It is both amusing and bewildering to watch the political class genuflect before the altar of polling—an art as inexact as predicting weather a year in advance. The latest projections from FiveThirtyEight, revered as if it were the Oracle at Delphi, show former President Donald Trump slipping below a 40% chance of winning the Electoral College. His opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, now supposedly enjoys a comfortable 60% chance of securing victory. But before Democrats break into premature celebration, perhaps a historical lesson on the perils of trusting polls too earnestly is in order.
First, let us acknowledge that polling has become, if not a religion, then certainly a drug for the political class. The perpetual obsession with numbers distracts from the real business of campaigning—persuading voters with substantive policies. In 2020, and famously in 2016, the pollsters largely got it wrong. Trump, the political anomaly, has made a career of defying expectations. This time, we are told by Nate Silver, once the boy-wonder of polling and founder of Silver Bulletin, that Trump is actually favored with 60% odds to Harris’s meager 38%. It’s a delicious irony that both sides seem to find comfort in contradictory data, as if certainty could be plucked from such statistical hedging.
The Harris camp might take temporary comfort in Pennsylvania, where a recent poll showed the Vice President ahead by a modest 48.6% to 45.6%. But the political landscape of the Keystone State, as in other battlegrounds, is notoriously capricious. It is an election cycle tradition that Democrats win the cities, while Republicans dominate the countryside. However, the counties in between, the so-called "working-class voters," do not always behave as polite polling models expect. One imagines that Harris, like Clinton before her, has not spent enough time in those towns, avoiding the whiff of small-town discontent that propelled Trump to victory eight years ago.
Meanwhile, Trump's campaign remains predictably gleeful, buoyed by an internal memo citing a survey of 1,893 likely voters across seven key states where the former president is said to lead Harris by 3 percentage points. This, despite his 39% odds in FiveThirtyEight’s latest forecast, suggests that the true battleground remains in the Rust Belt and Sun Belt states—places where Trump’s message of grievance and populism still resonates. Here, local polling carries more weight than any national survey that lumps together Manhattan and rural Arkansas, as if their political preferences were of the same species.
And therein lies the problem with modern political polling. It is an exercise in false precision, a numbers game dressed up as science, where decimal points replace common sense. The pollsters wish to convince the public that their models can predict human behavior with laser-like accuracy, forgetting that voters are not lab rats. They do not behave rationally when faced with polling questionnaires. Many do not behave rationally at all.
The Trump base—once labeled as “deplorable” by an overconfident Hillary Clinton—remains unfazed by polling data. Indeed, the more the polls predict his defeat, the more fervently his supporters rally behind him. Trump thrives on being underestimated. Pollsters, and Democrats, would do well to remember that in 2016, FiveThirtyEight gave him around 30% odds of winning, and yet here we are, still puzzling over his political staying power.
So, as the election season ramps up, one wonders whether Vice President Harris should take heed of these numbers or simply ignore them. With Pennsylvania polling showing a fragile lead, and Trump closing in on her across critical swing states, it is clear that this election, much like the last, will not be won by statistics alone.
In a better world, candidates would rely less on pollsters and more on engaging with the people they claim to serve. After all, polls did not create the American political experiment. That was left to the more enduring forces of ideas and persuasion. What will decide the 2024 election is not whether Harris is up three points today or down two tomorrow—it will be the steady churn of voter turnout and message discipline that renders these weekly polling snapshots as irrelevant as they are unreliable.
In the end, elections are not won in the august towers of polling organizations but in the voting booths of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Until then, we would all do well to heed an ancient piece of wisdom: numbers, like political candidates, are not always what they seem.
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Sources:
- FiveThirtyEight poll showing Trump’s 39% chance of winning the Electoral College.
- Internal Trump campaign poll surveying 1,893 likely voters, showing Trump leading by 3 percentage points in key states.
- Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin model predicting Trump at 60% odds.
- Pennsylvania poll showing Harris at 48.6% and Trump at 45.6%.
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