Politics
The problems with polling are real. Trust me, I’m a pollster.
Anxiety about the 2024 election is high. Both sides know that their candidate might lose — and they want polls to tell them just how scared to be.
Right now, polls give us the clearest answers to those questions. But there’s a problem: Every year, polling gets tougher. We pollsters face three core challenges that threaten the accuracy of all political surveys. Nobody has solved them, and it’s not clear anyone can.
Here’s what we’re up against:
Challenge #1: Almost nobody wants to talk to pollsters — and those who do might be weirdos.
Polling is built on a simple idea: If we talk to a representative, miniature version of a state or country, we can estimate what the whole state or country thinks. It’s like getting a sample at an ice cream shop: one well-mixed spoonful tells you what a whole cone will taste like.
Nonresponse makes good data rare and expensive.
But it’s getting tougher to reach the people needed to build that mini-country or mini-state. Response rates — how often people are willing to pick up a cold call or answer a text from us — have been dropping for decades. The response rates for Pew Research Center’s telephone surveys plunged from 36% in 1997 to 6% in 2018. Nate Cohn of The New York Times reported a 0.4% response rate to his polls in 2022. And any pollster will tell you response rates are low this year as well.
Nonresponse makes good data rare and expensive. Polls are costly, in part, because we spend so much money sending out unanswered texts or making calls that get sent straight to voicemail. And as polls get more expensive, media organizations will either sponsor fewer surveys or opt for polls that reduce costs by cutting corners.
But even when a group can afford to field a poll, nonresponse creates huge potential data problems.
When only 1 out of 100 people take a poll, pollsters have to make statistical adjustments. Some — such as getting the right demographic mix — are easy. If a pollster just can’t reach enough Latino, working class, young or rural voters, they often give the underrepresented voters they did contact a little more weight in their calculations. Weighted polls give each demographic a more accurate amount of say, even though some groups were harder to contact.
Other adjustments are not so easy.
Suppose a pollster has the right demographic mix in their poll but mostly happens to interview, for lack of a better description, nerdy rule-followers. This pollster might miss cranky, anti-establishment Trump voters — and risk undercounting the Trump vote for the third election straight.
It’s almost impossible to directly adjust for this type of issue. The census helps us calculate how many 18- to 34-year-olds should be in a poll, but not how many cranks and nerds. So pollsters have to get creative with math — which leads to another issue.
Challenge #2: We have to model our way around the fact that nobody talks to us. That’s risky.
The most common response to this problem — a shortage of pro-Trump, anti-institution Republicans in the 2020 polls — is weighting by “recalled vote.” Essentially, pollsters ask people how they voted in 2020 and try to get the right number of Trump and Biden voters in their sample.
Everyone is using math to adjust for the sad fact that normal people don’t take surveys.
Though I’ve used this tactic in some polls, there are downsides. Respondents don’t always correctly recall whom they voted for. Every estimate of how many Trump or Biden voters will vote again in 2024 is just that — an estimate. The list goes on.
That being said, many reputable pollsters say that weighting by recalled vote improved the accuracy of past surveys. And pollsters that only weight by party — and not recalled vote — might fail to fully address problems that damaged the industry’s credibility four years ago.
There’s no right answer. Everyone is using math to adjust for the sad fact that normal people don’t take surveys. And every pollster is on edge because, if we make the smallest mistake, we’ll be punished for years.
Challenge #3: Elections are closer than ever, so “the polls” will almost certainly be “wrong.”
The last true blowout presidential win was Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election. The last 40 years have seen the most consistently competitive presidential races in living memory. That’s bad news for polls — which are blunt instruments rather than precision predictors.
When a pollster randomly samples the electorate, they can — through no fault of their own — accidentally pick up a few too many voters from one side or the other. When we try to poll an upcoming election, we’re making (fallible) projections about who will and won’t turn out. And there’s plenty more uncertainty — from nonresponse, decisions around weighting and more — that’s just not easy to communicate to the lay reader.
In a race this tight, in which survey after survey has Harris and Trump dead even in the swing states, a good pollster could do everything right, yet still miss the result by a point or two and face years of ridicule from a huge audience of readers.
But we pollsters can’t look at these problems, yell “it’s not fair!” and go home. I’ve built election forecast models, and I’ve seen firsthand that polls are the best tool for predicting elections. More importantly, they’re the only way to ask members of the public what they think on any question, in real time.
The problems with polling are real. Maybe at some point, nonresponse or some other issue will become unsolvable and cause a catastrophic, industrywide collapse. But unless that happens, we’ll need to keep polling, because nothing else quite does what polls do.
