Today is November 7th, and the polls have closed across the Eastern time zone in our nation. Before the results from today’s races are in and show a terrible polling mistake, let me write with trembling hands: there is no conspiracy to falsify the polls. The polls are not rigged. Polling is a difficult job, but not a crooked enterprise. Within the caveats inherent to polling, you can trust election polls.
Problems with Polls
The first, and biggest reporting with polling, is not with polls per se, but with the reporting of polling by news people and the understanding of polling by the public at large. Crudely put, people put too much faith in polling, only to be disappointed when polls don’t prove as predictive as they expected. So, when you see in the news that ‘Clinton is ahead of Trump by 5 points’, that’s an estimate with a lot of caveats.
Polls can go wrong in many ways. First, the pollsters simply may not capture the population accurately—problems with their survey methods may lead to that kind of mistake. Invisible social changes—invisible to the pollsters, that is—may cause their methods to become obsolete. (The cell phone revolution immediately springs to mind). Pollsters adjust to social changes, but the adjustments take time, and tend to occur after-the-fact.
A second problem, and perhaps the most pervasive, is predicting voter intensity and how it translates to voter turnout. When people tell pollsters they intend to vote for candidate HERSELF, or for candidate BLOWHARD, they only tell of an intention to do so, not of how likely they are to follow through. Pollsters estimate that likelihood, but often fail in the attempt. This is another source of error—probably the largest source of error in the last presidential election.
And sometimes, of course, people lie about their intentions.
A Polling Conspiracy is Impossible
Polling errors are likely, and misunderstanding of polling by journalists and the public are a matter or record—but a polling conspiracy is impossible. For one thing, polling is a competitive enterprise, and pollsters care about their reputation. A pollster that became part of a conspiracy would open himself to charges of incompetence by a pollster who captured the electoral mood accurately. More subtly, but perhaps more importantly, polling is an open industry. Anyone can conduct polling. Polling is expensive, but there are no institutional gatekeepers keeping outsiders out or blacklisting pollsters who don’t toe the party line. There can be no party line when Tom Steyer or the Koch brothers can pay for polls out of their own pocket.
Conservatives should not worry about a polling conspiracy in our country; none exists, none is likely to exist, and if one were to exist it could be broken by money. All of the things to worry about, a polling conspiracy doesn’t rank.
