Election polling on the wrong side of maybe

The misguided reason why so many people are so quick to dismiss polling

Friends,

Last week I wrote you a newsletter arguing that we should lower our expectations for pre-election polls. That was not an argument that polls are bad per se, but that spot-on election predictions in 2008 and 2012 gave many people a false sense of how accurate surveys can be. In our modern era of medium-turnout, polarized, competitive elections, polls will scarcely give us confidence over who will win an election.

Pollsters face a related problem in media coverage of their estimates — or, in the preferred lingo, “snapshots.” After the 2008 and 2012 elections, journalists reported that forecasters such as Nate Silver “called” 49 and 50 of 50 states correctly, by which they mean that pollsters gave the eventual winner of the contest a lead in the polls, by however much.

But this is not how polls work! And it’s not really what forecasters are doing either. Continuing to cover them in this way plays up the role of some heuristics that damage our collective understanding of what sur…