I wanted to follow up on my post about Pat Ruffini’s deep dive about the accuracy of Senate race polling in recent cycles and whether they’ve overstated Democrats’ strength. But since I wrote that post, I’ve also gotten a few emails from friends and TPM readers about polling generally. So I wanted to combine all of this together into some general comments on polling and whether we should care about it at all.
In the wake of the big apparent polling misses in Michigan and Wisconsin, we’re seeing another wave of discussion about a purported “crisis” in polling and what we should collectively do about it or what the polling industry should do about it. Mostly, the answer is there is no “crisis” — at least in the sense of one that any of us should care about as some problem for American democracy or elections or anything else. If you’re in the polling business, it may well be a problem. But if you’re not, who cares? There might be a crisis in Swiss cheese marketing too. But if I’m not a cheese monger, why do I care?
To the extent bad actors might be trying to sow misinformation with deliberately fake polls, that’s a problem. But let’s put that to the side since that’s not really what we’re talking about. I would further say that to the extent polls seem unreliable and we go into election days with real uncertainty about the result, that’s actually a good thing, for both substantive and aesthetic reasons. Everyone should go into election day with that characteristic mix of hope and apprehension that is the essence of popular democracy, partly for the pageant of democracy itself but also so that neither side’s showing is artificially depressed by a mistaken certainty about the outcome.
To be clear, I say this while also being very clear that I will personally try to get as much clarity and certainty as I can, whether it’s real or imagined. And it’s 100% fine if you do too. Because, as friend and polling critic TPM reader RP put it in a note to me yesterday, one of the real uses of polling is “therapeutic, stanching existentially painful doubt about the future that is central to the human condition.”
In an email, RP made his general case about polling being mostly bad and why we should deprioritize it as much as possible. In response, I told him that while I somewhat agreed with his general critique — as I said, more uncertainty is probably good — I was much less sure of the practical import. There are many ways in which our human need to know the future isn’t that productive. But that’s part of being human, and I don’t know how much it’s worth trying to be less human. I don’t expect to see any future world in which polling ceases to exist or even gets significantly less prevalent.
One place where I told RP we had some limited agreement has to do with those possibly overstated polls for Democrats that Ruffini was talking about. I want to press readers to let go of the idea that we should care about this. Indeed, to the extent that these outcomes are predictable, even better. We know that chronic doomerism and a kind of barely concealed self-loathing is the achilles heel of the current Democratic coalition. Many Democrats seem to see these poll discrepancies as something akin to a team that holds leads to the end of a game and then consistently chokes at the clutch moments — call it electoral Spurs-ism. But that’s of course absurd, a perfect example of reifying polls into some real foundational feature of the election, as opposed to some separate thing over in a corner that doesn’t have anything to do with anything. Democrats aren’t choking or bobbling the ball in the final inning. They’re not “doing” anything. This is just a pollster surfing spreadsheets in his cubicle who can’t get a representative enough sample. It has nothing to do with anything unless we’re in the polling industry. This is how I really think people should de-center polls from the focal point of their political reasoning. Because what I’ve described above is really an example of pollism cooking people’s brains.
I would add a secondary point, which is that it is not a bad thing for people who are interested in politics, and certainly for candidates, to have some idea what people actually think. We are all so deep in our own bubbles that otherwise we have just a wild ability to imagine everyone is like us and thinks like us, which is definitely not true. That’s even more the the case in a country as vast as this one — the third largest in the world both in population and geographical expanse. Within limits that’s a plus, not a minus, though that’s different from the horse-race polls on the eve of an election that we’re really talking about. I get the idea that having too clear an idea of what the public collectively thinks can produce a collective risk aversion or perhaps a hyper-literalism about the difference between things as they stand and the extent of the possible. But I think the people who push this argument the hardest mostly don’t like being reminded — or probably having other people be reminded — that their ideas aren’t very popular.
