Political polling has scuttled into a national joke. The hard fact is that polls have become chronically unreliable and deserve full-blown skepticism.
There are several reasons. Fewer people are willing to participate in polls, especially over the phone. Response rates have dropped from over 30% in the 1990s to single digits today. This can skew polling results if non-respondents differ significantly from respondents, and this is happening. Republicans tend to be both less likely to talk with pollsters and, in 2024, less likely to reveal to pollsters that they would vote for Donald Trump.
Trump scored a resounding victory, but most polls concluded the election was headed for a tie. Nearly all media political mavens predicted a neck-and-neck race and most opinion polls showed a tie. The polls also failed to predict Trump’s 2016 election victory. Such failures reflect that some political groups are less likely to share their views with pollsters, the “shy voter” effect; this particularly applies to controversial candidates or issues.
One major problem with polls is “representation.” Polling samples need to accurately represent a diverse population. But starting about eight years ago, pollsters overrepresented college graduates and underrepresented rural voters and younger people. Another problem is the difficulty of reaching voters; traditional polling methods, such as landline calls, are outdated because many people now use mobile phones, which involve higher costs and legal restrictions.
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Internet surveys often do not capture a fully representative sample. Then there is the so-called “observer effect,” when merely being asked a survey question influences how those polled respond to it. And there are weighting problems—pollsters adjust (or “weight”) survey data to align with known population metrics such as race, age, and gender. If these adjustments are inaccurate or insufficient, the results are skewed.
Legacy media sometimes misrepresent polling data and treat margins of error as definitive predictions. Close races often fall within the margin of error, making outcomes inherently uncertain. News organizations are the biggest customers for polling firms, creating capricious or perverse incentives. For example, races that “go down to the wire” are likelier to sell newspapers or attract TV viewers than those with lopsided favorites.
Finally, modern elections are influenced by dynamic factors, such as misinformation campaigns, “October surprises,” last-minute attack campaigns and advertising, debate performance and shifts in public opinion, and unexpected changes in turnout, all of which are hard to capture in static polls.
So, beware of polls. They are only snapshots of public opinion at a given moment, not predictions of future behavior. Many pollsters are no longer trusted and are the subject of jokes because they have either deliberately or accidentally misused polling data to forecast or project outcomes that lead to disillusionment when election results diverge from expectations.
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