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- Is Political Polling Broken?
Political polling has had a black eye since at least the 2016 presidential election. That’s when national polls had Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump by a significant margin all the way up to Election Day. Democrats started measuring the curtains. Unfortunately, the polls massively underestimated the strength of Trump’s support, and Trump went on to win the Electoral College and the White House. More recently, pollsters have suffered embarrassing failures in high-profile contested primaries. In Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, polls predicted a blowout for Abdul El-Sayed; he won by less than a percentage point. In Wisconsin, polls showed Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong enjoying double-digit leads in the gubernatorial primary; she narrowly lost to David Crowley. Think pieces abounded on what’s gone wrong with political polling. In truth, polls have always been unreliable. Numbers create the illusion of infallibility, but polls are an imperfect gauge of unpredictable behavior. “You’re relying a lot on a human being predicting what they’re going to do and giving an honest answer about what they’re going to do, which is not what humans are great at doing,” says veteran Democratic pollster Stefan Hankin, founder and CEO of Lincoln Park Strategies. I talked to Stefan for this week’s interview, which you can watch above. Our conversation pointed to several factors that help explain why political polling seems especially unreliable as of late: Unreasonable expectations of polling’s accuracy One big problem is that pollsters and the polling industry, along with the political press and aggregators like Five Thirty Eight (now the Silver Bulletin), have overhyped polls’ “accuracy” and predictive value. Accuracy is a mirage, which Stefan acknowledges that pollsters themselves perpetuate. “A lot of times, pollsters will walk into the room and say, ‘Hey, our poll said [the race is] 40 to 46, and that is the word of God,’” he says. Reality is nowhere near that precise. Every poll has a margin of error, which many people downplay or conveniently forget. Take, for instance, a seemingly tight race with a four-point margin of error. If a poll shows Candidate A leading Candidate B with 51 percent of likely voters, the real level of support is between 55 percent and 47 percent (they’re either crushing it or losing significantly). Meanwhile, the opponent who’s “losing” with 49 percent of the vote could in fact be winning comfortably. In other words, the only thing this hypothetical poll is showing is that the race is tight, and… [TheTopNews] Read More.4 days ago - A Reckoning in Springfield
Photographs by Carol GuzyHe kept going over the details.“I run this route every day, like clockwork,” the trucker was saying, heading west to where he had first seen the man on the side of the highway.Now it was a Sunday morning, his day off, and Jack Buhring was driving his mother’s minivan, retracing the route, trying to make sense of what had happened less than a week before. His girlfriend, Renee Claytor, was in the passenger seat, studying him, then looking out the window. His mother, Diana Buhring, was in the back. “It wasn’t your fault,” she kept saying, and “Jack, do you think you’re still in shock?” But her son was not really listening.“Mondays—that’s usually my long day,” he continued. Up at 1:30 a.m., shower, coffee, and by 2 a.m. he’d be pulling out of the mobile-home park in Chillicothe, the southern-Ohio town where he had grown up, gotten his first job hauling garbage, his second job driving cross-country, and the one he had now, hauling powdered concrete hardener in a Kenworth T800. Fairborn to Westerville, Westerville to Fairborn, repeat. Two loops, paid per load, no health insurance, and a recliner where he fell asleep most evenings. Those were the basics of Jack Buhring’s 41-year-old life, and just after eight that Monday morning, August 31, he had reached his favorite part of the route, a westbound stretch of highway running through miles of cornfields and wildflowers near Springfield, a small city that he passed each day, and whose recent troubles had barely registered as a series of memes and headlines that he’d mostly tried to avoid.“We’re getting closer,” he said now, passing the fields. “We’re coming up on it.”He’d been in the right lane, he said, when he’d noticed a car rolling to a stop on the right shoulder. As he flipped on his left turn signal to move out of the way, he’d seen a man getting out of the car, who was then walking toward his trunk, who was then continuing on against traffic, then running—then diving out in front of him.[Read: The northern passage]“Right here,” Jack said as he drove over black tire marks curving left across all three lanes. “See, I locked it down right here. You can see where I swerved. See? I started to signal and—it just happened so fast.”Renee and Diana glanced back at the marks. Jack continued: An SUV and another… [TheTopNews] Read More.4 days ago - 0% intro APR until 2024 is 100% insane
[TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago - CNN Political BriefingThe political news you need to know, in 10 minutes or less. Hosted by David Chalian. [TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago
- The Axe Files with David AxelrodGo beyond the soundbites and get to know some of the most interesting players in politics. [TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago
- Margins of ErrorLook closely at almost anything and you'll find data—lots of it. But what are those numbers really saying about who we are and what we believe? Harry Enten is on a mission to find out. [TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago
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