Opinion | Dont Blame Polling for Our Infuriating Politics
The polls just can’t win in the court of public opinion — the very thing they’re designed to study.They are either maddening in finding a race too close to call (in the final month before the presidential election, nearly 80 percent of swing-state polls showed a lead of no more than two and a half percentage points) or they break from the pack, only to be wrong.In her final Iowa poll Ann Selzer, a name synonymous with the gold standard in polling, had Kamala Harris up by three points, a shocking result that titillated Democrats.
Ms.Selzer has had a long history of defying the conventional wisdom and being right, but Ms.
Harris lost Iowa by 13 points.It may even feel as though we’re Ping-Ponging between radically different futures, never quite certain what lies around the bend.Yet on the whole in 2024, polling did not experience much of a miss and had a reasonable year.
Ms.Harris led by only one point in my final national polling average.
And Donald Trump led in five of seven key states, albeit incredibly narrowly.The final polling averages were correct in 48 of 50 states.The final Times/Siena national poll (including third-party candidates) had Mr.
Trump one point ahead.There was plenty of data to support a Trump win.So why did polling still feel so unsatisfying? In a world where the parties are remarkably efficient at corralling voters and competing to a 50-50 split each time, polls aren’t going to provide the certainty we crave.
We’d better get used to it: This is now the fourth election in a row in which the popular vote margin was within five points, something that has happened only once before in the country’s history, for six elections between 1876 through 1896.The problems with polls are the same problems that plague politics.Polling has become a mirror that reflects the frustrating, even infuriating, nature of politics in America in 2024.
Our politics are messy, and that is not something polls can fix.We’d better get used to that, too...