| In a political culture swamped by the forces of unreason, it’s an understandable reflex to assume that all the raging chaos and belligerence might be reduced to a few simple mathematical formulas. Hence the cult of the know-it-all pollster—particularly since Nate Silver’s storied rise to geek celebrity after the 2008 presidential cycle, our pundit class, news professionals, and campaign consultants have all lavished attention on the mystic arts of political forecasting. And for liberals especially, the polls of the 2020 campaign’s homestretch seemed to bear a positively millennial quotient of reassuring news: Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was coasting to a sure victory on a solid 7 to 10 percent national margin and comfortable leads in traditional battleground states. Maybe even Texas—the sprawling red-state colossus that organizers and activists prayerfully seek to nudge into blue territory every presidential cycle—might finally land in the Biden column. |
| Well, so much for the know-it-alls. The entire national polling complex managed yet another face-plant in 2020, even after assuring skeptically minded clients that it had corrected for all the grievous errors it committed back in 2016, when it confidently forecast a strong showing for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats—and grossly undercounted Republican voters and disaffected non-college-educated Trump supporters. As New Republic staff writer Alex Shephard noted at a moment when the outcome of the 2020 presidential balloting was still up for grabs, one clear outcome of the race was that the polling industry had once more disgraced itself. And the fallout from this failure will infect our politics for a very long time: Even without the full picture, the verdict has been damning. “The political polling profession is done,” leading Republican pollster Frank Luntz said on election night. “It is devastating for my industry.” The writers of Politico Playbook declared that “the polling industry is a wreck, and should be blown up.” The Atlantic’s David Graham concluded that it was “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.” From national polls down to the district level, the polls were just off. And as a result, the entire narrative of the election was off, too. In 2020, the polls told a simple, coherent narrative about the president. Already deeply unpopular, he was now presiding over a botched response to a global pandemic. Voters were disgusted by his cavalier response and general noxiousness. Democratic gains in the suburbs would translate to an electoral landslide that would propel Biden to the presidency and expand Democratic congressional power. Biden may very well end up in an electoral position that some models predicted—between 290 and 310 electoral votes. But that discounts the fact that he is winning many battleground states by significantly lower margins than polls suggested—which means that what we know about Trump’s appeal, about the Democrats’ relationship to voters, and about the way voters feel about the most pressing issues of the day, all has to be reassessed. Indeed, for Democratic leaders in particular, the polling catastrophe has translated into lost political opportunity on a mammoth scale—because the polling narrative had Biden and the Democrats coasting to victory for months on end, with Trump a nugatory, whinging, and tweeting presence on the margins of the real action, Shephard writes. Democrats were thus lulled into a fable of ascendant power that had virtually nothing to do with actually existing conditions on the ground: “It’s quite possible this framing doomed congressional Democrats,” Shephard notes, “with voters opting for a check on the front-runner’s power, as they did with Hillary Clinton in 2016.” The media, as well, needs to go back to the drawing board when it comes to envisioning the electorate and its inchoate ideologies, behaviors, and attitudes, Shephard argues. As matters stand, “it’s barely even possible to imagine a mainstream news environment without a heavy emphasis on polling,” he writes—but the only path forward is to start creating just such a media culture, freed of the dictates of a data-industrial complex that seems utterly incapable of producing news anyone can use. —Chris Lehmann, editor |