David Byler
David Byler is chief of research at Noble Predictive Insights, a non-partisan polling firm anchored in the Southwest. He was previously a data columnist for the Washington Post.
Around a hundred Samurai Blue superfans crowded the Old Ambassador’s Residence at the Japanese embassy in Washington, on Sunday for a watch party marking its World Cup opener against the Netherlands.
The supporters — a motley group including erstwhile English teachers in Japan, state department workers and embassy staffers — lounged around a projector set in the building’s front room, plates piled high with nigiri. Drinking Kirin Ichiban lager and Asahi Super Dry, they winced when the Dutch team had the ball in the opposing third and burst into cheers and sang “Vamos Nippon” when Daichi Kamada’s header tied the game in the 89th minute.
“The World Cup itself is a competition,” said Masatsugu Odaira, the embassy’s minister of public affairs, at the watch party. “But from the perspective of policy and diplomacy, it’s a very good chance to connect people across borders.”
At the event, Blue Light News spoke to soccer fans who are already excited about Japan’s growing diplomatic footprint and soft power projection. And they hope the World Cup will buoy that cultural momentum, stimulating tourism — one of the nation’s most lucrative sectors — and drawing eyes to Japan.
The World Cup is “just a visceral way to connect people who have not yet had the opportunity to travel to Japan to be swept up in the enthusiasm of an international competition,” said Andrew Wylegala, president of the National Association of Japan-America Societies.
Japan is already “at the top of its game” in terms of soft power projection, Wylegala added — and “soccer now fits in with that.”
Embassy staff wore pink shirts with the American and Japanese flags on the back. “Together We Bloom,” they read.
The end result, a 2-2 draw against the Dutch, the world’s eighth ranked international side, only added to their enthusiasm.
The women’s team has a far more prolific record. Fans still hark back to their 2011 World Cup final victory over the U.S., months after a massive earthquake and tsunami slammed the country.
But the men’s team has won just seven World Cup games in its history. Japan’s best-ever finish: The round of 16, where they’ve fallen four separate times.
But there’s hope that, this year, the underdogs could pull off an upset. From Ajax’s Takehiro Tomiyasu to Kamada, a Crystal Palace midfielder, the Samurai Blue have more than enough talent to compete with the sport’s upper crust.
Odaira’s hope for this year? “Oh, becoming a champion,” he said.
No European country has infuriated Donald Trump more than Spain. Now it’s desperate to win his World Cup.
Teenage superstar Lamine Yamal, Rodri and co. enter the tournament as joint favorites alongside France. With the U.S. president apparently intent on making this a World Cup that projects his personal influence and America’s soft power, victory would be sweet for Spanish soccer fans — but especially so for their prime minister.
Outspoken socialist leader Pedro Sánchez, a supporter of Atlético Madrid, has clashed spectacularly with Trump over the Iran war, but also regarding NATO spending and Israel’s assault in Gaza. Meanwhile their policies on issues from energy to immigration could hardly be further apart.
Read the full story about the failing Washington-Madrid relationship here.
LOS ANGELES — In many World Cup host cities, competing teams also find themselves jostling for soft-power supremacy around their matches. But before its first match tomorrow in Los Angeles, New Zealand has had the diplomatic landscape all to itself.
New Zealand is scheduled to face Iran, which has not had formal diplomatic relations with the United States since 1980. Even as President Donald Trump claims an end to the countries’ monthslong war is at hand, Iran will be competing in the World Cup under severe travel restrictions. The team has been forced from its original Tucson training camp to Tijuana, and is being forced to effectively commute to its matches in the U.S. without a full government delegation.
That has left New Zealand alone in pressing its off-field agenda in Los Angeles. On Sunday evening, New Zealand consul-general Katja Ackerley opened her Brentwood mansion to a “New Zealand on the World Stage” networking reception sponsored by the government agencies overseeing the country’s trade, sport and foreign-investment portfolios.
“It’s all about soft power, it’s all about person-to-person,” said Peter Miskimmin, the government’s head of sports diplomacy. “We are building relations through sport rather than bringing up arms against one another.”
The country’s Los Angeles diplomatic outpost typically focuses on promoting exports of wine and lamb, expediting visas for Hollywood personnel traveling for location shoots and addressing the perpetual crisis of “Kiwis losing their passports in Las Vegas,” as one previous inhabitant of the office put it.
A delegation of New Zealand officials was preparing for their first World Cup appearance since 2010 uncertain whether any of their opposite numbers from Iran would attend, and how that might affect the standard match-day pageantry.
“This is our first World Cup in 16 years so we can’t tell what’s different,” said James Wear, a general manager of the New Zealand Football Association. “We don’t have anything to compare.”
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