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United States Science Politics

The Problems With Polls (nybooks.com) 227

Political polling, once hailed as a revolutionary tool for democracy, is facing a crisis of confidence amid high-profile failures and fundamental critiques. Data scientist G. Elliott Morris, Nate Silver's successor at FiveThirtyEight, has defended polling's relevance in a new book, arguing it remains crucial for revealing public opinion despite challenges like plummeting response rates and rising costs.

But critics, including political scientist Lindsay Rogers and sociologist Leo Bogart, have long questioned polling's ability to capture the complexities of public sentiment, arguing it reduces nuanced political matters to simplistic yes/no questions and potentially records opinions that don't exist outside the survey context. Social media platforms, promising to transform democracy by facilitating constant public feedback, have further complicated the polling landscape. The story adds: Today that product remains overwhelmingly popular: polls saturate election coverage, turn politics into a spectator sport, and provide an illusion of control over complex, unpredictable, and fundamentally fickle social forces. That isn't to say that polls don't have uses beyond entertainment: they can be a great asset to campaigns, helping candidates refine their messages and target their resources; they can provide breakdowns of election results that are far more illuminating than the overall vote count; and they can give us a sense -- a vague and sometimes misleading sense -- of what 300 million people or more think about an issue. But, pace Morris, the time for celebrating polls as a bastion of democracy or as a means of bringing elites closer to voters is surely over. The polling industry continues to boom. Democracy isn't faring quite so well.

Silicon Valley ultimately peddled the same feel-good story about democracy as the polling industry: that the powerful are unresponsive to the wider public because they cannot hear their voices, and if only they could hear them, then of course they would listen and act. The virtue of this diagnosis is that structural inequalities in wealth and power are left intact -- all that matters in democracy is that everyone has a voice, regardless of background. In a very narrow, technical sense, their innovations have made this a reality. But the result is a loud, opinionated, and impotent public sphere, coarsened by social and economic divisions and made all the more disillusioned by the discovery that, in politics, it takes more than a voice to be heard.

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The Problems With Polls

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  • by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @09:50AM (#64848323)

    Political polling, once hailed as a revolutionary tool for democracy..

    Oh for fucks sake, who’s SELLING that bullshit? The ones profiting off political polls?

    Polls are nothing more than an extension of “media”. Always have been. And media is both biased and corrupted by Government. If you struggle to believe that, watch Good Morning, Vietnam again. Then realize that movie had fuck-all to do with a funny radio DJ and everything to do with Government and media censorship.

    The lies and clickbait are bad enough, but the censorship issue goes above and beyond. And yeah, that problem is THAT old. I believe today’s political polls and results about as much as I believe the politicians buying and selling them. So should you.

    • Polls are nothing more than an extension of “media”. Always have been.

      Indeed. I go into some detail into a comment below about this. Basically there are the scientific polls, which are usually guarded as trade secrets by organizations wealthy enough to conduct them, and then there are the profit-maximizing / ad sales polls that are "farmed" by gaming which method produces the most clicks. For a lot of intuitive reasons, the latter almost always produces statistical ties, because it keeps the

    • by sinij ( 911942 )
      Yes, I agree in 2024 polls are political propaganda.. Polls showing Harris-Walz ticket being tied to Trump-Vance nationally are laughable, anyone can simply take a drive in any swing state and look at the lawn signs to see that is not even close.
      • by _xeno_ ( 155264 )

        I'm not sure yard signs are a good source either, because in order to place a yard sign, you have to care enough to evangelize for your candidate. I suspect that the vast majority of voters don't bother campaigning for who they vote for. The "swing voters" who will ultimately decide the election by definition won't have signs on their lawn saying who they support. If they did, they wouldn't be a swing voter.

        That being said, I will say that I've noticed that there are no Harris/Walz signs out there. Anywhere

      • Yes, I agree in 2024 polls are political propaganda.. Polls showing Harris-Walz ticket being tied to Trump-Vance nationally are laughable, anyone can simply take a drive in any swing state and look at the lawn signs to see that is not even close.

        The problem with polling isn't accuracy, because they tend to be pretty damn accurate (particularly more so than your lawn sign study).

        The problem is that they frame issues as A v B, Trump v Harris, pro-life v pro-choice.

        But peoples views and positions are much more nuanced than that. Presenting things as polls frames issues as having only two real viable positions and pushes people to join one of the camps.

