Campaign polling has become about as useful as a 20th century Trimline phone in an age when landline phones have all but disappeared and polling has become notoriously unreliable

One of our most popular headlines on cleveland.com over the past week was for an episode for our Today In Ohio news analysis podcast: “One thing’s clear from Tuesday’s Ohio election: We’ll never trust polling ever again.”

Our post-Election Day episode included a discussion about how wrong the polls were on the Republican primary for the Senate, which Bernie Moreno won in a blowout, getting more votes than his two competitors combined. 

That was a shock to anyone paying attention to polls in the weeks before the election. Most showed a race too close to call.

In our newsroom, we stopped reporting horse race polls as stories in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election. Pollsters back then said Hillary Clinton would win Ohio by 8 points, but it was Trump who won by that margin, which means the pollsters were off by a staggering 16 points.

Polling largely got things right for decades in America, leaving us with few surprises on Election Day. Something changed in 2016. One thought is that people started misleading pollsters intentionally. Another is that with the end of landline telephones, pollsters lost their ability to get good samples. Whatever the reason, pollsters have been failing Ohio. My colleague Laura Johnston looked back this week at some recent misses. In 2020, polls said the presidential election in Ohio was even, but Trump won by 8 points. And in 2022, Ohio polls showed Tim Ryan with a lead over JD Vance in the Senate race. Vance won – by those same 8 points.

All the signs heading into this week’s election were that Moreno and State Sen. Matt Dolan were “neck and neck.” Those were the words we actually used in a Monday story. The three-way race, which had been pretty sleepy for most of the campaign, became nasty as polls showed that Dolan had surged.

Nope. He was destroyed. He received 33 percent of the vote to Moreno’s 50.5. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, the only one of the three candidates to win a statewide election, received a paltry 16.6 percent, but that’s likely because Ohio voters know he was the force behind last year's move to all but kill voters' power to change the Ohio constitution. LaRose had the audacity to look voters in the eye last year and tell them giving up their power to set the rules – and give all power to a gerrymandered legislature – was good for them. Voters rejected him in a landslide.

As for Tuesday, how could the pollsters be so wrong, again? A pattern has developed following elections in which pollsters try to show you how they got it right.

One explanation they offer is that their polls showed a large percentage of undecided voters, and when those voters made up their minds, they swung the numbers. That doesn’t pass the sniff test. Do you really buy that in election after election, undecided voters all suddenly went en masse for one candidate, rather than being divided? And this year had three options, not just two. 

Another explanation pollsters love is that the polls are a snapshot in time, and things can change quickly. Really? So, before 2016, those snapshots in time remained stable until Election Day, but after 2016, the snapshots became remarkably unstable? C’mon. That’s ridiculous.  But, say it were true. Wouldn’t that make the polling entirely pointless? The reason we once reported polls is because they gave us all a close idea of how the election would turn out. If all they amount to are notoriously unreliable snapshots in time, what’s the point of doing them at all?

Beyond the polls being so far off, readers regularly tell me they worry the polls pose a danger. The readers say that if voters believe a specific outcome is set in stone, based on polls, they might decide to skip voting, altering outcomes. 

Erroneous polling can also change political advertising. National Democrats, no doubt seeing the poll results that showed a “neck and neck” race in Ohio, went large on messaging aimed at helping Moreno win. They wanted Moreno to be the candidate challenging Democrat Sherrod Brown, thinking Brown’s best shot would be against Moreno. Did those messages change the voting? If so, then inaccurate polling ultimately would be responsible for changing voting patterns. 

Do you want false information influencing elections?

Like I said, we stopped reporting horse race polls as stories. Reporters in our newsroom, in general stories about the races and campaigns, will summarize recent polls, but always with the caveat that they often are not reliable. 

Maybe we should stop doing even that.

Reporters do like talking to pollsters, as they speak the same language and have the same interests – the campaigns. And pollsters make a nice living trying to gauge sentiment. None of that is reason to report something that, year after year, is proving to be inaccurate.

In the end, there’s only one form of polling matters. That’s the one that comes from the voting booths on Election Day. 

I'm at cquinn@cleveland.com

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