Dear Pollsters: You Suck, and We’re Finished With You
The first thing we do, let’s kill all the pollsters. The smart money may still be on Joe Biden to eventually prevail as the 2020 presidential election winner, but I’ve seen enough to declare the polling industry, and its cousin, “probabilistic election forecasting,” as the biggest losers.
I’m not alone in thinking this. Republican pollster Frank Luntz told Axios “the political polling profession is done” after Tuesday. “Political polling is a fraud,” writes conservative John Podhoretz in the New York Post. It turns out that “Trump PTSD” from 2016 wasn’t a paranoid or out-of-touch response; it was a smart defense mechanism. At one point, the night felt eerily reminiscent of 2016, which is to say, the so-called experts blew it. Again. Even if Biden goes on to win, it’s a far cry from the landslide we were led to expect.
Probabilistic forecasting, which is tightly tied to the polling industry, has harmed our understanding of elections and the electorate. That’s because it creates an inherent veneer of certainty, no matter how hard you insist otherwise. We were all better off when folks used to just say “polls are snapshots and things can always change.” The whole allure of data journalism was that it would bring objective clarity, and it just isn’t.