      • Betting markets [270towin.com] seem [yahoo.com] to be much more accurate than polls, lately. Polls seem designed more as political tools than actual information tools, as they can suppress or motivate some voters (theoretically).
      • by ToasterMonkey ( 467067 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @01:01PM (#64849011) Homepage

        Yes, I agree in 2024 polls are political propaganda.. Polls showing Harris-Walz ticket being tied to Trump-Vance nationally are laughable, anyone can simply take a drive in any swing state and look at the lawn signs to see that is not even close.

        If it were that simple, elections could be predicted by yard sign shipments more accurately than your drive through rural bfe, but they can't, it's not.

        Also polls can have the inverse effect of driving people to vote when their team is behind. When your team is behind in the polls it drives people to get out and vote. Being ahead in the pools encourages people to stay home because they're winning anyway. Voting sucks or we'd all do it every time. There is a scary low fraction of registered voters that actually vote. What polls don't do is change anyone's mind. Duh.

        If all you want is a bullshit measure that confirms your feelings, save the gas and console yourself with some crap like all your [good] friends are voting for your team too, so it must be the most winningest.

        • If all you want is a bullshit measure that confirms your feelings, save the gas and console yourself with some crap like all your [good] friends are voting for your team too, so it must be the most winningest.

          Realize which party controls most of the liberal media, and you’ll understand they have ZERO reason to be honest in the polls. I already have my bullshit measure. It’s called the media convincing me that the worst-rated VP in American history, is suddenly “tied” with Trump.

          • by Pascoea ( 968200 )

            worst-rated VP in American history

            Gee, wonder what your source for that piece of "information" is.

      • by Pascoea ( 968200 )
        Your scientific method for determining polls are bullshit is "drive through Rural Wisconsin and count the number of Trump signs vs Harris signs"? I really hope I just missed the intended sarcasm.
      • Yes, I agree in 2024 polls are political propaganda.. Polls showing Harris-Walz ticket being tied to Trump-Vance nationally are laughable, anyone can simply take a drive in any swing state and look at the lawn signs to see that is not even close.

        For a slightly different take on this, I am a conservative and will vote for Trump and live in a sort of inner suburb. Wasn't really my choice, but whatever. I don't have any signs in my yard because it is an open invitation for people to fuck with my car, egg my house and vandalize stuff. One of the neighbors yelled at the last campaign guy who was going door to door handing out literature for the local conservative candidates, he was a very respectful black man who had idiot young white women explaining t

        • by Pascoea ( 968200 )

          extremely activist and unhinged crowd to hate on conservatives currently in the US

          We get the same bullshit on the liberal side from the unhinged "conservatives". I don't have a "Harris" sign in my yard for the exact same reasons. I don't need the jackass with the ten-foot-wide "Trump won 2020. You know it and I know it." sign in his yard fucking with my stuff.

    • by Mitreya ( 579078 )

      Polls are nothing more than an extension of âoemediaâ. Always have been.

      I was under the impression that politicians tend to pay attention (in some cases) to clear trends in the polls. I think you can see that with presidential candidates reorienting their stance.

  • People have all sorts of reasons for being deceptive, so at the very least you need a massive poll to average that crap out.

    People being polled want to influence the results to change perception to influence those easily influenced and will find pollsters who use unethical methods to get the desired polling results.

    Different polling methods inherently select subpopulations with average deviances from the general population.

    You need to find a way to get a large random sample that isn't accidentally selecting

  • Weird (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @10:05AM (#64848365) Homepage

    I was watching Nate Silver in an interview recently, and he just said it plainly... people who answer polls are "weird." That is, they're less and less representative of the voting population every year. I wonder if you'd be better off sending the questionnaire through the regular mail and having them answer that way. You could argue that people without a fixed address wouldn't be polled, but I think they vote less anyway.

    It seems like Twitter and TikTok are where "journalists" turn to but those are the worst. They're performative spaces where people say what they think other people on the platform want to hear, not what they actually think.

    Politicians need to know what people are thinking, but there are other ways to find out. If someone from a political party comes door to door, I still talk to them. They can ask me questions and I'll tell them why I'm voting a certain way. Of course if they were recording me, I'd tell them to F-off. What's really damaging democracy is that we have a new wave of people who think freedom of speech is bad. If people are afraid to say what's bothering them out of fear of being ostracized or losing their job, that's what keeps the so called "elites" out of touch with real people.

