Flood of Unreliable Polls Threatens To Cast a Shadow Over Election Day’s Results

Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana is casting doubt on polls predicting a GOP wipeout on Tuesday — standard pushback against unfavorable numbers. Yet with recent surveys missing the mark by laughable margins, and twin scandals of fraudulent pollsters, expect the lack of confidence to add to post-election chaos.“Polls,” the veteran Democratic strategist, Douglas Schoen, tells The New York Sun, “do traditionally underestimate Republicans, particularly low-propensity voters who are difficult to reach. With so many races within the margin of error, it is impossible to say with certainty how key Senate and House races will turn out.”Monday on Fox News Channel, Mr. Johnson said that “the polls are wrong,” noting that “two polling organizations nationwide” were “exposed for completely fraudulent numbers.” Wedgewood Polling, as this columnist wrote Friday in the Sun, copped to running a “social experiment” by spreading fake surveys. SoCal Strategies was outed a few days later.The American Association for Public Opinion Research president, Mary Losch, condemned these “bad actors.” She wrote in a statement last week that they are “producing and distributing fabricated data and organizational information that undermines trust in public opinion and election polling.”Ms. Losch said that “professional polling organizations are transparent, ethical, and work hard to provide critical information to the public.” A statistician, George Gallup, pioneered that sort of scientific polling in the mid-1930s. His company became the gold-standard but gave up “horse-race” polling after forecasting a loss for President Obama in 2012. The proliferation of dubious data that has filled Gallup’s void has eroded public faith. Prediction markets, which have no scientific basis, add more noise, and the flood of numbers can leave voters feeling cheated when they fail to match what happens at the ballot box.CNN, Mr. Johnson said, reported that in “14 out of the last 16 elections, the October generic ballot underestimated Republicans by an average of four points.” He asserted that the polls are “even further off this time because more and more Republicans are unwilling to participate in these surveys,” referencing a new phenomenon: Partisan Non-response Bias.Last month, Pew Research Center explained how they’re adjusting. Pollsters, they wrote, “now weight their surveys on political characteristics,” which “wasn’t common practice a decade ago, to correct for a systematic bias that emerged around 2016.” Only a poll by Los Angeles Times and USC predicted President Trump’s victory that year.NBC News analysis in December 2024 found that polls “understated” Mr. Trump’s “support in virtually every state.” After President George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004, it was Democrats crying foul. Exit polls had shown Senator John Kerry winning. The early data had prompted Mr. Kerry’s chief strategist, Robert Shrum, to prematurely say, “Let me be the first to call you ‘Mr. President.’”In December 2020, Politico profiled a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, Steven Freeman, who “went down a rabbit hole of statistical analysis” to explain how votes for Mr. Bush “seemed to have magically appeared.” Mr. Freeman said he concluded that “fraud was an unavoidable hypothesis.”Mr. Freeman’s conspiracy theory, Politico wrote, “ended up spreading widely, drawing thousands of responses from around the country” among those “who believed … that the election had been stolen.” To voters of this sort, polls that show the results they want are reality; anything else is sinister.“What we’re dealing with here,” Mr. Freeman alleged before a congressional committee investigating the election, “is a stuffed animal, not a real animal — a taxidermic model of democracy.” Politico reported that “a darker theory” alleged that fraud occurred “via high-tech voting machines.”The refusal to accept Mr. Kerry’s loss was examined amid Mr. Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election had been stolen and, again, suspicions about hacked voting machines. As in 2004, partisans warred with conflicting sets of data, rejecting more than two centuries of civic tradition where sparring ended after elections were certified.Dozens of publications have sprung up to deliver data since Gallup’s day, drowning Americans in digits. As a result, an increasing number of voters regard Election Night tallies as just more numbers to be crunched, eroding faith in democracy and emboldening those who’ll only accept data when it shows their horse winning.

Flood of Unreliable Polls Threatens To Cast a Shadow Over Election Day’s Results

Flood of Unreliable Polls Threatens To Cast a Shadow Over Election Day’s Results

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