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.
President Donald Trump is blaming fellow Republicans as his endorsed candidate, Ken Paxton, appears to be in a fierce struggle for a Senate seat in Texas with Democratic challenger James Talarico in a state the GOP has long taken for granted.
Trump, in a lengthy post to Truth Social Thursday, singled out longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove and Sen. John Cornyn, the incumbent who failed to secure the president’s endorsement in a heated primary.
Rove and Cornyn, Trump said, are doing “everything possible” to make it harder for Paxton to defeat Talarico, a state lawmaker and Presbyterian seminarian who is making a suprisingly strong run for Senate in deep red Texas.
“They are hurting Texas and, more importantly, hurting the United States of America!” Trump wrote. “If Ken Paxton loses, it will be because of WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Political Hacks like John Cornyn and Karl Rove, who have ineffectively opposed me for my entire political career.”
Cornyn, a longtime fixture in Texas politics, lost his bid for reelection in a contentious Republican primary in which he and his supporters portrayed Paxton as a deeply flawed candidate. As Election Day approaches, public polling over the past two months has shown Talarico with a narrow edge against Paxton, the state’s attorney general.
Trump urged his supporters to back Paxton.
“Your favorite President (ME!) is asking all of those who supported Senator John Cornyn to UNITE, and immediately switch your support to Ken Paxton,” Trump said. “He will be a Great Senator, just like he is a Great Attorney General. “
The race has also become one of the most expensive non-presidential battles. Talarico raised $64 million this summer — the largest third-quarter haul of any Senate candidate in history. He has raised more than $134 million since launching his campaign last year.
Paxton raised $18 million in the third quarter of 2026 and last month announced a new $20 million ad buy. Earlier this month, though, a Trump operative told POLITICO that MAGA Inc. and its affiliates are could spend nearly $45 million on direct mail, TV and digital advertising in Texas through Oct. 12.
Already, $235 million has been spent by outside conservative groups and party committees against Talarico as national Republicans scramble to boost Paxton.
Some Republicans have grown concerned that the cost of the Texas race is diverting money needed in other states and have expressed frustrations with Paxton after leaked audio showed him blaming Trump for his woes.
Trump easily won Texas in 2024, winning just over 56% of the vote. But concerns about Republicans’ chances this November have surged as the president’s approval rating plummets.
Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels said he thinks Vice President JD Vance and other Republicans are wrong to move away from the party’s traditional embrace of free-market economics — and that their shift could create an opening for a “pro-freedom” movement.
“I think they are in error,” Daniels said in an interview when asked about Vance’s criticism of economist Milton Friedman, who championed free-market capitalism.
“I think what Vance is saying is that there are aspects to the free market which can be disruptive of culture and tradition. I mean, that’s what the free market does. It’s dynamic,” he told Blue Light News. “It’s the only mechanism, in my view, for preserving the American dream, and that’s the most important element of our culture.”
The vice president’s intra-party critics have argued that Vance has been moving away from free-market economics and toward a larger role for the government in shaping the economy in his defense of the Trump administration’s economic policies, especially its wide-ranging tariffs.
“What the president is doing is changing 40 years of a failed bipartisan consensus in Washington, D.C., that has sold out American workers and destroyed the underlying economic strength of the United States of America,” Vance said in a Fox News interview last year.
The move is seen by some as Vance testing a more populist and protectionist message as he eyes the Republican presidential nomination in 2028.
But the two men were at one point closer politically. In Vance’s bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance described Daniels as his “political hero.” Daniels has said that Vance sought his counsel on running for office in 2018 and Daniels advised against it because it was likely to be a bad year for Republicans.
The vice president’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Daniels’ remarks.
Daniels recently released his new book, “Impatience Is a Virtue.” In it, the veteran of Indiana politics — who also led the Office of Management and Budget under President George W. Bush — detailed his career championing the free market.
Daniels told Blue Light News that President Donald Trump was both a “symptom” and “a propellant” of voters’ discontent, pointing to their “feeling of being patronized, condescended, looked down on, ignored, disrespected.” And Trump’s political success came from his ability to unite and represent these discontented voters.
Still, Daniels argued the evolution of the Republican Party under Trump has created room for a “pro-freedom party” that champions economic freedom and individual autonomy.
“Whether that is the next iteration of this Republican Party or you find some other vehicle, I don’t know,” he said. “But I think that there’s a need, and as I say, there’s certainly, I think, a market for that viewpoint waiting to be expressed by somebody.”
The former governor, now back at Purdue University as the interim president after leading the school for a decade until 2022, sidestepped a question about his party identification and another one on whether he sees Vance emerging as the “pro-freedom” candidate.
