Monday, November 14, 2022

Do Tell

This is the fourth election in a row where pollsters have been wrong about the attitudes of Americans. The implication is that asking yes or no questions is not helpful in revealing where voters are in a political world with a lot of grey areas. The same thing happened to anti-abortion groups in their polling. While they have years of polls saying that nearly a majority of Americans didn't necessarily support abortion, polls that asked whether voters supported Roe v. Wade gave a different picture. 
The most famous example comes from Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who predicted Republicans would win 233-240 seats and that issues like "democracy" weren't even in the top three of issues.
To be fair, it’s Frank Luntz. But polling hasn’t changed that much over the years, and the world has always been almost nothing but grey areas. Indeed, the insistence the world is reducible to simple categories like “us” and “them” is where our recent troubles came from.

The problem with polling is the response rate (caller ID and unknown calls blocked) and archaic models based on narratives that no longer play. Models like the assumption “young people” won’t vote because they don’t historically, or people don’t really care about American democracy or access to abortion, especially as a matter of healthcare. It’s only been since June, but I expect that issue to become more important to more people in remarkably short order. And, as the article points out, people really didn’t like the riot on Jan. 6th. And the majority of the country doesn’t like Trump, either.

I welcome him running again. The debacle will be glorious.
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