My roommate is a particularly giddy mood these days, as he continues to become more convinced that his choice is all but assured his second presidential term. Much as that fact may be daunting to many of you, I can’t say he’s wrong. Thanks to his virtually nonstop blaring of FOX News and FOX Business on our living room TV when he’s in control, I’m acutely aware of the narrative he’s being spoonfed, and now more than ever I’m grateful that I own a very effective pair of headphones that pipes in a more robust and diverse array of entertainment options throughout my work-from-home days.
But I will vehemently dress him down when he cites as his chief reason for his confidence are the positive moments his candidate is making in polls which inevitably are trumpeted by the seemingly endless array of pundits that crop up on his favorite channels. Forget the fact that the movements they cite are almost always in the range of statistical insignificance–in any national election, any advantage of two percentage points or less are meaningless, and based on the results of the last five elections that threshold rises to four and a half percentage points. And the closer one gets to an actual election polls become little more than cosmetic signposts to take up time and space for talking heads. I know that to be true not only because I’ve spent more than four decades analyzing survey data, but because I’m a fan of college sports.
This time of year, from Sunday midday through Tuesday night, polls from USA TODAY and THE ASSOCIATED PRESS rank schools, providing a boatload of “breaking news” alerts which fortunately my algorithms push to me faster than the political ones. Inevitably, each week’s narratives involve what are perceived as upsets and what the results might have on the ultimate selection process. When college football’s playoff field was limited to four teams there was more of a delineation and urgency. Now that is has been expanded to 12 teams, any discussion this far out becomes increasingly premature in its level of predictability. It’s strictly fodder for helping its many TV partners help to tout the upcoming weekend’s matchups as worth watching and something for their gasbag personalities that occupy the balance of their respective schedules to yak about.
That all changes when the season’s at an end. Rarely do the polls fully align with the eventual choices, and with a larger field that’s almost assured. Look at college basketball as an indicator. Teams are seeded utilizing a host of variables that polls simply don’t address, which ultimately results in frustration, consternation and conspiracy theories. Football is assuredly headed down that path. And sorry, roomie, politics is already there.
As THE WALL STREET JOURNAL’s Aaron Zinter pointed out in a timely piece he dropped yesterday, the last time we did this a lot of what we saw around this time proved to be inaccurate, and there’s no guarantee things have materially improved:
Once the votes were counted in the 2020 presidential election, the result was clear: The pollsters
had lost once again.
Surveys had indicated that Joe Biden was closing strong against then-President Donald Trump.
He led by a comfortable 8.4 percentage points in the final Fivethirtyeight.com average of
national polls just before the election, and by 7.2 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average.
Biden ended up winning the national vote by less than 4.5 points—a lead that barely let him eke
out victory in the Electoral College. If polls are missing the mark this year by the same
magnitude, the narrow leads for Vice President Kamala Harris in many national averages today
would actually be leads for Trump.
Pollsters have spent the years since 2020 experimenting with ways to induce hard-to-reach voters
to participate in surveys and testing statistical techniques intended to improve accuracy. But
expert opinion is mixed on whether polling is in for a repeat of 2020, which the professional
association of pollsters called the most inaccurate performance in 40 years. New developments,
such as the shift of Black and Latino voters toward Trump and the proliferation of online
surveys, are creating potential sources of additional error.
“We are headed for more disaster,” said Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University political scientist.
Among other problems, he believes many of the newer, online surveys are using unproven
sampling methods.
I’m downright evangelical about the accuracy and reliability of any survey being grounded in the sorely needed principle of making absolutely sure you’re asking the right people at the right time in the right way. Any poll that misses any of those marks are suspect at best and misleading at worst. This reality check was front and center in 2016, and there’s a wonderfully compelling documentary readily available on Netflix called THE GREAT HACK that tells this story in vivid and at times disturbing detail. Per Wikipedia:
The Great Hack is a 2019 documentary film about the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, produced and directed by Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, both previous documentary Academy Award nominees (The Square, Control Room, Startup.com). The documentary focuses on Professor David Carroll of Parsons and The New School, Brittany Kaiser (former business development director for Cambridge Analytica), and British investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr. Their stories interweave to expose the work of Cambridge Analytica in the politics of various countries, including the United Kingdom’s Brexit campaign and the 2016 United States elections.
While there’s a lot of compelling storytelling about what evolved in Britain, let alone how Facebook was complicit in this to the point where penalities were levied. what’s most germane to this issue were revealed in this segment focusing on the company’s methodologies:
The filmmakers track down Brittany Kaiser in Thailand, where she considers becoming a whistle-blower and making information about Cambridge Analytica public, or dodging press inquiries and questions. With the help of British-born social entrepreneur, writer, and organizer Paul Hilder, she decides to go back to Washington DC, to come clean. With the help of specific documents from her personal Cambridge Analytica archives, Kaiser explains the effective micro-targeting of unsuspecting individuals, particularly those she calls “persuadables”, by Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 United States elections.
Most of the jockeying and grandstanding that’s going on in the waning days of the 2024 campaign is targeted squarely at these highly desired difference-makers. The jokes about being at the wrong rally or the ridiculous sight of a McDonald’s addict willingly giving away food he’d otherwise covet to others are little more than distractions from the real challenge at hand. And the fact is that since most “established mainstream” polls still don’t employ the ways that Cambridge did to reach those either reluctant to or incapable of registering how they feel, they ultimately wind up with results and reviews similar to what Zinter pointed out:
The industry’s analysis of 2020 polling, conducted by a select committee of the American
Association for Public Opinion Research, was full of dour news. Pollsters had understated
Republican support not only in the presidential race but in elections for Senate and governor. No
method of polling—by phone or online—emerged as the most reliable, leaving few clues for
improving surveys. Pollsters had fixed problems that skewed some results in 2016, such as
talking with too few working-class, white voters, Trump’s most supportive group. But new
sources of error had apparently turned up.
So much as I realize that my roomie’s leisure time choices rely upon polls to fill in the gaps between rallies, at a time like this I can’t encourage him enough to simply find something else to watch or listen to. May I suggest football?
After all, look how much his choice–let alone his competitor–do.
Until next time…