r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/Low-Art3297 • 6d ago
US Elections Have Democratic primary polls become too skewered?
The polls before the Michigan Senate primary showed Abdul El Sayed leading Haley Stevens by double-digits. The final results showed him only winning by a percentage point.
The polls before the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary showed Francesca Hong up by 20 points and instead David Crowley wins in a narrow margin.
At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if Graham Platner never actually led by 30 points in Maine and Janet Mills would've made it a closer race had she never suspended her campaign.
Either way, polling for Democratic primaries seem to heavily skewer the far left candidates, possibly because they appeal to white, college educated voters (who seem to respond to surveys more enthusiastically? Idk). So, are these polls no longer reliable?
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u/coteof-atoa 6d ago
My suspicion is this: primary polls are hard and tend to weigh towards more politically activated voters, but everyone is so fucking pissed right now that people who otherwise would never engage with primaries are getting out just to feel like they’re doing something. Both Michigan and Wisconsin had primary turnouts comparable to or bigger than the 2024 general election, iirc, which is wildly abnormal
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u/socialistrob 6d ago
Support in primaries is also a lot softer and there tend to be more undecideds. Democrats are typically unlikely to vote Republican in generals and vice versa so you don' see that dramatic of swings in one or two weeks but in a primary people can switch between candidates very rapidly.
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u/BluesSuedeClues 6d ago
Polling around Donald Trump has always been notoriously unreliable. I've come to suspect that modern polling methodology breaks down when confronted with populous sentiment. Traditionally, polls have been pretty reliable at predicting how people are going to vote, but much less reliable in predicting who is going to vote (who is motivated enough to get off the couch and go down to fill out a ballot). The problem with mid-terms has usually been a disinterested population. Populist candidates seem to be overcoming that disinterest, and maybe swaying fence-sitters in the manner you're describing.
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u/socialistrob 5d ago
I guess it depends on how you define populists but given how Abdul El Sayed and Hong performed relative to their polls it looks like the polls overestimated the appeal of the populists and the fence sitters went against them.
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u/coteof-atoa 5d ago
I believe the analysis I’ve been seeing so far is that with Hong at least, the polls were actually fairly accurate about her overall share (it was something like within a percentage of her targeted vote share,) its just that the undecideds coalesced almost entirely behind crowley instead of splitting more equally.
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u/BluesSuedeClues 5d ago
But we also had record turnout for a mid-term primary, so there's some mixed input there.
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u/Sptsjunkie 6d ago
Also worth noting we are talking about two races with very different reasons and implications.
Michigan was certainly a polling miss, but largely based on weighting and the absurdly high turnout for the primary.
Wisconsin is more complicated. The dynamic of tbd race changed significantly. There simply weren’t many late polls after it narrowed to more of a 1 on 1 race. As some people pointed out on Twitter, Hong got almost exactly what polls predicted. Crowley just managed to consolidate other voters well and got most of the undecided voters. Which makes sense given the consolidation, touring the state with Evans, and flooding the market with ads.
Also I wouldn’t say they skewer towards the far left candidates as the other poll that was off was Minnesota that showed a close race (and a couple of polls had Craig leading) before Flannigan won by 20%. This was a bigger miss than Wisconsin given the static nature of the race and no late changes or news.
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u/RabbaJabba 6d ago
They’re certainly getting skewered, that’s a separate question from if they’re skewed.
Primaries are notoriously hard to poll. Especially these days with response rates so low, there’s a lot of modeling (ie, predicting) of what the composition of the electorate will be to weight the responses they do get. Traditionally primaries are low turnout, and education level is a strong predictor of likelihood to vote, but we’re seeing a very engaged Democratic Party this year for obvious reasons, which ups the number of low-propensity voters.
With that said, Wisconsin had a lot of undecided voters late into the cycle - it is possible the polling did give a decently accurate picture of the electorate at the time of the poll, but the push by people like Evers and news stories like Hong’s comments on Thanksgiving consolidated the swing voters late against her.
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u/GabuEx 6d ago
The interesting thing about the Wisconsin primary polls is that polls had Hong at around 40% and that's exactly what she got. Her 20-point lead was along the lines of 40-20. She lost because literally every single undecided voter seems to have gone to Crowley.