    Seriously, we spent so long under the boot of the church, and being told you can't say that because it's "blasphemy" but these days the list of scientifically proven things you can't say without repercussions is longer and longer. This won't last forever, but I'm afraid of what the backlash against it is going to look like. It's going to be violent.

    • I don't think I've ever seen a paper poll that wasn't a push poll. But it might get a better response rate than all the crap in my spam inbox on email or sms.
    • Re:Weird (Score:5, Interesting)

      by evil_aaronm ( 671521 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @10:42AM (#64848505)

      What's really damaging democracy is that we have a new wave of people who think freedom of speech is bad.

      I'd modify this to say that the new wave think that free speech is Ok - but only for them, and without consequence. They want to say their piece, and not be held accountable for it. And everyone else can just STFU.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Nrrqshrr ( 1879148 )

        These people were always there, since the dawn of time. The problem is that, 1000 years ago, the village buffoon was just a village buffoon. Today that same guy will have a platform and millions of village buffoons will form a voting block and demand that he leads their kingdom.
        Democracy died with the internet's birth because every voter can find the loud minority that best fits his world view and starts shouting with them. Sadly, a democracy can not exist when campaigns are just shouting fights between clo

    • We (voters) don't need polls, campaign staff workers 'need' polls.

      Reporters report on polls because the only alternative to reporting on polls would be to instead cover what politicians say, which is incredibly repetitive and boring. By reporting on polling numbers, the election takes on a sporting event-like appeal to readers/viewers.

      • by RobinH ( 124750 )
        There's some truth to that, but also reporters (and news organizations) are more and more biased. Different news organizations are biased in different directions, but they're trying to move the dial in that direction, and you can see that they cover poll results in a biased way.
    • I would offer a note of hope, although delivered in a package of miserable history: There's always a "new wave of people who think freedom of speech is bad."

      Even limiting ourselves to postwar times, you got the Red Scare and HUAC, J. Edgar Hoover's wire crews listening to everyone who ever expressed an opinion to the left of Genghis Khan, Nixon's "ratfucking" slander machine, violent Southern racists (as always), National Guards deployed because teenagers with hair longer than a millimeter were waving si
    • ...we have a new wave of people who think freedom of speech is bad.

      Yep. Most of them refer to it now as some form of "misinformation".

      Here's some examples of recent "ruling class" disgust with freedom of speech:

      John Kerry at the WEF [youtube.com]

      Hillary Clinton for book interview..."lose total control" [youtube.com]

      Tim Walz on free speech (3:17 in). [youtu.be]

      Yes, these links are on YT from conservative shows, but the videos are NOT generated they are real.

      It's strange I remember seeing these a lot a few weeks ago...and they now seem t

    • If people are afraid to say what's bothering them out of fear of being ostracized or losing their job, that's what keeps the so called "elites" out of touch with real people.

      Freedom of Speech has never been about freedom from consequence of stating your opinion. It's about freedom of punishment from the government. Congrats you're not in jail, that doesn't mean other people should be forced to stay around a toxic thundercunt who tattoos a swastika on their forehead. My freedoms are to not associate with those people, not employ them. If you're afraid of being ostracized for your opinion then it's a good indication that your opinion is worth keeping to yourself.

      That's not fear,

    • I wonder if you'd be better off sending the questionnaire through the regular mail and having them answer that way.

      I actually get occasional polls that way. Some of them are from the VA, asking about how good or bad my experience was at a recent appointment, and I generally remember to fill them out and send them back. The others are from the political party I'm registered with. Those are trying to learn what their membership thinks about various issues and/or candidates. I fill them out and send th
  • Someone randomly calls me, using my real name, and asks if I support Trump. Yeah, no thanks. Don't want to get my property vandalized.
    Problem 2 is people lie on purpose to make the candidate they don't want feel safe and spend less money and put in less effort.
    Problem 3 is that it's biased towards people who have unlimited time to waste talking on the phone or will take a long political survey for a $5 gift card, aka slightly more Democrats than Republicans.
    Problem 4, and this is 99% of the problem, they
  • The fact that polling can be, and is, used to influence results and consensus instead of simply monitoring them as often as not is a pretty damning in and of itself.

