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I get this question a lot: are right-wing pollsters flooding the zone? So I thought I would answer it generally in a single post.
Are they? Yes, they definitely are. But there are some important caveats and qualifiers to know to make sense of the whole story.
Just to review the basics: There are a series of Republican or right-wing pollsters who are overtly partisan, use questionable or floating methodologies and pretty clearly release polls not as a predictive enterprise but to produce friendly numbers for Republican candidates. The worst offenders are places like Rasmussen, Trafalgar, InsiderAdvantage. We know this from a mix of a lack of transparency about methodology, general behavior that betrays a goal of shaping election perceptions and outcomes rather than measuring public opinion, and extreme “house effects” — the tendency to favor a particular party’s candidates over the other’s relative to what most pollsters are finding — that support their agenda. After those, there’s a larger penumbra of often less-known pollsters who don’t appear to be as flagrant, but generally seem to be in the same category.
Here I would be remiss if I did not add a reminder that “house effects” are not in themselves evidence of bias or shadiness. When we say that a pollster has a Dem or GOP-leaning “house effect,” that simply means that relative to all other pollsters in a given cycle their numbers tend to lean in the direction of one party or the other. Whether that pollster is “right” or not you can’t know until you have your election results. And even then, you might not totally know, since the election results don’t totally tell you where public opinion was in, say, September. The pollster with a strong house effect could end up being the most accurate.
It’s other things that make these suspicious pollsters suspicious. Just to give one example: A number of key zone-flooders have tended to produce numbers this cycle that hover right near ties while better pollsters bounce around more. It’s just that the ties favor Donald Trump. Stuff like this isn’t what you’d expect from a pollster doing real polling. There are little hints like this that suggest game-playing more than the results themselves.
In any case, this has been a real and known issue for years. But it reached a kind of critical mass in 2022 when these pollsters played a wildly outsized role in creating a “red wave” narrative that turned out to mostly be false. There’s also every sign the same thing is happening this year.
But as I said, there are some caveats and qualifiers to keep in mind. The better aggregators and averages down-rate these pollsters to the point where they don’t have as much impact on their averages as you might imagine. I’m thinking particularly of aggregators like 538, but others as well. (Here’s a short thread and link from G. Elliott Morris, the editorial director of 538, on the topic.) The point is that while the zone flooding is happening, it might not be affecting the average from the better aggregators as much as you think.
To address what people are talking about right now, there’s little question that the tightening in the polls we’ve seen over the last couple weeks is not, for the most part, driven by zone flooding polls. It shows up in the higher-quality polls as well. That doesn’t mean it’s “right.” That tightening is very, very small. It might as easily be statistical noise, some non-response bias. But it’s still there after you strip out the junk polls. So if you’re thinking that that slight tightening we’ve seen in the last couple weeks is driven by junk GOP polls, you’re on very weak ground.
Because of this there’s a sort of anti-zone-flood narrative counter that says that this is at least in part Democrats making themselves feel better as opposed to a real thing. There’s some truth to that. But it’s also at best incomplete. These pollsters make up a big amount of what goes into shady aggregators like RCP and, in any case, it’s not all about averages. To the extent that the flood of these polls shapes narratives or demoralizes Democrats, it’s headlines and what gets shared on social media that counts as much as averages.
So what that all comes down to is that yes, zone flooding is happening and it probably (though it’s obviously hard to quantify) helps shape election narratives, enthusiasm and possibly actual results. But it’s also important to know these qualifiers, like the fact that the averages and aggregators — at least the better ones — have gotten wise about this at least to an extent and fortified their methodologies against it.
All of which brings us back to a pretty essential question: why are these polling outfits even doing this? I’ve actually given this question a fair amount of thought and I’m not sure there’s a totally clear answer to it. There’s little question, given how the GOP coalition operates, that having a squadron of pollsters who zone flood in this way is an advantage. But the pollsters at least appear to be separate organizations and there are a fair amount of them. So what exactly is the goal, the advantage of a place like Trafalgar doing this? Where’s the money come from? And how do they make money? We get why “the GOP” is doing this or why it’s good for the GOP. But why is Trafalgar doing it? What’s in it for them?
One potential answer is that there’s an ecosystem of right-wing payola which is funding it, creating this squadron of shady pro-GOP polling operations. Given how the contemporary American right works, that’s far from a crazy idea. The other possibility — which I take pretty seriously — is that there is actually a lot of market demand for shady GOP friendly polls that make Republicans happy. That is also a far from crazy idea given how the contemporary American right works. So maybe Trafalgar does it because there’s good money in it, the reason all successful businesses do what they do. My own best guess is that it’s a hybrid of the two, that the zone flooding polling space is basically derivative of the right-wing media ecosystem, something that both rakes in a lot of money for many businesses but is also rife with ideological payola. In any case, that question is to a degree beside the point in making sense of the impact of zone flooding. Precisely why it happens is less important than the fact that it does happen.
So that’s the story. Yes, zone flooding is real. Yes, it played a big role in the false narrative of a 2022 red wave. Yes, they’re doing it again now. But it’s probably having less impact on the quality polling averages than you might think.