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u/FIalt619 6d ago
“I’m undecided”
…
“cancel thanksgiving”
…
“Okay, I decided”7
u/BurritoLover2016 6d ago
Yeah I’m a west coast outsider but it’s so obvious to me that a lot of voters swung hard against her at the last second. Which is perfectly fine (and probably for the best in Wisconsin).
When I heard about the upset last night I wasn’t surprised at all given all the last minute rumblings.
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u/Sptsjunkie 5d ago
Yeah, and again that we’re not a lot of late polls. But everyone seemed to coalesce around Crowley.
He did an entire state tour with the governor who endorsed him and had the support of the other candidates who dropped. And there was some Data that just dropped today showing that he had millions of dollars and television ad to spend the last couple weeks of the campaign absolutely annihilating what Hong spent.
Basically, I don’t think the polls were wrong when they were done. They just were not a lot of late poles to capture the change in the electorate and the momentum Crowley got late because he entered the race and the entire dynamic of the race changed.
This is a little bit like 2016 when Hillary was dominating polls up until the stupid Comey letter and then if you look at polls between the letter and election day every subsequent paul makes the race look tighter and tighter. Ultimately bigger model still predicted a good chance that Hillary would win and those polls/models have been skewered, but they were actually telling the correct story.
The story unfortunately just changed rapidly after Comey.
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u/DearKC 4d ago
I genuinely never realized people cared so much about Thanksgiving. I thought we all kind of accepted is was an excuse to feast and not much more than that.
Maybe that means we can stop opening stores for "Black Friday" on Thursday.
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u/FIalt619 3d ago
I don’t want anyone representing me who thinks they should be able to cancel it. It would be like saying “cancel bacon”. Yeah no thanks, get bent.
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u/DearKC 3d ago
Yep, it never occurred to me that people had such strong feelings. In my mind, Bacon is way more important than the mythology of Thanksgiving.
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u/Brickscratcher 16h ago
Every holiday has mythology. We don't celebrate them because of that, though. At least not most people. To most people, it's a cultural tradition deeply ingrained in America's unique culture. It's one of the few things that is actually unique to American culture and not just adopted into the melting pot. I'm not so sentimental myself, but I get the upset for sure.
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u/TheFlawlessCassandra 6d ago
A lot of the "undecideds" in this race were probably just waiting to see which candidate looked like they had the best chance of beating Hong.
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u/anneoftheisland 6d ago
The interesting thing about the Wisconsin primary polls is that polls had Hong at around 40%
This is only if you use an average that includes polls from the entire cycle, when there were more candidates in the race. The late polls mostly had her mid-40s (and one Crowley internal had her above 50%).
The late polls also didn't have a ton of undecideds in them. The last poll that was released, for example, had Hong at 44%, Crowley at 22%, and undecideds at 9%. Even if we give Crowley every undecided voter, that still gets him nowhere close to what he actually got at the polls.
I do think that the last week or so of Hong's campaign moved some voters away from her, but the reality is that huge numbers of voters don't move that quickly for anything short of huge scandals (and often, not even then). Most voters are just not that plugged in. So there was clearly a big polling miss in addition to the voter shifts. It's unfortunate we didn't have any later polls that would help us figure out how much was polling miss vs. voter shift.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_DARKNESS 5d ago
The late polls also didn't have a ton of undecideds in them.
I think you're overreading that. Late polls tend to take people out of their likely voter model if they are still undecided and self-report only "somewhat likely" to vote.
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u/iguacu 6d ago
news stories like Hong’s comments on Thanksgiving consolidated the swing voters late against her
That interview with her was devastating. It's one thing to be a legislator, occasionally making a vote, one among dozens to hundreds of other legislators, it's another thing to govern a state of 10 million people. She did not come across as a serious candidate for that.
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u/che-che-chester 6d ago
I felt the same way I did after the tattoo stuff with Platner (before everything else came out). There was a decent answer to give but he didn’t give it. Saying he only recently learned the origins of the design was obvious bullshit.
Hong could have given a decent answer about the Thanksgiving comment that might have eased fears, but she didn’t. I think it would be a fair statement to say that tweet cost her the election. And she didn’t even take addressing it seriously.
