The folly of following polls so far from Election Day

A couple of months ago, the New York Times’ David Brooks wrote a column telling Democrats to chill out about the latest polls that showed President Biden trailing.

Brooks’ central point was that a year out from an election, potential voters use polls to vent and not to vote. Brooks quoted from political strategist Michael Podhorzer’s article “Mad Poll Disease Redux” that pointed out that since the turn of the century sitting presidents have, more often than not, been under water in national polls reflecting a generally sour mood in the country and not necessarily their less-than-well-formed view of the person sitting in the White House.

This past week, The Economist’s cover story was about the dilemma for the Democrats that they are running an 81-year-old candidate with poor poll numbers and lamenting that the Democrats don’t have a viable “Plan B”.

However, in the same issue, there is another article that points out how poorly polls have done in recent elections in predicting what is actually happening. It notes how hard it is to do polling these days when fewer people have landline telephones and that internet polls are largely self-selecting, thus skewing the results. As they point out, polling these days is more of an art than a science and that art can be increasingly abstract.

I am a pretty voracious consumer of news, and what bothers me is the vast amount of column inches, airtime and electrons devoted to the horse race and the polling numbers. We are 11 months from Election Day, and that is a millennium in political time. So much can happen in that span of time, including the felony conviction of the leading Republican candidate or a Supreme Court ruling, led by the originalists on the court, who could conclude that, yes, Section Three of the 14th Amendment does apply to the former president and he could be barred from the ballot.

On the Democratic side, President Biden could have a change of heart (though that does not seem likely) or what some have delicately called “a health event.” However, just because someone is in his 80s, does not automatically mean he is ready to keel over at any moment. We are living longer and healthier lives.

I’m sorry, but current polls tell us very little about what will happen in November and, thus, deserve far less attention.

Could we please spend more time on the issues and what the candidates are saying to the voters? Yes, a number of issues – immigration is a good example – are complex and don’t lend themselves to 60-second stories on the evening news, or slogans, or bumper stickers, not even “Build the Wall.” (Has anyone noticed that – if elected -- the former president has threatened to “invade” Mexico.) The media just needs to stop picking the low-hanging fruit that polls provide.

Some of the results we have seen in recent polls strain credibility. Do we really think that conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is going to receive 25 percent of the presidential vote in November?

Polls also tell us that between a quarter and a third of voters still think the 2020 election was marked by widespread fraud. A recent poll found 25% of Americans think the FBI instigated the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. A third or more of Americans do not think the former President should be charged with any crime. Nearly six in 10 Americans think the economy is in recession despite strong growth, low unemployment and falling inflation.

We better hope the polls are wrong.

• Keith Peterson, of Lake Barrington, served 29 years as a press and cultural officer for the United States Information Agency and Department of State. He was chief editorial writer of the Daily Herald 1984-86.