The number of opinion polls showing an exact tie in the presidential race is incredible.
I don’t mean “there are too many”, but literally they are unbelievable.
The performance of recent public opinion polls is as reliable as flipping a coin. They completely condemned Trump’s 2016 victory. They predicted that 2020 would be even worse, with Biden winning by a landslide. A ‘red wave’ with greater impact was promised in 2022. And don’t forget how they completely missed Brexit.
Here’s what fascinates me: There is a pattern to these mistakes. Opinion polls don’t just give us wrong results. In a world without public opinion polls, following the current wisdom would yield results that are just as wrong as you would expect.
And people are political
Consider the above example again from 2016. The media consensus was clear. Trump never stood a chance. Opinion poll? Amazing, amazing. They showed exactly that. After four years of media provocations and COVID-19 chaos, 2020 opinion polls showed Trump overwhelmingly. Britain’s educated elite could not imagine that their own people would actually vote to leave the EU. Once again, the polls agreed.
Pollsters are quick to blame their mistakes on technical glitches. The ‘shy Trump voter’ did not answer the phone. They counted more college-educated voters. Turnout patterns have changed. But there may be a simpler explanation. They are human beings with the same prejudices as us.
The real polling problem isn’t about math. It’s about human nature.
Today, conventional wisdom says this race is too close to call. Given the standard sampling error of opinion polls, even if the race was actually tied exactly 50-50, the polls would have been widely conducted. average There is a difference of about 3%. That’s not what we see at all, just a tight cluster of polls with almost half showing an exact tie as of today.
RELATED: White House reportedly changed official transcript of Biden’s ‘garbage’ remarks
The polling industry has a term for when polls mysteriously cluster around the same number. This is ‘herding’. Pollsters double-check their methodology when they see different results from their peers and – surprise! – Find a reason to adjust to the agreement.
Nate Silver, a polling analyst who has essentially made a career out of number-crunching surveys, was a little surprised to discover an apparent trend. “I have less trust in pollsters,” he said on the podcast. “When you sample 800 people across dozens of surveys, the numbers don’t exactly come out to a one-point lead. You are lying! You’re putting your x$%* finger on the scale!”
He is right about ranching. Pollsters are very afraid of being seen as idiots on election night, and they can avoid this by keeping their numbers close to others. The analogy of running safely among a herd of animals fits perfectly.
How it actually works
But all the pollsters always There’s a finger on the scale. There is no such thing as raw data.
Polling requires hundreds of judgment calls rather than simply counting responses. How many young voters will show up? What percentage of voters will be college-educated women? Should we base our evaluations on past voting behavior?
This is not a clear mathematical decision. It’s a hunch, an educated guess about human behavior. And like all hunches, they are influenced by what we believe to be true.
RELATED: Nearly 63 million voters have already cast their ballots.
It’s just human nature. We all tend to see what we expect and find ways to justify our existing beliefs. Pollsters are not immune from these psychological functions, despite scientific claims.
These biases creep in when we have to make dozens of judgments when designing and interpreting public opinion polls. When we “know”, consciously or not, that Trump can’t win, we choose a methodology that confirms that belief. If you are “sure” that competition is fierce, “adjust” your assumptions until you get exactly that.
I’m going to go to the extreme here and say the whole bunch is wrong. This is just a hunch because the data is clearly inconsistent. But I don’t think it’s a cutthroat competition. I think the trends of 2016 and 2022 will continue and that they are greatly underestimating Trump’s power. Of course, you can’t say that out loud at most Washington insider cocktail parties.
So when you see another poll showing an exact tie in the presidential election, remember that. Behind all the decimal points and margin-of-error calculations, there are people making judgments. And just like you and me, they are bound to be influenced by what they think they already know.
Ken LaCorte writes about censorship, media malfeasance, uncomfortable questions, and honest insights for people who wonder how the world really works. Follow Ken on Substack