    Anyone who 'trusts' the results from a poll which can be easily manipulated by any number of factors is a fool, and frankly, that's why they're still used.

  • Huh. Likely voters? Bascially, boomers. All of us need to fix that. Get out and vote, or they will keep taking and taking until they're gone.

    You don't sow, you don't reap.

    • Have you ever wondered why boomers tend to vote and later cohorts don't? Maybe you should be doing more to get your contemporaries to take the time to express their opinions on election day rather than just bitching that their candidate didn't win. As for me, I don't have to because my cohort already votes in large numbers.
  • Gathering and analyzing data in a statistically rigorous way is well-understood. The problem is that the organizations with the resources to conduct the polls are increasingly incentivized to "juke" their method by gaming results through clickbait / ad algorithms. They find the polling method whose output maximizes their financial reward, not that has the greatest empirical validity.

    What that usually looks like is dead-heat horse race elections, with slight emphasis one way or another depending on who
  • Political polling, once hailed as a revolutionary tool for democracy, is facing a crisis of confidence

    ... that's just part of democracy itself facing a crisis of confidence. polls are biased just the same as media, there's no mystery there. at the end money talks and all governments rule overwhelmingly for the elites, the "demos" has no real "kratos" at all. this can only hold while there is hope and trust, meaning money flows, business blooms and everything is good and nice enough to keep the populace happy and content. it's been decades, but we might be facing new challenges and it would seem that such a

  • by DeplorableCodeMonkey ( 4828467 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @10:42AM (#64848503)

    No one was admitting to supporting Trump because many Trump voters were afraid to do so for various reasons. My coworkers in a rich, blue region were shocked at how well Trump did. I wasn't. I warned them that most of the USA outside of rich, blue metro regions was not doing well. After watching Bernie Sanders get shated six ways to Sunday, a lot of Trump voters kept their mouths shut.

    Partly because a lot of people sympathetic to Sanders actually voted for Trump in the end since pre-sellout Sanders was basically a left-wing version of Trump on core blue collar issues (including immigration control and protecting jobs).

    • Sadly, I think the only effective polling strategy today is to sit down and talk to people and listen. Unfortunately we all feel like the other half are bat-shit crazy stupid morons without a functioning brain cell.

      It pains me when smart people make dumb arguments with conviction. It pains me that people hold vile opinions of others based solely on political party. But, I get the divide. It has been around for a long time simmering. Some current turns baffle and worry me, but this too shall pass.

  • Groucho Marx once said "I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member." There's a similar aphorism in front of us here: Nobody who takes a survey is likely to be answering as honestly as they might if they didn't know that is what they were doing. Most people hang up on surveys and block the number. (even though blocking doesn't really help.) Anyone who takes the time to answer a survey is already in some weird category that isn't representative of average americans.
    • There is more incentive to be dishonest than there is to be honest. When a pollster, somehow, gets through to me, I'm answering questions based on what feedback I want their candidate to have, not on what the pollster is asking.

      Will you vote for Kamala Harris? No, I don't like her position on (x, y, z). In fact I wouldn't vote for trump if I had a gun to my head, I'd definitely ask for the bullet. But the democrat party doesn't get a free pass to assume I'm in their corner and support all of their policies,

      • Yeah, I agree. I think there's also a lot of assumption that a negative sentiment for one candidate implies support for another. that's a good point indeed.
  • The last poll taker who came to my house asked "What's the most important issue to you - jobs, the environment, education, or housing?" "None of those" was my response. "Well, which one is the most important to you?" What the hell kind of poll is that?

  • Contrasting polls

    1) Polls of 3,000 (or even 1,000) persons are a joke. For a state like Pennsylvania: 6,915,283 likely voters, 9,090,962 registered, 10,353,548 eligible. Statistical noise. And that's assuming a random sample (polls are "Self-Selecting Populations"). See those error bars? Double them.

    2) Poll of 21,000 out of 1.2M Teamsters is statisticly significant. Both in absolute sense (21,000 people) and relative sense (1.75 %).

  • We should definitely blame polls for their failure to identify winners in statistically tied, winner-take-all races, where a few states will end up dictating the total outcome.

    The real problem is the format of the elections. We should be using ranked choice voting and run-offs. The winners should never really be a surprise to us, and their capacity to make sweeping changes without popular support should thus be limited by their ability to remain in power with a less faithful electorate.

