Politics

The problems with polling are real. Trust me, I’m a pollster.

Published

2 years ago

November 11, 2024

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.

Politics

Senate Republicans are getting smoked in fundraising

Published

1 hour ago

October 16, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Republican Senate candidates are hurting for cash.

Nearly every Democratic candidate in battleground Senate races outraised their GOP opponent from July through September. And in some cases, the disparities were stark.

In Texas, Democrat James Talarico trounced Republican Ken Paxton $60.2 million to $10.2 million in their main campaign accounts.
In Georgia, Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff raised $33.1 million to Rep. Mike Collins’ nearly $2.8 million.
In North Carolina, Democrat Roy Cooper raised $12.2 million to Michael Whatley’s $2.1 million.
In Michigan, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed hauled in roughly $33 million to former Rep. Mike Rogers’ nearly $10 million.
In Maine, Democrat Troy Jackson raised $20.5 million to GOP Sen. Susan Collins’ $5.2 million.
In Ohio, Democratic former Sen. Sherrod Brown hauled in $23.1 million to GOP Sen. Jon Husted’s $4.8 million.
In Iowa, Josh Turek raised $13.9 million to Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson’s nearly $3.3 million.
In Alaska, Democratic former Rep. Mary Peltola raked in $17 million to GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan’s nearly $2.7 million.
In New Hampshire, Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas brought in $8.1 million to Republican former Sen. John E. Sununu’s $1.5 million.
And in Kansas, Democrat Adam Hamilton raised nearly $9.9 million to GOP Sen. Roger Marshall’s just $866,000.

Across those 10 Senate races, the Democratic campaigns raised more than five times as much as the Republican ones. Put another way: Talarico alone raised more than all those Republicans combined.

Marshall and Whatley each started October with less than $1 million left in the bank. Mike Collins wasn’t much better-positioned, entering the final weeks of the election with just over $1 million cash on hand.

These numbers do not include joint fundraising committees, which allow candidates to raise money and may have some more cash that has not yet been transferred to the campaigns.

Democrats have consistently outraised Republicans on the candidate level this cycle. But the yawning gaps heading into the midterm’s home stretch stand as the latest example of the deteriorating environment for the GOP.

And while GOP outside groups have significantly more money than Democrats, this candidate cash advantage matters because candidates get TV ads for much cheaper rates, letting their dollars stretch much farther.

To underscore how lopsided some of these figures are: At least half a dozen House Democratic challengers raised over $3 million in the third quarter — a sum higher than several GOP Senate incumbents.

There are some silver linings for the GOP.

In Minnesota, Republican Michele Tafoya raised $4.9 million to Democratic Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan’s $4.3 million. Tafoya started the month with $2.1 million to Flanagan’s $1.5 million.

Sullivan, Husted, Hinson, Rogers and Susan Collins all entered October with millions more in cash on hand than their Democratic opponents.

And Republicans are getting air cover from GOP super PACs bankrolled by billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump’s MAGA Inc. that have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the midterms in recent weeks.

Musk was revealed on Thursday as the primary funder of Texas PAC, which has spent $131 million so far boosting Paxton and attacking Talarico. Musk gave $158 million to Senate Republicans’ super PAC arm last quarter, the filings showed, with the group in turn transferring the funds to the pro-Paxton PAC.

Republicans are also benefitting from a recent Supreme Court ruling that allows party committees to spend unlimited sums in coordination with candidates, allowing the National Republican Senatorial Committee to offset at least some of the differences.

Since the tranche of reports filed Thursday only cover until Sept. 30, the full scope of each candidates’ coffers is unknown.

But there are other signs that some are strapped for cash in the final sprint: Whatley has gone dark on television, a clear indication of him running low on funds even as his campaign insists it’s a temporary pause.

Politics

Inside the democratic socialists’ plan to shake up Congress

Published

2 hours ago

October 16, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Inside the democratic socialists’ plan to shake up Congress

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Politics

Trump lashes out at Republicans as Ken Paxton struggles in Texas

Published

8 hours ago

October 15, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

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.