The fact is, a lot of this discussion of polling is inside baseball stuff.Instead of mindlessly repeating NYT/Siena polls because, well, it’s the New York Times, news organizations should be asking hard questions about them. These polls are given far more weight than they deserve. https://t.co/Yhn0bBkrG1
— Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) September 29, 2024
Young, white, blue collar voters don’t give a shit. Polling isn’t driving them to the ballot box.🗳️ Black and Hispanic voters aren’t presumably turned off by poll numbers. Nobody thinks the elderly (Hello!) will stay home because the NYT/Siena poll showed a wild swing in Wisconsin.
As Chavez reasonably points out (in his Twitter thread), campaigns need good polling data to help determine how to allocate resources. One reason the DSC is spending money in Texas is because Allred is polling so well. Even Beto couldn’t get that kind of help. But for the rest of us? Who gives a 💩?
Polls are useless. They’re either badly conducted, badly interpreted, or just bad information. Nate Silver hasn’t correctly interpreted the polls since 2012. When Trump won in 2016, he’d said Hillary had a 72% chance of winning. He defended his prediction by pointing out that still meant Trump had a 28% chance of winning, so Silver wasn’t wrong.😑
And he hasn’t been wrong since; just useless. All polls are. Candidates can use them; the rest of us should discard them. Polls don’t win elections: votes do.*
(*Arguably Trump won in 2016 because people didn’t want to vote for Hillary, and expected her to win without their vote. Whereas if they’d ignored the polls, our national nightmare might never have started. Polls don’t win elections. Votes do.)
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