Don’t be bamboozled by all the election polls

“Who is right?” and “Who is wrong?” — those are the two questions people have to ask when they see the flood of polls in their social media feed or referenced on the news.

Sadly, many in the once-vaunted political polling world are falling into the same public opinion of disrespect category as local weathermen who predict the next big rain or snowstorm only to be proven wrong time after time.

George Gallup published the first systematic poll 91 years ago on Oct. 20, 1935, which reflected public opinion on issues during the Great Depression. Gallup established a useful and mostly honorable profession that has been used by political people and journalists over the last century to focus attention on the problems faced by the American public and to provide much-needed data to help candidates and strategists conduct elections and perform the art of public policy once elected.

However, in the past quarter century, many public polls sadly have become just another advocacy weapon in the arsenal of professional campaign managers and strategists. The polls campaigns keep to themselves internally are the ones that are more important and closer to the truth.

Polls are no longer conducted in person, such as when Gallup pollsters would sit in a room with a respondent in rural Iowa to interview them and record their answers on a notepad. Some, such as Wedgewood Polls, were brave and brazen enough to admit recently that they deliberately produce inaccurate and inflated poll results that get included in national aggregator reports such as Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin.

Even CNN spends an inordinate amount of time trying to explain why Republican Senate candidates and President Donald Trump have routinely overperformed their final poll projections since 2016. Could it be that somehow, some way, their poll experts have failed to figure out how to contact Trump and GOP voters when they seem to have no trouble finding people who support Democrats? No one in the liberal mainstream media ever has to explain why their polls underestimated the final Democratic vote count or percentage. If anything, they have to backpedal and try to explain why they overestimated Democratic turnout.

What most people don’t know about polling is it is as much of an art and guessing game as it is about data collection and statistical analysis. Pollsters will call several hundred or thousand people in a congressional district of 761,169 people and ask them a series of questions, including who they are going to vote for in a coming election. They don’t waste time and money calling people who are not registered to vote, and they seldom interview anyone who has not voted in three or four of the previous elections.

Once they gather the data from a few people — which is just a snapshot of the public mood during a particular week — they have to adjust the data to fit what they think will be the makeup of the final electorate on Election Day. Sometimes they model it after a similar previous election year, say 2020, as the last off-year election similar to 2026. Other times they weigh the turnout of voters of various ages, genders and races based on the respondent’s declaration of their enthusiasm and intent to vote, which may or may not actually be 100% correct or ever verified.

There are a few things in politics that have been proven by empirical evidence over the years. First is that incumbents almost always win unless they have done something egregiously wrong. Second is that the candidate with the most money behind them wins more than 90% of the time. The third is that voters over the age of 60 will make up the largest part of the final electorate in almost every election.

According to several Republican pollsters, there is evidence that the number of senior citizens voting already is on the increase, and with the future of Social Security on their minds, they may vote in near-record numbers. Hardly any senior citizens are clamoring for America to be taken over by the socialists except for Bernie Sanders and his wife. Republicans have massive financial advantages this year over a cash-strapped Democratic Party.

With just over a week to go before Election Day, there’s still time for everyone to go cast an actual vote. Democrats may take the House in a midterm correction, but it shouldn’t be the result of a few polls that distressed conservatives and effectively suppressed their vote. Maybe the polling world will clean itself up before 2028.