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Americans Have Collective Amnesia Around Polling
‘Polls are not prophesies’ and other things we refuse to learn
For many, the shock of Donald Trump’s upset victory in 2016 still hangs over this presidential election. Though polls suggest Joe Biden has a decent lead over Trump, plenty of people question whether it’s wise to listen to such forecasting in the first place. But such questions ignore a perhaps uncomfortable truth: that polling has never been perfect. As American University professor W. Joseph Campbell details in his new book, Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections, polling has a “checkered history” in U.S. elections due to a variety of factors, including inconsistent statewide polls and untrustworthy exit polling. Yet polling remains a major piece of our election experience. “Opinion polls will drive the election narrative for the news media in 2020,” Campbell writes, “much as they have in most presidential elections since 1936.”
Campbell spoke with GEN about our short memory when it comes to forecasting flubs and how we might use social media to improve the polling process.
GEN: Lost in a Gallup runs through many of the major polling errors of the last 80-plus years: the Chicago Daily Tribune’s infamous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline, Jimmy Carter’s perceived lead over Ronald Reagan in 1980, erroneous exit polls in 2004 that suggested John Kerry had unseated George W. Bush for the presidency, Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Given the history here, why do we still act so shocked when a poll proves inaccurate?
W. Joseph Campbell: One of the reasons I think we don’t learn from past mistakes is that polling failure and polling errors are never quite the same, just as no two presidential elections are quite alike. They’re not all like “Dewey Defeats Truman” in 1948. There are other varieties, and among those is the one we saw in 2016: key states in the upper Midwest — Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in particular — swung unexpectedly to Donald Trump. No one really anticipated that kind of outcome because the polls in those states were consistently showing Hillary Clinton ahead. So there’s polling failure at the state level, which really has never had such a profound national impact before.
