Mainstream pollsters across America this week can look at themselves in the mirror without cringing.
Unlike some other recent elections, pollsters were able to point out that a lot of their numbers looked pretty good compared to actual outcomes.
The commentariat, on the other hand, believing the political “fundamentals” over polling, were caught by surprise.
The conventional wisdom was that Republicans were in for a big win: a mid-term election with a Democratic president, pessimism — appropriate or not — about the economy and the direction of the country, low approval ratings for President Biden, to name the most obvious factors.
Obviously, the big GOP win didn’t materialize; Democrats had one of the more remarkable off-year elections in decades.
As Nathaniel Rakich put it on FiveThirtyEight, “This election showed why you should rely on polls (which pointed to this close outcome) over vibes (which predicted a Republican landslide).”
Is Rakich right? Should we rely on polls?
Nope, says Nate Cohn of the New York Times.
“Going forward, I think that it would be pretty foolish to be overly confident in our polls, or any polls,” Cohn told Isaac Chotiner in a New Yorker interview. He added, “I am very excited that our polling was as good as it was, but I don’t think the 2012 era, when people would tweet “Trust the polls” and clap emojis, is coming back.”
Zeynep Tufekci, writing in The New York Times in November 2020, made a similar case in an op-ed essay titled, straightforwardly enough, “Can we finally agree to ignore election forecasts?”
Chotiner, in a separate New Yorker article, described the conundrum: “What is clear is that the polls, such as they were, provided a decent view of what was happening in most of the Senate and gubernatorial races. (The House numbers are still incomplete, but the national outcome also seems on track with what the polls predicted.) A week ago, if you had been looking solely at polls and given less thought to the general political environment — a shaky economy, an angry populace, an unpopular President leading his party through his first midterm — you would have come away with a better picture of what happened on Tuesday. It’s understandable that so many observers, especially liberals, had doubts about the polls, which is probably why the results came as such a shock. Whether the polls being more accurate than the “vibes” is comforting or scary depends on how you felt about polls to begin with.”
Most of these discussions gloss over a central question: What, exactly, are these polls for?
Chadwick Matlin addressed that point directly on FiveThirtyEight: “I’ve been working for this website for nearly a decade, and this election made me think heretical thoughts again. Namely, that all the polls and forecast stuff is really beside the point in the end, a way to kill time before the real show arrives. It is so much more interesting to analyze what voters did than guess at what they might do.
“I am not some apostate who is saying polls don’t matter — they tell us a ton about what might happen, and they can shape strategy in ways that affect what does happen. But the media engages with those polls to entertain its audience’s anxiety, not divine its country’s mood.”
Exactly.
The polls that news outlets serve up to the public during campaigns are a way of keeping score. They are essential to the narrative on which newsrooms depend to attract readers every day — or every hour, for that matter.
That narrative framework — the horse race, the obsession with assessing any policy choice by its impact on politics and poll numbers — is chosen, not because it gives us a clear picture of our choices in the election ahead and the possible consequences. Rather, it is a framework chosen to maximize revenue.
Serious coverage of policy differences and consequences may be more valuable to the fate of our democracy, but it won’t keep us coming back to the channel or the website. To do that, the media create a race — a game — and they poll so they can keep score right up until the election itself.
If those numbers prove accurate, all well and good. If not, they provide fodder for post-election coverage, and another way to draw an audience.
In the world of political punditry, the biggest sin is not being wrong — even wrong all the time. The biggest sin is not drawing an audience.
(One Dog Barking is an occasional column by my husband, John Dineen. He is a former senior congressional staffer and media executive and founder of briefing.center, a news and information service.)
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