In a mid-July column, I detailed how internal polls, combined with scarce independent polling, warped perceptions of Graham Platner’s electoral resilience in Maine’s Senate race before he bowed out. I further raised an eyebrow at the flurry of internal polls showing fat leads for Abdul El-Sayed over Representative Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, when other springtime polls depicted a much closer race. Prompted in part by the internal polls, the former Wayne County health department chief and left-wing insurgent was crowned the frontrunner by mainstream media outlets. Several independent polls very late in the campaign echoed El-Sayed’s internals, firming up the media narrative. Two days before Election Day, a rumor shot through the X social media platform that Stevens’ own pollster told the candidate she was down 14 points and had “no path to victory.” The pollster denied it, but the rumor further fed a perception that the cake was baked. Yet my earlier skepticism proved warranted. El-Sayed beat Stevens, but by a single percentage point, not the double digits forecast by the surveys affiliated with his campaign. The colossal miss raises the question of whether El-Sayed’s internal poll flex led to a case of “herding,” the polling phenomenon once described by Nate Silver as “file-drawering (not publishing) results that don’t match the consensus or torturing their turnout models until they do.” Following the surprise Michigan result, The New York Times noted the challenge for pollsters to anticipate the demographic mix of primary election turnout: “Conducting surveys in partisan primaries has long presented a challenge to pollsters, as it requires them to make assumptions about who will actually turn out to vote. Without mandatory party registration in Michigan, pollsters must guess who will show up on Election Day.” Fearful of becoming an embarrassing outlier, “independent” pollsters had an incentive to make like-minded guesses. One pollster who worked for a pro-El-Sayed political action committee, Zenith Research’s Adam Carlson, published a post-mortem in which he acknowledged his turnout model “undershot” demographic groups favorable to Stevens: senior, low-income, and rural voters. One possible explanation Carlson offered is that his company uses “text-to-web” technology to reach out to potential respondents, as opposed to more expensive “live calling,” which may have tilted the respondent pool towards younger votes more partial to El-Sayed. Less noticed over the weekend was Hawaii’s First Congressional District Democratic primary, which pitted moderate incumbent Ed Case… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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