The One Where I Am Backed Up By Rick Perlstein

Awesome @rickperlstein piece going through 100 years of presidential polling, finding misinterpretation, bad calls, meaningless bravado, and junk science. Yet, in our search for certainty, we've allowed it to drive everything about politics. We should not.https://t.co/Hwngxc9QMg

— David Dayen (@ddayen) September 25, 2024

Presidential polls are no more reliable than they were a century ago. So why do they consume our political lives?

That’s actually the subheading to the article. Now I gotta go read it. 

Well, here, I’ll give you the first paragraph;

In 2016, I experienced the desolation of my candidate for president losing after the most respected polling experts told me she had a 71.4 percent, 85 percent, 98.2 percent, and even 99 percent chance of winning. As a historian, I was studying how Ronald Reagan’s runaway landslide in 1980 was proceeded by every pollster but one supremely confident that the race was just about tied. I’ve just finished a fine book published in 2020 that confirms an intuition I’ve been chewing on since then. It turns out this is practically the historical norm. W. Joseph Campbell’s Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections demonstrates—for the first time, strangely enough, given the robust persuasiveness of its conclusions—that presidential polls are almost always wrong, consistently, in deeply patterned ways.

I’ll just add that, immediately after those elections, all those polls are memory holed and we are told the polls were very close to the results and trust us, would we lie to you?

And it’s all like remembering who won the Oscar for… well, anything, really. 🤷🏻‍♂️. Or, as Perlstein puts it:

POLLSTERS TEND NOT TO INTERPRET THIS all as a spur to humility. Reading Campbell’s book, I found myself creating a section of my notes headed “Assholes.” Like George Gallup in ’48 giving the excuse that his mistakes were his audience’s fault: “Most laymen see no difference between forecasting an election and picking the winner of a horse race. In due time these people will be educated to the difference.” Or John Zogby in 2004, when he had joined the herd who said John Kerry had it in the bag. This was so taken for granted that on Election Day, senior adviser Bob Shrum said to Kerry, “May I be the first to call you Mr. President?” When this proved wrong, Zogby whined, “I don’t know that anyone was hospitalized over my prediction.” 

The spin’s the thing. Admitting the enterprise’s fallibility is bad for business.

As I’ve said before: the problem with the future is that nobody lives there, so we can’t get reports on what’s going to happen.

Shit, there’s just too much good stuff here:

It’s a good example of how blithely pollsters can invent a reality they purport to describe. All these numbers could ever be was a statistical artifact of the reality that the more undecided or “no opinion” voters there are, the less predictive a poll can be. Polling so closely was inherently misleading. Instead, the implication was that it proved the electorate was fantastically volatile. Which at the very least makes for a more entertaining horse race. “I would love to be tracking the election that Gallup is tracking,” one more responsible practitioner rued. “It’s a lot more interesting than the one I’m looking at.”

Anything to save the narrative.

As for Silver himself, he blithely parried critics by observing that, well, a 71.4 percent chance of Clinton means a 28.6 percent chance of Trump. So was he even actually wrong? 

To be fair, all the big presidential pollsters do this to greater or lesser degrees. Their never-wrongness, after all, is their value proposition. Spinning is part of the business model.

It’s a racket.