There’s one other issue with anti-pollism that isn’t really about polls precisely but gets conflated into the discussion. It’s worth mentioning too. TPM Reader RH wrote in about polls and said this: “It seems to me that the only reason that we have polls is for talking heads to have something to talk about before an election. They really don’t inform the electorate about issues and positions at all so why not just wait and see who the people elect?”
This may be true as far as it goes. But while I respect what is a common refrain, I think it’s the wrong way to think about popular politics. Many of us have this idea that there is a platonic ideal of electoral politics which either used to be how elections worked or should be. And that ideal is something like a high school civics class, or things we were taught in a high school civics class: a reasoned debate about each candidate’s policy proposals and issue positions in which the role of the press is to curate this discussion. Some of that is how elections work. And I would point to TPM’s decades of coverage of the nitty gritty of voting rights, health care policy, reproductive rights, extremist groups, Supreme Court jurisprudence and corruption and so much more; we’re very into the details of policy and their importance to our journalistic mission. But I will tell you with the backing of my background in U.S. history that that has never been how elections have worked at any point in American history. If anything, things may be a bit more like that now than in the past, contrary to many people’s assumptions. And mostly, I’d say that’s totally fine.
Elections are a pageant of democratic life, with all the boisterousness, intensity, and sometimes crassness that goes with that. They’re about values, identity, our collective trust or lack or trust in particular candidates, music, rallies, emotion. If we really believe in popular democracy and decision-making we shouldn’t be bothered or worried that some of it mirrors the sports enthusiasm, celebrity culture, enmities, pugilism, hopes and dreams that animates so much of our popular culture — and always has. How would it be any other other way? Just speaking for myself, I don’t see this as well, we can’t expect any better. I think it’s mostly a wonderful thing, how a big impossibly diverse country with a deep obstreperous streak makes collective decisions about its future and governance. This is why when I hear people decrying “horse-race journalism,” I mostly see red. I think they want it to be the civics class. Or more specifically, I think they want it to be the civics class for someone else.
I should restrain myself a bit here and say if you decry horse-race journalism, I’m not saying you have bad motives or a bad ideas. I’m saying we should understand what popular politics is and isn’t, and mostly celebrate it as such rather than imagining it is something it isn’t. And there’s a great deal to celebrate. How this relates back to polls is that I think a certain element of anti-pollism relates back to this misapprehension of what popular politics is: You shouldn’t be focused on who’s winning or losing or what’s happening in the campaign. You should be reviewing the policy proposals.
But if we care about politics, care about who is going to make the decisions about our future, of course we’re going to care how it’s going, whether our team is winning or losing. That’s just human nature, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Especially if we already have a clear idea of where we stand on the big issues of the day. And beyond this, if we really believe in popular democracy, its messiness and impressionistic beauty, we should at least aspire to appreciating its inner workings, joys and agonies. All of this treats as a given that there are more or less corrupt periods of politics, times of greatness and decay. But that’s the same with sports, music, and truly everything else in the world. If you think electoral politics should be like a civics class, that’s great. But just don’t mistake that with any world that’s ever existed. It’s more or less like believing in the platonic ideal of a chair. Whatever works for you.
In any case, all of this comes back to polls. They’re interesting. I don’t think we’re going to stop being a little obsessed with seeing at least a bit into the future, like most of us are in most aspects of life. It’s probably a good thing to know in general what people actually think, rather than imagining that they’re all kind of like us or just leaving it to our imagination. But polls are not some kind of constituent element of a functioning electoral democracy. It’s fine if they stop working. Maybe it would even be a bit better. I don’t know. What I find perverse about the “polling crisis” conversation is that you have the civics class idea and now polling is somehow becoming a part of that, which is kind of the worst of all worlds. How will our democracy function if we can’t trust the polls anymore? That’s absurd. It will function fine. Polling will probably continue to be at least directionally accurate. And if you want to know the direction things are going, that’s fine too.
