Ah, fall: the season of pumpkin spiced everything, fallen leaves, and inflorescence disorder syndrome.
These days, I wake up, log in and immediately check Real Clear Politics and the “Latest Polls” page on 538. They are always very close.
I know it’s foolish to obsess over polls, but how else do we decide what to stock up on before Election Day: champagne or antidepressants?
You’d think I’d have learned my lesson eight years ago. Just before the 2016 election, my friend Suzanne was worried that Donald Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton. Suzanne, a sought-after hairstylist in Orange County, has been listening very carefully to her clients, many of whom are politically conservative.
“Don’t be stupid,” I told her as she dried my hair. “The polls all show a decisive victory for Hillary.”
I’m so sure I wrote in the memo section of my check to Suzanne: “Trump can’t win.”
I don’t make political predictions anymore.
As American Assn. Public Opinion Research puts it into postmortem. How could they be so wrong?
It turns out that when pollsters weight polls to correct for differences between the sample and the population, they don’t take educational attainment into account. Their sample was skewed by including too many college graduates who tended to support Clinton.
That’s not entirely the pollsters’ fault, though. Never before that election had there been such a sharp divide between college-educated white voters and non-college-educated white voters.
“It’s shocking,” said Scott Kitt, an expert on U.S. public opinion and political behavior at the Pew Research Center in Washington. “At least since the New Deal, non-college groups have actually leaned more Democratic.”
In recent years, however, the appeal of populist politicians of the left and right has grown throughout the Western world, not just in the United States, eroding confidence in governments and institutions.
“Working-class and less-educated voters,” Keeter told me, “have become more supportive of populist candidates.” Political scientists are aware of these trends, he said, “but Trump’s campaign has really brought this to a head. A phenomenon crystallized.” Before 2016, educational attainment was not correlated at all with political views.
Oddly enough, pollsters didn’t fare any better in the 2020 presidential election. Although they correctly predicted Biden’s victory, they vastly overestimated his support. This is partly due to record turnout: About a quarter of 2020 voters did not vote in 2016. Pre-election polls showed new voters were younger and tended to vote Democratic, but were roughly evenly divided between Biden and Trump.
The Harvard Gazette recently spoke with John Anzalone, Biden’s chief 2020 pollster, to learn why recent polling records are so mixed. For some reason, when Trump was on the ballot, the polls were less accurate.
“I think the challenge has a lot to do with the modeling results,” Anzalone said. “It’s definitely a mystery in the Trump era. I can’t tell you right now who’s going to show up.
Years ago, author Arianna Huffington and comedian Harry Shearer launched the Partnership for a Poll-Free America, a tongue-in-cheek initiative. Their manifesto urges people to “stop paying attention to the pollsters who pollute our political environment by dominating media coverage, influencing election results, and turning our political leaders into slave-owning poll followers.” It’s an interesting take, Aiming to disrupt the much-derided horse racing style of political journalism: Who’s Up Today? Who fell?
But political coverage has changed. Poll stories no longer dominate daily coverage.
Kitt said many of the research and news organizations that sponsor polls “have stopped chasing the horse race and are more focused on trying to understand the dynamics, who the coalition is and so on. But the fact remains that people want to know who’s ahead and who’s behind.
I know I know, and polls—no matter how flawed—seem to be the only way to guess.
“If you weren’t doing polls and you were at the mercy of so-called street interviews or who was buying whose baseball caps, I think your anxiety level would still be the same,” Kitt said. “There is no cure for this problem.”
Topic: @rabcarian
