Are polls the next fatality of new tech?
- Writing Staff
- Dec 4, 2020
- 5 min read
Updated: Dec 6, 2020
The era of technology has brought numerous changes to our lives that seem to go unnoticed. It has changed the very way we experience our lives. As a world population, our patience has lowered. A simple text can suffice rather than a phone call. Our lives are speeding up every day. One of the most common ways an industry or product can get steamrolled by this ever-growing dependence on technology is not modernizing their tactics. Now, the latest culprit of this very problem: The Polling Industry.
Polling in America has been sacred in judging the race for any elected official, whether that be for President or State Representative. In the past two Presidential Election cycles, the polls have been plain-out confusing. In this case, we will look at 2020, where the polls showed slightly more accurate data than 2016, yet displayed strange irregularities from state to state and nationwide.
But first, we must recognize why polling needs to be adjusted or thrown aside since incorrect polling can cause substantial disadvantages to the candidates competing. The most prominent problem with inaccurate polling is everyone monitors to polls. Not only the public but advisors to both Presidental nominees were watching the polls. The Trump Campaign spent months trying to discredit the polling, yet they ended up spending the last week of the campaign appearing in red states that showed Trump could lose. In the last week of the campaign, President Trump frantically visited Republican strongholds from recent elections such as Florida, Texas, and North Carolina. The reason Trump went to these states was to protect them. Joe Biden was winning Florida and North Carolina by an average of 1-3 points. In Texas, Biden was statistically tied with President Trump. Once the weeklong election ended, the totals were: Trump in NC (+2), Trump in FL (+4), and Trump in Texas (+5). These tallies were not as close as the Trump Campaign anticipated. Republican strategists were truly worried Joe Biden might take Texas, yet the result was Trump by 5. It all became clear, 2020 was another bad year for polling.
Big donors like Michael Bloomberg also felt the polling errors. Huge sums of cash were spent in Florida and Texas in the hopes to turn them blue when in reality the polling was off, and Biden was slightly down. Big Senate Races as well, such as the South Carolina slug-fest between Incumbent U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) against Jaime Harrison (D). Harrison raised a record $57 million in the last quarter, to lose by 10%. In much closer raises like, in North Carolina or even Maine, the money accumulated in the South Carolina race could have easily helped sway the election.
In a frantic effort, Democrats in unison, across the country worked together to try to throw Lindsey Graham out of Washington D.C. because a handful of polls in South Carolina called a close race. Once again, the polls leading strategies down the wrong path. This game can be played all-day, back and forth, between Democrats and Republicans.
Since March, polls were shared on the national media every week, showing Joe Biden's dominant leads in the blue wall states (PA, MI, WI, and MN), yet once the election came along, Biden took these by razor-thin margins. Just one week before the election, USNews posted a Wisconsin Poll showing Joe Biden was up 17 points over Incumbent President Trump. This poll raised the state average to blowout territory, leading both operations to stop campaigning aggressively in the state only to find out after the election it was the closest swing state, with Joe Biden carrying by only 0.6%.
As the election winds down, and Trump's legal cases continue to be thrown out of courthouses across the country, his campaign must begin to reflect on what went wrong and who to blame. At the top of the list, should be the polling industry. The inaccuracies this year were critical to his campaign. Assuming Joe Biden lost this election, the focus then would be on the inaccuracies to the detriment of Biden's campaign.
However, the inaccuracies of state polling are connected with Trump and the very way he moves about in his short-lived political career. Many pollsters like the Trafalgar Group, founded by Robert Cahaly have insisted that the "Shy Trump Voter" is the reason to blame for inaccuracies connected
to Trump's polling, yet there is no proof to these claims. Other pollsters have concluded that Trump is too hard to poll since the political spectrum is so partisan, that overall poll makeup often leans to the Democrat simply because pollsters notoriously poll more Democrats than Republicans. This is for the simple fact there are more registered Democrats than Republicans in our country.
"Telephone polls were much easier to carry out. In 1997, a national sample of about 800 respondents required between 2,000 and 2,500 calls. Today, getting that same number of respondents requires between 7,500 and 9,000 calls to get a reasonably sized sample, a precipitous decline in what’s called the response rate." - HBR
The real problem is polling itself in the modern era. In the simplest terms, to conduct a poll, a professional polling group will call a list of voters and ask them a range of questions regarding their plans for the election and views on key policy. The world has changed with technology. The polling industry, not so much, carrying on this tradition for the last forty years. With Caller ID, Spam Protection, and higher mobile phone usage, the odds of callers picking up the phone to take ten minutes out there a day is improbable. Not to mention that very few people look forward to an arbitrary discussion with an unfamiliar person, identifying with an obscure polling firm. In modern times, those who accept a phone call tend to shy away from providing accurate answers since so many possible views politically are now viewed as controversial.
He gave evidence that people are more likely to pick up the phone if they’re Democrats, more likely to pick up under the conditions of a pandemic and more likely to pick up the phone if they score high in the domain of social trust. - SA
There is no puzzle about the polling industry, it simply needs to change with how polling is carried out. It's apparent, they need to change with the times. Use text message polling with one or two simple questions. Try emailing rather than calling, or run advertisements on websites with an active poll, that allows website viewers to vote. These are ideas, not suggestions. It is not up to the public to help pollsters figure out how to do their job correctly, but something needs to be done.
The mainstream media needs to stop peddling these inaccurate polls. Whenever the next poll is published showing an incumbent President falling to a 17 point deficit in a state he previously won in the past, should not be presented to viewers across the country. It is unacceptable for errors of this magnitude. In any other profession with such high stakes, mistakes this large would have consequences, yet everyone moves on. In two years, when midterms come around, polls will once again be the talk of late-night talk shows, despite having no credibility in their recent work.
It’s best not to force too much meaning out of a poll. If a race looks like it’s within three or four points in either direction, we should simply say it's a close race and not force the data to say something they can’t. I think pollsters will take this inaccuracy and try to do better. - SA
The polls cost Donald Trump crucial time down the stretch of 2020. To claim the pollster's lost President Trump the election is leaping too far, but they negatively influenced his performance since he spent valuable time in unnecessary states. In the light of President Trump's loss, maybe pollsters will be getting a break since Trump might fall out of the limelight. The worrying about Trump over-performing won't be on everyone's mind.
...and accounting for "Shy Ted Cruz Voters", just does not have the same allure.
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