“It’s all TBD; I don’t know,” he said of Vance.
Daniels also defended his view on another 2028 hopeful, Democrat Pete Buttigieg, who was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, during the tail end of Daniels’ governorship.
In his book, Daniels said Buttigieg is smart, but his principal asset that excites Democratic activists is his sexual identity.
Buttigieg became the first openly gay person confirmed to be a Cabinet secretary when he was tapped to lead then-President Joe Biden’s Transportation Department. A spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“This differentiates him in a way that would be appealing to large portions of the core Democratic electorate,” he said. “Absent that, he would be a less likely national figure.”
TALLAHASSEE, Florida — Two women this week sued former GOP Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and two others — including a former state legislator — in federal court and accused the men of engaging in an alleged sex trafficking scheme during a time when Gaetz was still in Congress.
The lawsuit, which seeks damages from Gaetz and other defendants, was filed in Orlando by two women who were in their early 20s when they first met Gaetz. The women are not named in the lawsuit. The details mirror allegations that were at the center of a House Ethics Committee probe that found Gaetz had sex with a minor, solicited prostitutes and used illegal drugs.
“The defendants collectively used their public office, power, and wealth to prey on the economic vulnerability of the plaintiffs to commit the acts outlined below,” states the 38-page lawsuit.
That House probe helped derail Gaetz’s bid to become attorney general under President Donald Trump. He resigned from his Northwest Florida congressional seat to seek the post but decided to withdraw his name ahead of a potentially messy confirmation battle in the Senate.
Gaetz, who has repeatedly denied he ever had sex with a minor, said he would vigorously contest the allegations in the lawsuit.
“I look forward to taking the plaintiffs’ depositions because much of the conduct alleged against me is false,” Gaetz said in a text message. “The lawsuit relies almost exclusively on a Congressional committee report that didn’t allow me to confront my accusers. Now I will finally have that chance.”
The civil suit is the latest development in the long-running scandal involving Gaetz, a former ally of Trump who has continuously denied any involvement in underage sex or trafficking of women after news broke in 2021 that the Justice Department was investigating him.
The lawsuit this week by Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2 was first reported by the Miami Herald. It alleges that Gaetz and former Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg “coordinated the recruitment, payments, drugs and travel to obtain commercial sex acts from young women.” The lawsuit includes former Florida legislator and lobbyist Chris Dorworth because his Central Florida home was the site of a party where he allegedly “participated in the activities alleged there.”
Greenberg is serving an 11-year federal sentence after he pleaded guilty to multiple federal offenses including underage sex trafficking of a minor and wire fraud. Greenberg cooperated with federal investigators who were probing Gaetz but the U.S. Department of Justice closed the investigation without filing charges.
The lawsuit says it “arises from the recruitment and sexual exploitation” that occurred from 2017 through January 2019 and included trips to various locations such as Las Vegas, New York City and the Bahamas. It accuses Gaetz and Greenberg of making promises to help the two women financially or with college bills.
“They led her to believe they would resolve her financial needs as long as she continued to perform sexual acts for them and their associates,” the lawsuit states about Jane Doe 1. “They used the age, wealth and political power gap between themselves and Jane Doe 1 to keep her compliant and silent.”
Jane Doe 2, the lawsuit states, was “paid less” than promised and “through this pattern defendants caused Jane Doe 2 to believe she would lose her education and serious financial harm if she stopped performing sexual acts.”
Stencer Kuvin, a West Palm Beach attorney representing the two women, said in an email that federal law designed to protect sex trafficking victims has a 10-year statute of limitations “which potentially could run [out] next year based upon the allegations in the complaint.”
Gaetz, a firebrand and ally of Trump, was once seen as a potential candidate for Florida governor or attorney general. Since he left Congress, he has hosted his own show on the One America News Network and he was appointed to the board of a nonprofit charged with distributing proceeds from a settlement Florida received after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill along the Gulf Coast.
-
Politics2 years agoFormer ‘Squad’ members launching ‘Bowman and Bush’ YouTube show
-
Uncategorized2 years ago
Bob Good to step down as Freedom Caucus chair this week
-
The Josh Fourrier Show2 years agoDOOMSDAY: Trump won, now what?
-
The Dictatorship2 years agoPete Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon goes from bad to worse
-
Politics2 years agoFormer Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron launches Senate bid
-
The Dictatorship2 years agoLuigi Mangione acknowledges public support in first official statement since arrest
-
Politics2 years agoBlue Light News’s Editorial Director Ryan Hutchins speaks at Blue Light News’s 2025 Governors Summit
-
The Dictatorship1 year agoMike Johnson sums up the GOP’s arrogant position on military occupation with two words