Ignore The Polls?!
They won't tell you who's going to be President. They're still useful.
The New York Times has several pieces out parsing the results of its latest surveys with Sienna College, including those showing Harris with a 4-point lead in Pennsylvania and Trump with a 6-point lead in Arizona and noting the Democrats’ continuing struggle with Hispanic voters. But Ezra Klein, one of their most prominent pundits, urges readers to “Ignore The Polls.”
Here’s a bit of advice to help maintain your sanity over the next few weeks until Election Day: Just ignore the polls. Unless you’re a campaign professional or a gambler, you’re probably looking at them for the same reason the rest of us are: to know who’ll win. Or at least to feel like you know who’ll win. But they just can’t tell you that.
Which isn’t quite true: most races are so lopsided that the outcome really isn’t in doubt. But Klein is certainly right that, in a relatively tight race like that between Trump and Harris, there’s just too much uncertainty for the polls to be all that predictive. (Although, even there, we already know the almost-certain winner in 42 or 43 states.)
Back in 2016, Harry Enten, then at FiveThirtyEight, calculated the final polling error in every presidential election between 1968 and 2012. On average, the polls missed by two percentage points. In 2016, an American Association for Public Opinion Research postmortem found that the average error of the national polls was 2.2 points, but the polls of individual states were off by 5.1 points. In 2020, the national polls were off by 4.5 points and the state-level polls missed, again, by 5.1 points.
This is more than the margin any candidate consistently has in any of the swing states. Which is what makes them swing states to begin with.
As of Oct. 10, The New York Times’s polling average had Kamala Harris leading Trump by three points nationally. That’s tight, but the seven swing states are tighter: Neither candidate is leading by more than two points in any of them.
Imagine the polls perform better in 2024 than they did in either 2016 or 2020: They’re off, remarkably, by merely two points in the swing states. Huzzah! That would be consistent with Harris winning every swing state. It would also be consistent with Trump winning every swing state. This is not some outlandish scenario. According to Nate Silver’s election model, the most likely electoral outcome “is Harris sweeping all seven swing states. And the next most likely is Trump sweeping all seven.”
Which, one must admit, is decidedly unhelpful as predictions go.
After a discussion about polling methodology debates (see Nate Silver‘s “New York Times polls are betting on a political realignment” for a longer take), Klein observes,
Here’s the other reason you can safely tune out the daily polling news: The polls are remarkably, eerily stable.
A week before the Harris-Trump debate in September, Harris led Trump by three points. Then came the debate, during which Trump turned in the second-worst debate performance in recent memory. Then came another attempted assassination of Trump, after the shooting at a campaign rally in July. Then the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by 50 basis points. Then Israel launched a ground invasion of Lebanon. Then came the vice-presidential debate. Then came a surprisingly strong jobs report. In this period, Harris released an 82-page booklet of policy proposals and Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting Trump in the Jan. 6 case, filed a 165-page brief adding new details of Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. After all that, Harris is now leading Trump by … three points.
Which is rather remarkable. I’ve been saying for a very long time that public opinion on Trump is baked at this point. There’s simply nobody who is going to vote in the election who doesn’t have a firm view of who he is. That was also true of Joe Biden but is decidedly not the case with Kamala Harris. Even granting that the overwhelming majority of voters are reliable partisans, it’s amazing that her support hasn’t moved at all as people get to know her.
But it really comes down to this:
There are voters who are still undecided, but they are, almost by definition, voters who pay less attention to political news and are either so uninterested in politics or so cynical about both candidates that nothing has yet caused them to make up their minds. There are many more voters whose minds are made up but may or may not actually fill out ballots by Election Day. These are the voters who will decide the election, and they’re not tipping their hands yet.
For most of the cycle, the pundits were talking about the “double haters,” who strongly disliked both Trump and Biden. I would have thought that swapping one of the hated candidates for a fresh new face would have brought most of these folks over to the Not Trump side. Thus far, it just hasn’t happened.
To the extent one is looking for answers—and especially to the extent that they’re causing added anxiety—Klein is certainly right: the polls aren’t going to help you, so you might as well just wait until the morning after the election to see what happened.