    • The real problem is the format of the elections. We should be using ranked choice voting and run-offs.

      This is insightful.

      The current winner-take-all elections drive us to binary choice polarization.

      Agree, ranked choice would be better. I'm a fan of approval voting [electionscience.org], another balloting system that solves the electoral process devolving into a choice between only two alternatives, but ranked choice would be better than what we have.

      (Approval voting has one advantage that vote counting is simple, and that no changes are needed to the voting technology. All you need to do is remove the current constraint "Vote f

  • Polls with loaded questions are just sales tools
    Polls with leading questions are to skew the results
    People that answer political polls are usually people that want to tell you how to live

    All polls without a Cowboy Neal option are not worth answering

  • I no longer answer calls from any number that is not on my contact list. This is because most of the time it is automated scam calls from India. Consequently, it is extremely unlikely that any polling agency would be able to reach me via phone. If they want reliable polling data, then they have to send out physical people to knock on my door.
  • by FeelGood314 ( 2516288 ) on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @11:07AM (#64848621)
    Polling is still valid if done properly. If it is a political party or a company selling something then they care about quality. If it is the media they don't care about quality all they want is to report on the election like it is a horse race. If it is someone with an agenda then they have a bias. If it is academia then a bad poll gives a new exciting thing to write a paper about.

    A good poll won't just ask your opinion, they will ask how firm that opinion is and then they will ask a lot of demographic questions to try and figure out how representative you are of the target population. For an election the target population is the people who will show up on election day. So pollsters for an internal political party poll will ask "Are you eligible to vote?", "Did you vote in the last election?", "Are you currently registered to vote", "Do you know where to vote?", "How likely are you to vote?"

    A good poll will go out of their way to find people in demographics that don't answer the phone. They will double check that socially embarrassing opinions are correctly captured by asking "do you agree with any of the 5 following statements" where one of those statements is the socially less acceptable one and then asking further questions to infer if the polled person likely agreed with the target statement. This is particularly important in countries with repressive regimes.
    Polling when done right is still disciplined science. Most polls though are total garbage.
  • by dirk ( 87083 )

    Polls can still be very useful, the issue is the misuse of many of them. Many polls now are built for misuse and outrage. For example, a poll asking people in the country is headed in the right direction makes for great headlines, but doesn't actually tell anyone anything. Do they think it is headed in the wrong direction because it is headed to the left or right? Too many polls are built for headlines instead of for actual gathering data.

  • That are much more accurate and much more expensive to do. This is why Joe Biden dropped out. Internal polling by the Democratic party showed he didn't have a path to victory.

    The slop guy's like Nate silver pass around isn't very useful for anything. You might just kind of barely get an idea of a general trend and if the public really really hates a politician, like they do with say JD Vance, you'll know that. But the internal polling from the parties is what matters.

    The downside to it is it's extr
  • The only people I know who answer phones, are the elderly. These are certainly not representative of the population's views on things.

  • Remember when they were *fun*?

    First, they became dumb, then they disappeared. The two things are not unrelated. To make polls engaging, worth the effort, they need to be well done. And doing them well, requires spending money and effort.

    This may be part of the larger polling issue. Polls are too commonplace, and too much like spam. People aren't interested in answering leading questions or being part of someone's political agenda. So yeah, they avoid pollsters.

    Time for a new strategy. The telephone is a dyi

    • To make polls engaging, worth the effort, they need to be well done.

      I think even "bad" Slashdot polls can be quite engaging, depending on the imagination of the people responding. Distance, in multiples of my height, from my birthplace [slashdot.org] is my all-time favorite poll, featuring such contributions as this one [slashdot.org] and this one [slashdot.org]. Also you can generate a cut-out-and-keep list of Slashdotters who didn't understand dimensional analysis in 2010.

  • "...all polls released to the public are for the purpose of manipulating, rather than informing, the public."

  • You do a real sample and then you subjectively need to decide how that maps onto the population and then subjectively decide which of those people are likely to vote in a meaningful way.

    All of those subjective variables can be tuned to get any outcome in most races.

    Most pollsters stop playing propaganda games with their methodology as the race draws near so they can sell how close they were on Election Eve.

    The "top five" pollsters are the ones who are most often close *and* don't have huge swings just befor

  • Looked over some of the discussion and noticed a number of Funny comments not so moderated...

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