The ‘Red Wave’ Washout: How Skewed Polls Fed a False Election Narrative

 

 

I gave Nate Silver and 538 up as a one-hit wonder fossil from 2012 after the Catastrophe of 2020.  I did not read 538 after that.

 

This cycle I followed RealClearPolitics intently. Got gaslit by them too.

 

 

  ...the closely watched RealClearPolitics average...

...Surveys showing strength for Republicans, often from the same partisan pollsters, set Democratic klaxons blaring in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Colorado. Coupled with the political factors already favoring Republicans — including inflation and President Biden’s unpopularity — the skewed polls helped feed what quickly became an inescapable political narrative: A Republican wave election was about to hit the country with hurricane force.

Democrats in each of those states went on to win their Senate races.

The misleading polls of 2022...

I read this Times article last night, reread it today and am still not clear on what the prescription is, except that told by the two high school juniors in the conclusion. Obviously, we are not going to stop reading polls. The point of the article seems to be that not all polls are bad; rather, in 2022 at least, the bad polls swamped the good ones in aggregating sites like 538 and RCP. In other words quantity overwhelmed quality. But this article suffers the historian's fallacy of retrospective infallibility. Nate Silver, who used to work at NYT, and the current Times polling analyst, Nate Cohn, (Lesson: avoid Nates? lol) all fell into the Republican trap. If that trap is so apparent now, on January 1, 2023, why was it not clear to 538, RCP, and NYT on November 1, 2022, two short months ago.  not sort the wheat from the chaff? As to Silver the paper has an answer, a snarky one (deserved).

In the election’s immediate aftermath, the polling failures appeared to be in keeping with misfires in 2016 and 2020...

...a New York Times review of the forces driving the narrative of a coming red wave, and of that narrative’s impact, found new factors at play.
...
The skewed red-wave surveys polluted polling averages...spilled over into coverage by mainstream news organizations, including The Times, that amplified the alarms being sounded about potential Democratic doom.

The virtual “bazaar of polls,” as a top Republican strategist called it, was largely kept humming by right-leaning pollsters using opaque methodology, in some cases relying on financial support from hyperpartisan groups and benefiting from vociferous cheerleading by Mr. Trump.

...

 Other pollsters lacked experience, like two high-school juniors in Pennsylvania who started Patriot Polling and quickly found their surveys included on the statistical analysis website FiveThirtyEight — as did another high school concern based at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.

...

“These frothy polls had a substantial, distorting impact on how people spent money — on campaign strategy, and on people’s expectations going into the election,” said Steven J. Law, the chief executive of the Republicans’ Senate Leadership Fund, [That's Mitch McConnell's outfit.] which poured $280 million into the midterms. Its own private polling showed no red wave at all.

...

 Tom Bonier, the chief executive of TargetSmart, a Democratic data clearinghouse...saw a devious logic...G.O.P.-aligned firms were pumping out polls to help Republicans regain momentum that had shifted toward the Democrats. “That was the point of this red-wave polling surge,” he said. ...they repeatedly ran into skepticism from people citing the averages on RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight.

But the averages were being affected by a widening imbalance between a dwindling number of reliable, reputable nonpartisan polls, and a proliferation of questionable surveys.

...

When critics questioned FiveThirtyEight for taking the youngsters’ polls seriously, an election analyst at the site called the critique “ageist,” saying “students can do awesome work.” 

“Ageist”! Coming from a Fossil! Hohoho.
...
To [Simon] Rosenberg and Mr. Bonier, teenagers weren’t responsible for the false red-wave narrative — it was partisan pollsters, who flooded the market with outlier results and were abetted by the keepers of the polling averages.

“We can’t trust the data on RealClearPolitics or FiveThirtyEight any longer,” Mr. Rosenberg complained on MSNBC in late October, “because it’s essentially Republican propaganda.”

If one imagined that Fossil Silver would take umbrage to that, one would be correct. :)

Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight’s founder, dismissed Mr. Rosenberg’s criticism by suggesting he was smoking Democratic “hopium,” saying on the site’s politics podcast that FiveThirtyEight’s model was devised to account for pollsters’ partisanship.

Besides, he suggested, Democrats could always put their own credibility on the line by publishing their own equally partisan polls. Mr. Silver did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

[Sean McElwee, Data in Progress, D firm] blamed methods devised in previous election cycles to avoid undercounting Trump supporters.

RCP did this explicitly and were up front about it.

For their part, Mr. Ruggieri and Mr. Kaul, the Pennsylvania high school juniors, imparted some lessons they had learned before heading off on winter vacation.

Mr. Kaul said polling should be used to “enhance analysis,” not in place of it. “It’s meant to give you a better look,” he said.

Mr. Ruggieri boiled it down even more: “I think people should pay less attention to the polls.”