For the kind of people who read political blogs and listen to political podcasts—even in non-election years!—though, the polls are quite useful. While they won’t tell us who’s going to win Pennsylvania or Georgia, they do provide insights into attitudinal shifts that will shape that outcome. That Trump is appealing to young Black and Hispanic men in a way that Mitt Romney and George W. Bush didn’t is interesting. Ditto the fact that there’s now a huge divide in how those with and without a college education vote.
If you’re only interested in the topline results, the polls aren’t terribly useful. At best, they’re entertaining in the way that sports talk is: a way to pass the time until the games are actually played. But, if you’re interested in the factors that contribute to the results, the polls and the analysis of the microtrends are the best way to understand our shifting political landscape.
The handwringing, ugh. I think Klein knows better. Fact is, many in the Opinionista class are still traumatized by what happened in 2016, and so warn everyone about the imperfections, about being complacent.
Polls have a lot of value, and until someone comes up with a better idea as to taking the pulse of an upcoming election they’re always going to be with us. Polls are a snapshot in time and while polls may not be dead-on accurate they surely give us an idea of where and how things are going.
People are freaked out for good reasons. It’s a very demoralizing time. Harris has turned to the right on immigration, most educated voters are at least dimly aware that our wonderful ally Israel is happily executing children, and my good friend Dick Cheney shows up every other inning to tell me how bad Trump is. Meanwhile, the polls point to Trump winning. It’s not a great moment in American political history, and the Democrats seem to have no idea what to do.
To confuse the issue further, NBC News now has Harris and Trump running neck and neck.
Somewhat OT, but look at that picture. And look at his latest videos. Part of it may be the lighting, but he is going to a darker pancake makeup. I probably could interpret that as his losing confidence (because of the polls) or responding to something about his appearance that the pancake is covering. And the demarcation line is becoming more obvious.
Anyway, pretty ugly.
@Cheryl Rofer:
He probably thinks it makes him look younger, thinner, and more vigorous.
My internal poll is that few people who voted for Biden will vote for Trump, and I doubt that they will skip voting. However, the Trumpers are highly motivated, and they may show up in higher numbers. It’s a toss-up.
It would have if the face had been male. You need to expand the horizons of your cynicism, that’s all. [Thumbs up emoji]
@Modulo Myself:
Could you cite anything specific on this point? From where I sit, the Harris/Walz campaign team is consistently doing what they need to do.
If you are looking for day to day polling to accurately reflect good or bad campaign strategy, then Trump’s visits to Colorado and California this week would move his numbers either up or down. They won’t.
As James notes:
If this is the case (and sure, why not?), then one needs to consider whether our political landscape is actually shifting. And it’s not in any meaningful way. The national averages trend lines on 538 have been statistically flat since early September.
Here’s all you need to know about the polls:
– It’s good that Democrats think it’s close – that will mitigate complacency. It’s still a GOTV election.
– It’s bad that Republicans think Trump is winning – that will feed conspiracy theories if he doesn’t win. Trump plans to claim victory no matter what.
@Cheryl Rofer: It may be the lighting, it may be darker, it may be that the makeup artist he’s not using is doing worse at putting it on. Very sad and low energy* no matter what.
Bigly.
*Had anyone else noticed that he stopped using his previous turns of phrase this round? He does adapt; I’d wondered if he’d be able to.
@Cheryl Rofer:
The outside matches the inside in this case.
Exit polls are often more accurate than pre-election polls as it removes the uncertainly of the likely voter screen, and election results can be broken down to a precinct level to extract more information based on demographics of those precincts.
So even in the case of people interested in understanding what is happening to America’s electorate, I think polling a month before the election is pretty useless when much better information is right around the corner.
Unless you are planning on doing something between now and the election that will directly affect the outcome… focusing GOTV, fomenting revolution, etc.
@just nutha:
Trump uses words and phrases that he then abandons after constant repetition. He also uses them oddly, as in “proud” or “proudly,” i.e. Americans will be “proudly” saying “Merry Christmas.” Or “strongly,” as in “we’ll be looking at that very strongly.”