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Sometimes you have to marvel at the lack of understanding by people like JPod. Rush Limbaugh has been saying for years the polls are meant to shape public opinion not reflect it. And finally…. finally it dawns on JPod that maybe the polls were meant to dispirit Republicans. Talk about being in a bubble.
I am very satisfied that republicans were competitive in the new ballot harvesting era. Was very afraid the democrats would have a party worker make sure that every registered democrat voted and they would overwhelm the republican vote. Even if Trump loses because of discovered and manufactured votes, we are going to be able to compete going forward.
And the problems the country faces the next 4 years in terms of deficit spending that has to be reigned in and a pandemic imploded economy – well, if the democrats want those problems so bad – let them have them. This way, their policy ideas of UBI, high taxes on productive high earners and lenient policing, will fail and be discredited for a generation.
John Podhoretz: In the past four years we have seen reporters, civil servants, politicians, scientists, jurists and business people incinerate their credibility with their deranged efforts to bring down Trump. Why should we be surprised that pollsters would do the same? Sal
All,
Perhaps we should invoke Hanlon’s Razor with regard to polling, “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Interestingly in 2016, the polls had the gross count reasonably correct but missed the possibility of Trump squeaking out an Electoral College victory. The pre-election polls suggested an 8% difference in gross votes between Biden and Trump. It looks like it will be closer to 2%.
It should be remembered that the margins of error in polls are based on sample size statistics. The quoted margin of error does not include possible systemic errors.
Frank
I find myself mystified by the lack of understanding evinced by Podhoretz and crew. Robert Cahaly explained all this, in detail, on several podcasts. He is ignored and dismissed (even by Richard Lowry, who interviewed him!). He has been utterly vindicated. So instead of trying to figure out why you were wrong to listen to the mainstream pollsters, how about you find one of those podcasts, listen to what he has to say, and learn why he was correct.
The polling companies purposely want some of the polls to be wrong and to favor Democrats.
As Robert Cahaly said, you cannot account for everything. Democrats would win or win big, if the young anti-Trump demographics turned out big in certain areas. Some pollsters can claim that this was their model for the election demographics.
You discussed the drag of progressive issues on democrats . I think commentators should include in this discussion the failure of Proposition 16 in California. This was yet another rejection by voters of affirmative action as public policy. Progressive sacred cows do not do well when put in front of voters. Perhaps there is a lesson here.
Flag this podcast and bring it out about three years from now, when the next primary season really gets in gear and JPod and the others are speculating on the GOP’s lack of hope against Kamala in ’24 based on the polling results, from the exact same pollsters who just mucked up the 2020 election projections.
points to great opportunity of work class white republicans to expand their coalition to include independent working class people of other ethnic groups. People who do not want welfare, want criminals prosecuted and are rightly suspicious of government regulation.
This is a dangerous rule, if you’re actually dealing with malicious people.
Quite frankly, if I wasn’t a First Amendment absolutist I would be all for banning the practice entirely.
Something went terribly wrong with Frank Gallup’s infernal invention and what it did to journalism. It pushed journalism from what actually happened to being the predictor of what will happen.
I think part of the problem is polling that is based on sugar daddy media outlets paying for a specific poll. Gallup used to throw it’s polling out there for any news organization to use, but we’ve now devolved into specific media outlets pairing up with specific polling firms, to where as those media outlets have gone more and more into advocacy journalism, the question becomes whether or not the polls are weighted in certain ways to produce the results their sponsoring outlets want to hear, and therefore will make no effort to drop those polling firms and find new ones when their results are horribly off the action voting numbers.
Gallup got out of doing head-t0-head polling because they valued their reputation, even though they still do other politically connected polls, such as voter satisfaction. But if a polling outlet knows their sponsoring organizations are going to keep hiring them not because they produce polls that are right, but because they produce wrong polling that fits the desired confirmation biases, then there’s no penalty for being wrong. That also means there’s no penalty for doing any better in 2022 or ’24, and their media sponsors will likely just hope voters forget which polling firms were worst offenders, so we can go through the same thing all over again.
JPod assured us in a previous podcast that he personally knows many pollsters and they assured him that they made the changes necessary to be more accurate this time around because “profits.” WRONG! Trafalgar was the only one that had it basically right.
The media polls serve no purpose. If they did the campaigns would rely on them, too. The fact that every campaign pays the money to get proprietary and more honest polling tells you just about everything you need to know.