Time Out!

Treat the polls as a motivator, not a misery

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Back a few years ago at the “CBS Evening News,” we aired a segment called “Reality Check.” The late, great correspondent Eric Engberg would report on taxpayer money being ill-spent. When he found waste, fraud, or abuse, he would announce it with his signature phrase, “Time out!”

Perhaps it’s time to take a reality check on current political polling. As colleagues who have worked closely with me would attest, I don’t trust polling. Never have. For many years, there was only one polling outfit, Gallup. Now there are dozens. Which, if any, can we trust? Looking at the last few elections, none seem to have gotten it right. Let’s call a “time out” on polling.  

Much hair will be pulled by Democrats over the latest poll from The New York Times and Siena College. It shows President Biden trailing Donald Trump in several key swing states.  

Should Democrats worry? You bet. As I’ve said for quite some time, the threat of Trump 2.0 is real. President Biden’s accomplishments aren’t resonating. The economy is the number one issue according to most polls, and many don’t feel the economy is better now than it was under Trump, no matter that objectively that is not the case. Large numbers of voters — young people in particular — are deeply concerned about Biden’s stance on the conflict in Gaza. At least that’s what the polls say.

But the polls have also been wrong. Remember, pollsters predicted with 90 percent certainty that Hillary Clinton would beat Donald Trump in 2016.

Then in 2020, Biden was supposedly, theoretically ahead by a comfortable margin. He won, but in several swing states by only a whisker. One news organization said the polling industry is “a wreck, and should be blown up.”  It turns out pollsters didn’t factor in enough white, non-college-educated voters, who apparently are less likely to answer pollsters’ questions. They also happen to be Trump’s biggest support base.

How about the “Red Wave” predicted in 2022? Or the surveys that said Americans cared more about the economy than abortion after Roe v. Wade was struck down? Voters said otherwise.

Analysts from the polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight explained the 2022 election results this way. “[A poll’s] true utility isn’t in telling us who will win, but rather in roughly how close a race is — and, therefore, how confident we should be in the outcome. Historically, candidates leading polls by at least 20 points have won 99 percent of the time. But candidates leading polls by less than 3 points have won just 55 percent of the time. In other words, races within 3 points in the polls are little better than toss-ups — something we’ve been shouting from the rooftops for years.”

I am not a gambler, but those don’t seem like very great odds. Here are a couple of other important points:  

Most voters aren’t really paying attention to the race yet. Based on historical trends, that won’t happen until the conventions this summer at the earliest, and more likely not until after Labor Day.  

Pollsters are struggling to keep up with changing technology. Not long ago, data was collected by calling voters at home on landlines. Now with the ubiquity of cell phones with caller ID, answer rates for pollsters have been plummeting. Also, some folks, maybe more than we think, just flat-out lie, to mislead the pollsters.

You can also point the finger at news organizations that trumpet every poll regardless of its quality because a horse race engenders clicks. 

What the latest Times/Siena poll should be is a great motivator. Sure, don’t believe the polls, but also don’t believe that Donald Trump’s many legal troubles will spell his political doom. Please, get involved. Make sure you’re registered and your friends and family are registered too. 

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Stay Steady,
Dan