Polling gone haywire

Happy Thanksgiving! Yes, this is a late-night post because I am running behind and I wanted one post during the week.

So… polls…they are becoming infamous for being off. I remember 2016 where we, of course, had a surprise and the discussion was how the polls really got the election wrong. I didn’t pay attention to 2018 and 2020, at least the polling aspect, for two reasons: 1) I’d rather not follow politics and 2) I was a bit leery about polling after 2016.

I did pay a little more attention to the news on polls for 2022 (why? I don’t know) and most of the polls and the news pundits were predicting a Republican blowout, sweeping in huge numbers into office throughout the land. Everybody was repeating the historical norms: generally, during midterms, the people vote out the party in power, especially if economic conditions were unfavorable. Specifically, if the President, House of Representatives, and the Senate were all held by the same party and voters were unhappy, maybe due to a poor economy, then the voters would vote in the other party into the House and Senate during the midterms, thus crippling the Presidential agenda.

The prediction for 2022 was that there would be a red wave, just because history has always played out that way. The pollsters may have been subscribing very heavily to that theory and thus did not pick up on any seismic changes – if there were any – to change the game.

While the House make up did change, it was not a blowout. And the Senate still remains in the hands of the President’s party. The polls were wrong and historical dogma was overturned.

Because I’m not an expert and I do not follow politics very closely (I follow very reluctantly), I am relying on the news guys to get me up to speed on the history of polling: namely polls have failed in 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022. So, every election.

From my readings on the topic of polls, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two areas where the polls need updating to reflect current times. One person noted that the type of questions posed to the most likely voters were not phrased very well and thus probably did not elicit how the voters would vote. Basically, the question was, if I remember correctly, are you happy or satisfied with the direction US is going? With the crime, mass shootings and inflation going on, the majority predictably said “no”.

Okay, but saying “no” did not automatically mean that the voters would vote in the other party. There were a lot of “loony toons” candidates running and now the voters had a choice: the “loony toons” or the party that was in charge during times of rising crime and inflation. The choices were not wonderful.

It looks like in a lot of places – not everywhere – the voters decided “no” to the craziness. The craziness was too much.

The types of questions that the pollsters used may not have brought out the dilemma the voters were facing and did not provide a clue as to which direction the voters would take.

The questions were the first area that the pollster failed in. The other one is they may not have connected with all of the most likely voters when conducting the polls. In 2022, the youth or the younger voters came out in strong force and the pundits said it was those young voters that prevented the red wave. The pollsters may not have included young voters in sufficient numbers when conducting polls because historically, young voters do not turn out much. Typically, they are busy working – I think. So, all of the pollsters’ weighing and other mathematical tricks to divine the voters’ plans were based upon historical norms that may not apply in 2022.

The voting demographic may have changed in 2022. Will it hold in 2024? I don’t know. The youth could conceivably turn out in even greater numbers in 2024 because the next two years is likely to be dreadful. Full of sturm und drang with lots of investigations going nowhere. Nothing useful being done.

But right now, it looks like the polling methodology needs to be updated because there appears to be some changes going on in the public and the polling is not reflecting those changes. You can’t get good polling results if you are operating under wrong premises of who the likely voters will be, or you are using poor questions to gauge intent.

The Democrats have been quietly celebrating that the red wave did not happen. However, when next year rolls around, I suspect that celebratory feeling will disappear because not all “loony toons” were voted out – some got voted in. And it is expected that they will pull a lot of drama and chaos into the governing process. I’m not looking forward to that.

In addition, it is troubling that almost 50% of the voting population are in favor of these “loony toons”. It seems like the voting results were extremely close in those cases where the “loony toons” were voted out. They were close such that it felt like the political makeup was 50/50.

So, 50% of the US population like the craziness and want the chaos. They are also supporting violence because most of the violent rhetoric seems to be emanating from that side. So close to 50% want the craziness, the chaos, the crudity, the cruelty and the violence.

The next two years is going to be ugly.