The New Yorker:

The question is not whether we should trust the polls. It’s whether the onslaught of analysis that invariably follows them actually holds any predictive or explanatory power.

By Jay Caspian Kang

Twenty years ago, on September 27, 2004, the front section of the New York Times included a story about John Kerry, then the Democratic nominee for President, and a Chinese assault rifle. During an interview with Outdoor Life, Kerry had suggested that he owned one, but the Times was reporting that Kerry, in fact, did not. Elsewhere in the paper that day, there was a preview of the upcoming debate between Kerry and George W. Bush and a brief check-in with Howard Dean, who, a few months before, had screeched at the end of a speech in Iowa and squandered his early polling lead in the primaries. There were also seven letters to the editor about a Stanley Fish op-ed titled “The Candidates, Seen from the Classroom.” Fish had polled his freshman writing class at the University of Illinois Chicago about who had won an earlier debate between Bush and Kerry. An overwhelming majority—13–2—believed Bush had been the more effective communicator. Fish provided their “devastating” analysis, which included assessments on who had used topic sentences to begin their answers, and his own aside about how Bush, at a pivotal moment in the debate, had listed off countries that contain the letter “A.” “He and his speechwriters deserve credit for using the accident of euphony to give the argument cohesiveness and force,” Fish wrote.

There were no stories about the polls. In contrast, on September 23, 2024, the day I am typing this column, the Times has stories on the polls in Sunbelt states, a “State of the Race” about Harris’s small debate bounce, and another story titled “What’s Behind Trump’s Best Poll Results in Weeks.” I have long been quite critical about the amount of space the polls take up in our political discourse. The reasons are pretty simple: although polls certainly have a place in assessing the state of the election, they’ve inspired a type of sophistry in which the pundit or the politician flashes the results of some fallible poll and treats it as irrefutable proof of the will of the electorate. The result is a tower of bad takes, built upon a foundation of solid polls and good pollsters. The question is not whether we should “trust the polls.” It’s whether the onslaught of analysis and extrapolation that invariably follows them actually holds any predictive or explanatory power.

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