What the polls can’t tell us about America’s election
民调无法说明美国大选的真相

There have been 907 polls conducted by 141 pollsters regarding next month’s US presidential election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, according to data from aggregator FiveThirtyEight. They have been conducted online, over email, on the phone and via text message. In total, they have queried the voting intentions of 821,525 American voters, nationally and in 44 states and congressional districts.

This is the data set of our collective disquiet. It has been mapped and charted, interpreted and extrapolated, celebrated and lamented. With days until the election on November 5, it has yielded precisely the same statistical conclusion that we would have drawn with no polls whatsoever: the election is a coin toss.

I was not among those 800,000 and odds are neither were you. Yet I suspect we have both looked upon their tabulated responses with great interest and engaged in the quadrennial pastime of presidential poll-watching and prognostication — a tradition since the advent of scientific polling in 1936, when George Gallup predicted Franklin D Roosevelt’s victory. This year’s data, despite its current lack of thesis, is our modern picture window on the political world. 

There’s a part of me that says we probably should be moving election coverage to the sports page

A particular sort of fixation on polls dominates in an election year — an obsession not with self-knowledge or social science but with prediction. Like a black hole, this fixation bends all rays of political light towards its centre. Despite the fact that polls have shown nothing but deadlock, and that they haven’t been particularly accurate in recent presidential elections, we can’t look away from them.

Pollsters spoke to me about the consumption of their product in 2024 using the language of addiction: a “need” for different, for new, for more. Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, told me about an analysis of hundreds of news stories mentioning his outfit’s work — 80 per cent of them concerned the horse race, while 18 per cent concerned the real issues underlying it. I am guilty of this, of course — both as a consumer and as a producer — and no doubt will be again before Election Day. Horse races are compelling by nature, and our species is nothing if not curious, including and especially about the future. But this speculation is an odd thing, distracting from the stakes of the very thing about which we’re speculating. 

“People want that next little nugget,” says Courtney Kennedy, vice-president of methods and innovation at Pew Research Center. “Any moment there could be a new score, a new touchdown, whatever. It’s the same phenomenon.”

Electoral polls have had a rough run. In 2016, too much emphasis was placed on national-level polls, while state-level polls, crucial to understanding US presidential elections and the electoral college, were a mess. As a result, they were wrong about Trump eight years ago — not to mention Brexit in the UK. In 2020, the story was much the same — pollsters may have got the headline result right, but the systematic underestimation of Trump’s support remained. 

But pollsters have been responding to their misses and to a changed world — more than a third of national pollsters adjusted how they did business after 2020, according to a Pew study. Far fewer now rely on phone calls, for example, more use online and text surveys, and more have turned to probability-based panels, a method of sampling random Americans using addresses from the US Postal Service. And the 2022 midterm polls, for their part, despite the contrarian partisan polls that predicted a “red wave”, were quite accurate. Perhaps this year’s have been too.