Polls 2024

Are you fed up with polls?  I am.

I’m mad that every time I turn on TV news, I’m confronted with one poll after another.  The media seem obsessed with them, perhaps because they’re desperately trying to come up with fresh stories to fill their nearly endless need to offer viewers something new and different.

I’ve always been leery of polls.  First, I’ve never been asked to be in any poll, and no one I know has either. I’ve always wondered exactly who are the people answering questions in these polls.  Currently, polls seem to be focusing on voters in “swing states” and voters in one demographic group or another.  Maybe I don’t fit into any of those categories.  But I think my views on any number of issues are valuable and should somehow be included in these polls.  Why aren’t they?

Further, I’m quite certain that the people who do participate are often led to answer questions in a given way, thanks to questions that are, in my view, slanted in one direction or another. You’ve probably noticed that, too.

Instead of getting mad, maybe I should take the advice of Ezra Klein, an opinion writer for The New York Times.  On October 13, he published a column, “Ignore the Polls.”  He makes a bunch of good points.  To begin with, he notes that you’re probably looking at polls to know who’ll win.  But the polls can’t tell you that.  On average, polls in every presidential election between 1969 and 2012 were off by two percentage points.  More recent polls, in 2016 and 2020, were off by even more.  Klein states that pollsters today are desperate to avoid the mistakes they made in 2016 and 2020, when they undercounted Trump supporters.  So some of them are asking voters to recall who they voted for in 2020 and then using that info to include Trump voters more accurately this time.  But the results are very different when pollsters don’t ask voters to recall what they did in the past.  According to Klein, voters are “notoriously bad at recalling past votes.”  So why do the pollsters even bother asking?

Klein adds that polls are “remarkably, eerily stable.”  Events keep happening (like assassination attempts and televised debates), but the polls haven’t really changed.  So Klein advises us to give ourselves a break.  “Step off the emotional roller coaster.  If you want to do something to affect the election, donate money or time in a swing state…or volunteer in a local race.  Call anyone in your life who might actually be undecided or might not be registered to vote or might not make it to the polls.  And then let it go.” 

That’s exactly what I’ve been doing.  I’m glad my outlook resembles Ezra Klein’s.  Now if the media would just pay attention to his wise advice.  Hey, media people, ignore the polls.  Instead, seek out interesting stories about the candidates, the voters, and the issues.  Then let it go.