In Canto 20 of Inferno, Dante confronts a pit where the sinners have had their heads twisted around backwards; they trudge, naked and weeping, through puddles of cooling tears. Virgil informs him that these are the fortunetellers, who tried to look forwards in life and now must look backwards forever.
In a completely unrelated subject, how about those election pollsters, huh?
Writing for The American Prospect, historian Rick Perlstein takes a hard look at characteristic failure modes of election polling and ponders their meaning:
Apart from the pre-election polling chaos we're living through today, Perlstein's main inspiration is W Joseph Campbell 2024 University of California Press book, Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in US Presidential Elections:
In Campbell's telling, US election polling follows a century-old pattern: pollsters discover a new technique that works spookily well..for a while. While the new polling technique works, the pollster is hailed a supernaturally insightful fortune-teller.
In 1932, the Raleigh News and Observer was so impressed with polling by The Literary Digest that they proposed replacing elections with Digest's poll. The Digest's innovation was sending out 20,000,000 postcards advertising subscriptions and asking about presidential preferences. This worked perfectly for three elections – 1924, 1928, and 1932. But in 1936, the Digest blew it, calling the election for Alf Landon over FDR.
The Digest was dethroned, and new soothsayers were appointed: George Gallup, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossler, who replaced the Digest's high-volume polling with a new kind of poll, one that sought out a representative slice of the population (as Perlstein says, this seems "so obvious in retrospect, you wonder how nobody thought of it before").
Representative polling worked so well that, three elections later, the pollsters declared that they could predict the election so well from early on that there was no reason to keep polling voters. They'd just declare the winner after the early polls were in and take the rest of the election off.
That was in 1948 – you know, 1948, the "Dewey Defeats Truman" election?
If this sounds familiar, perhaps you – like Perlstein – are reminded of the 2016 election, where Fivethirtyeight and Nate Silver called the election for Hillary Clinton, and we took them at their word because they'd developed a new, incredibly accurate polling technique that had aced the previous two elections.
Silver's innovation? Aggregating state polls, weighting them by accuracy, and then producing a kind of meta-poll that combined their conclusions.
When Silver's prophecy failed in 2016, he offered the same excuse that Gallup gave in 1948: when voters are truly undecided, you can't predict how they'll vote, because they don't know how they'll vote.
Which, you know, okay, sure, that's right. But if you know that the election can't be called, if you know that undecided voters are feeding noise into the system whenever you poll them, then why report the polls at all? If all the polling fluctuation is undecided voters flopping around, not making up their mind, then the fact that candidate X is up 5 points with undecided means nothing.
As the finance industry disclaimer has it, "past performance is no guarantee of future results." But, as Perlstein says, "past performance is all a pollster has to go on." When Nate Silver weights his model in favor of a given poll, it's based on that poll's historical accuracy, not its future accuracy, because its future accuracy can't be determined until it's in the past. Like Dante's fortune-tellers, pollsters have to look backwards even as they march forwards.
Of course, it doesn't help that in some cases, Silver was just bad at assessing polls for accuracy, like when he put polls from the far-right "shock pollster" Trafalgar Group into the highly reliable bucket. Since 2016, Trafalgar has specialized in releasing garbage polls that announce that MAGA weirdos are way ahead, and because they always say that, they were far more accurate than the Clinton-predicting competition in 2016 when they proclaimed that Trump had it in the bag. For Silver, this warranted an "A-" on reliability, and that is partially to blame for how bad Silver's 2020 predictions were, when Republicans got pasted, but Trafalgar continued to predict a Democratic wipeout. Silver's methodology has a huge flaw: because Trafalgar's prediction history began in 2016, that single data-point made them look pretty darned reliable, even though their method was to just keep saying the same thing, over and over:
Pollsters who get lucky with a temporarily reliable methodology inevitably get cocky and start cutting corners. After all, polling is expensive, so discontinuing the polls once you think you have an answer is a way to increase the enterprise's profitability. But, of course, pollsters can only make money so long as they're somewhat reliable, which leads to a whole subindustry of excuse-making when this cost-cutting bites them in the ass. In 1948, George Gallup blamed his failures on the audience, who failed to grasp the "difference between forecasting an election and picking the winner of a horse race." In 2016, Silver declared that he'd been right because he'd given Trump at 28.6% chance of winning.
