One Thing We Know For Certain …

Above: GOP pollster Frank Luntz.

One thing we know for certain is that the polling and political analyst industry has failed miserably once again for the second election in a row.

“The political polling profession is done. It is devastating for my industry” — GOP pollster Frank Luntz, quoted by Axios.

Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post’s media columnist and previously the New York Times public editor writes, We still don’t know much about this election — except that the media and pollsters blew it again:

[A]fter consuming hours of news on Tuesday night, and observing the election results thus far, there are a few things that we can be certain of.

• • • That we should never again put as much stock in public opinion polls, and those who interpret them, as we’ve grown accustomed to doing. Polling seems to be irrevocably broken, or at least our understanding of how seriously to take it is.

The supposedly commanding lead that Joe Biden carried for weeks didn’t last very long into Tuesday evening. This was a lead, remember, that many predicted could result in a landslide Biden victory, help turn the Senate blue, and bring the Democrats amazing victories in red states like Ohio and Florida.

It didn’t take long for that dream to dissipate into a much more typical process of divvying up the states into red and blue, with a lot of unknowns added in. But none of it amounted to the clear repudiation of Trump that a lot of the polling caused us to think was coming. (As for the New York Times “needle” that projected results for Georgia, North Carolina and Florida? Just as in 2016, the way the graphic twitched and swerved throughout the evening once again was capable of provoking a heart attack or, depending on your politics, nausea.

• • • The news media, in general, has not done a good job of covering the Latino vote. “One day after this election is over I am going to write a piece about how Latino is a contrived ethnic category that artificially lumps white Cubans with Black Puerto Ricans and Indigenous Guatemalans . . .” tweeted Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times.

A better, more nuanced understanding might have eased the surprise over how critical portions of Florida voted — particularly the strong support for President Trump in the area around Miami. One exception was an Atlantic article by Christian Paz, “What Liberals Don’t Understand About Pro-Trump Latinos,” that unpacked the president’s grasp of “their unique worldview, one rooted in deeply held beliefs about individualism, economic opportunity, and traditional social values.”

• • • Trump has been extremely well-served by encouraging hatred of the media. The endless mainstream political coverage and commentary about how his bungling of a deadly pandemic had changed everything and there would be a huge political price to pay? Apparently that missed the mark.

Instead, it came down, mostly, to tribal red-or-blue politics. It came down to a president who is exceedingly good at assigning damaging labels to his political opponents, at misdirection and, yes, at lies. (His opponents are “radical leftists,” for example, or in the case of Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris, “a monster.”) And, of course, Fox News remained the president’s not-so-secret weapon, hammering home his message, serving as his constant guru, muse and megaphone. On Tuesday morning, “Fox & Friends” touted an “exclusive” interview with Trump — free air time, in other words, as he’s been getting on a daily basis.

* * *

And that is one of Trump’s great accomplishments: turning huge swaths of the country against nuanced fact and toward the comforting simplicity of tribe.

Again, this is not over. There may yet be a President Biden and a Vice President Harris. There’s a lot we still don’t know.

But at least one thing is sure. This didn’t go the way we expected it to.

David Graham at The Atlantic takes the analysis a bit farther. The Polling Crisis Is a Catastrophe for American Democracy:

Even with the results of the presidential contest still out, there’s a clear loser in this election: polling.

Surveys badly missed the results, predicting an easy win for former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democratic pickup in the Senate, and gains for the party in the House. Instead, the presidential election is still too close to call, Republicans seem poised to hold the Senate, and the Democratic edge in the House is likely to shrink.

This is a disaster for the polling industry and for media outlets and analysts that package and interpret the polls for public consumption, such as FiveThirtyEight, The New York Times’ Upshot, and The Economist’s election unit, [The Cook Political Report, and Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball]. They now face serious existential questions. But the greatest problem posed by the polling crisis is not in the presidential election, where the snapshots provided by polling are ultimately measured against an actual tally of votes: As the political cliché goes, the only poll that matters is on Election Day. The real catastrophe is that the failure of the polls leaves Americans with no reliable way to understand what we as a people think outside of elections—which in turn threatens our ability to make choices, or to cohere as a nation.

* * *

The 2016 election was a shock to this new regime. Polls and poll analysts expected a Hillary Clinton victory, and instead Donald Trump won. Amid a popular backlash, the poll clique—pollsters and analysts alike—defended their results and blamed the public for not understanding polling or probabilities. They pointed out that the popular vote had closely tracked national polling on Clinton versus Trump, and while state polls were very consequentially wrong, many were not wrong by all that much.