This isn't an entirely worthless excuse. If you predict that Clinton's victory is 71.4% in the bag, you are saying that Trump might win. But pollsters want to eat their cake and have it, too: when they're right, they trumpet their predictive accuracy, without any of the caveats they are so insistent upon when they blow it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jDlo7YfUxc
There's always some excuse when it comes to the polls: in 1952, George Gallup called the election a tossup, but it went for Eisenhower in a landslide. He took out a full-page NYT ad, trumpeting that he was right, actually, because he wasn't accounting for undecided voters.
Polling is ultimately a form of empiricism-washing. The pollster may be counting up poll responses, but that doesn't make the prediction any less qualitative. Sure, the pollster counts responses, but who they ask, and what they do with those responses, is purely subjective. They're making guesses (or wishes) about which people are likely to vote, and what it means when someone tells you they're undecided. This is at least as much an ideological project as it is a scientific one:
But for all that polling is ideological, it's a very thin ideology. When it comes to serious political deliberation, questions like "who is likely to vote" and "what does 'undecided' mean" are a lot less important than, "what are the candidates promising to do?" and "what are the candidates likely to do?"
But – as Perlstein writes – the only kind of election journalism that is consistently, adequately funded is poll coverage. As a 1949 critic put it, this isn't the "pulse of democracy," it's "its baby talk."
Today, Tor Books publishes VIGILANT, a new, free LITTLE BROTHER story about creepy surveillance in distance education. It follows SPILL, another new, free LITTLE BROTHER novella about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different order from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information--misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive people of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?
« Here’s a bit of advice to help maintain your sanity over the next few weeks until Election Day: Just ignore the polls. Unless you’re a campaign professional or a gambler, you’re probably looking at them for the same reason the rest of us are: to know who’ll win. Or at least to feel like you know who’ll win. But they just can’t tell you that.
[ … ]
So give yourself a break. Step off the emotional roller coaster. If you want to do something to affect the election, donate money or time in a swing state — ideally to a state party or down-ballot race, where your efforts will go further — or volunteer in a local race. Call anyone in your life who might actually be undecided or might not be registered to vote or might not make it to the polls. »
— Ezra Klein at the New York Times.
Don't obsess with polls – even if we're ahead. Just stop it!
For starters, polling never fully adjusted to the post-landline world. Poilsters now have to endlessly adjust and contort raw data to get the results they think they're supposed to get.
One thing we know for certain is that this election is going to be close. Whether we're 1.3% ahead or 0.5% behind, those results are still within those imperfect polls' margins of error.
For whatever reason, Democrats pay far more attention to polls than Republicans. All that doomscrolling and anxiety is unhealthy and is a distraction from what we should be doing.
Elections are about getting more votes than the opposing candidate. If you are truly worried, then volunteer your time. If you get one additional person to vote Dem, that does a lot more good than mass sharing links about polls. There are many candidates for all levels of government who really need your help.
Volunteer Opportunities, Events, and Petitions Near Me · Mobilize
And if you can donate, this is not a time to be stingy. Candidates for House and Senate can often get neglected in presidential years.
ActBlue – Powering Democratic candidates & progressive causes across the country.
And when in groups of people which may include undecided or soft voters, don't let some MAGA loudmouth get away with spewing bullshit. When you don't challenge bullshit, others are more likely to think it's true.
When somebody claims the Trump economy was great, remind the others that Trump's botched handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 led to an immediate recession, unemployment, and a series of events which resulted in over two years of inflation.
Trump did not leave office until 20 January 2021. But the MAGA people want voters to think his administration ended on 22 January 2020 – the day the first COVID infection appeared on the US.
Except (maybe) for price gougers, almost nobody was better off in October 2020 than they are now. The United States had the highest per capita fatality rate for COVID of the G-7 countries. It's the only way Trump made America first. Drinking bleach and eating cow paste cured nobody.
To actually win, let's concentrate on stuff we can do personally and let pollsters and pundits have food fights among themselves which we should ignore.
Volunteer, donate, and speak out! You'll feel far better. 😎
"Because Selzer was paid for her services, her product shouldn’t fall under the dominion of First Amendment free speech protectionbecause she wasn’t engaging in political free speech as an individual espousing her personal beliefs. She was paid for a product…"
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