Some observers, including me, more or less bought that defense. Pollsters closely examined their methods and promised to try to fix problems in 2020, though they noted that polls are never perfect. (Again, the only poll that matters … ) FiveThirtyEight, which smugly boasted that it had given Trump a better chance (roughly 30 percent) than most analysts did in 2016, gave him just a 10 percent chance in 2020. The Economist was even more bullish on Biden. Then came the vote. In every swing state but Arizona, Trump outperformed the FiveThirtyEight polling average. This is not to pick on FiveThirtyEight, which went to unusual lengths to ensure that its averages were accurate, but simply to indicate how far off the polls as a whole were.

The coming days and weeks will see careful analysis and less careful recrimination, but no one seems to know yet exactly what went wrong. But the answer almost doesn’t matter, unless you’re a professional pollster, because after two huge presidential flops, pollsters have lost the confidence of the press and public.

Expect two lines of defense. First, many pollsters insist that their polls are snapshots, not predictors (and bridle at people such as Silver, Nate Cohn of the Times, and G. Elliott Morris of The Economist using them to create forecasts). If their snapshots are so far off, though, where were they aiming the lens? Why bother? Second, the analysts will protest that they’re only as good as the polls, but who cares? Whatever the instructions on the bottle, the public uses opinion polls to try to understand what happens. If the polls and their analysts don’t offer the service that customers are seeking, they’re doomed.

Pollsters and analysts are unlikely to get much sympathy, especially today. But the train wreck of their industry has consequences that run deeper than its impact on their own professional lives, or even having set incorrect expectations for the presidential race. Much of American democracy depends on being able to understand what our fellow citizens think. That has become a more challenging task as Americans sort themselves into ideological bubbles—geographically, romantically, professionally, and in the media they consume. Parties are now mostly ideologically homogeneous. We no longer spend much time around people who disagree with us. Public-opinion polling was one of the last ways we had to understand what other Americans actually believe.

If polling doesn’t work, then we are flying blind. That is an especially acute problem at the moment, because the coronavirus pandemic has made the old way the media got at this—shoe-leather reporting, despite its many shortcomings—much harder to pull off. The Trumpist alternative of simply trusting gut feelings isn’t any better. Gut feelings have failed plenty of candidates before; they may still prove to have failed the president this time.

When an election can give a definitive answer to a question, by telling us which candidate or policy Americans prefer, the problems with polling matter less, though they make vote-counting more stressful. But anything that happens outside of the quadrennial and midterm elections is now murky. Earlier this summer, Trump took a hard line against protests for racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd. As I noted at the time, there was a quick and significant drop in the president’s polling, especially among white voters. Trump never recovered that support in polls, but if the polls were off, who knows whether that drop was real, or whether white attitudes about racial justice have really changed?

The inability to rely on polling also undermines a range of generic political choices. Many voters decide which candidate they favor in primary elections based in part on rational calculations about who is most likely to win a general election. Policy makers choose what ideas they support or oppose based on what they think the public supports. If poll data are not reliable, though, the candidates that triumph in primaries are more likely to be the loudest and best-funded, and the policies politicians back might run contrary to the wishes of the voters who elected them.

Without reliable sources of information about public opinion, the press, and by extension, the public, should perhaps employ a measure of humility about what we can and can’t know in politics. As wise as this may be—and even if people manage to act on it—that sort of epistemic humility risks falling prey to the same asymmetrical warfare that has characterized much of the Trump era. At the moment, the leader of the Republican Party is an authoritarian populist who claims to represent the “true” will of the people, despite losing the popular vote twice. The president is unlikely to exercise any such humility in claiming, without evidence, that public opinion is with him. He might be wrong, but without reliable polls, who’s to say otherwise?

David Graham is correct, this has consequences for public policy and social sciences polling. And that has consequences for the data driven social sciences and political science fields. This needs to be addressed.

NB: My wife obsessed over polls during the campaign, spending more than an hour a day getting down into the weeds of the latest polling data to judge its statistical quality, and then coming to tell me what she thought about the latest poll.

My response, which she did not appreciate in the least, was always the same: “Would you please stop wasting your time obsessing about polls, they don’t mean anything.”

I’m still waiting to hear a “you were right.” (It’s going to be awhile).