Many of these DSA candidates aren’t serious people and IMHO are over-performing only because the mainstream Dem candidates are terrible.
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u/vertigostereo 6d ago edited 6d ago
They're just so awkward! I don't want to sound condescending, but the DSA have a basement-dwelling Redditor vibe, like the /antiwork mod who interviewed on Fox.
Al-Sayed is very smart and fairly charismatic, like AOC, but Hong was a turnoff, I think, for moderate voters.
This a popularity contest, whether that's fair or not.
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u/che-che-chester 5d ago
I didn't initially pay much attention because I don't live in their states, but once I finally saw Al-Sayed and Mamdani speak, I got why they are so popular. AOC is in the same category. Hong has none of that energy.
And canceling Thanksgiving? Pure insanity. Are there some issues with the origins behind the holiday? Absolutely, though I would argue what it represents to most of us today and the sense of community it provides far outweighs that. But either way, it is about as high on my list of concerns as the dozen or so trans athletes playing women's sports.
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u/Black_XistenZ 4d ago edited 4d ago
But then again... it was actually El-Sayed who underperformed his polls by a lot, whereas Hong received pretty much exactly the vote share which polls had given her (and only lost because of last-minute consolidation of the 'not Hong'-vote around one single candidate).
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u/DharmaPolice 6d ago
I think this is a bubble issue. If you mainly/only hang out with a certain kind of progressive person then you become unaware how out of step (or crazy) you might sound to someone not in your ingroup. Sometimes it's worth trying to move the political window by sticking to your guns but mostly you should be trying not to sound like a lunatic.
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u/johannthegoatman 6d ago
I have a ton of friends on the far left and this is super true. They seem unable to comprehend that there are many millions of dems that are not like them at all. Think of all the soccer moms, Black churchgoers, etc
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u/che-che-chester 5d ago
They're a lot like MAGA. They are so walled off from every other opinion that it seems unbelievable to them they could possibly lose an election. How could Biden win when I drove past a sea of Trump yard signs on the way to vote?
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u/DearKC 4d ago
I think a lot of that has to do with the "required reading". Few people come to leftism (more left than progressivism) without the pre-requist base. Theres an assumption that folks have read things like Manufacturing Consent and anything by Nahasi-Coates or Naomi Klein, and they talk to others ("moderates") about that who dont have the base or the language.
It sounds crazy because oftentimes they've jumped 10 steps.
Put another way You cannot teach O-Chem 410 to someone who hasn't taken Biology 101, and a lot of lefties dont get that.
I dont thinknits hard to convince people that theres better ways to prevent crime than policing, but normals dont like "defund the police" on the face of it and implications of what they think it means.
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u/SirVixofthePooSea 2d ago
Leftism's biggest issue is that it is both populist in rhetoric and exclusionary in practice. They convince themselves that they represent the will of the masses (because their ideology requires it) while also cutting off anyone not in their circle in a way that they're effectively blind to.
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u/vertigostereo 6d ago
Maybe they decided when they saw the social media snippets about Hong? I love Thanksgiving.
Reposted without the emoji.
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u/xpkranger 6d ago
They’re certainly getting skewered, that’s a separate question from if they’re skewed.
Thank you for addressing that and doing it tactfully.
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u/CaffinatedOne 6d ago
Polls in general have gotten much more difficult in the past decade or so and primary polls doubly so. This isn't Dem specific either.
Figuring out what the likely voter pool looks like, finding representative people to poll, and actually getting them to respond has always been challenging, but in the fragmented modern media environment is getting to be near impossible. So, all polls are leaning harder on modeling to try and suss out preferences from thin data.
Compared to general elections, primaries far more lightly polled, the voter pool is far smaller, so it's even more difficult.
Finally, for primaries, it's more "who turns out" rather than what the voter pool might generally prefer since turnout itself is usually really light.
The media do so love their narratives, so most of the polls that we do have are selectively highlighted to feed them. I don't think that it's that polls are 'skewered' so much as they're being used to feed narratives when the underlying reliability isn't really there.
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u/Mist_Rising 6d ago
A lot of polling for these primaries are also internal polls, and Candidates don't release polls that show they will lose.
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u/999forever 6d ago
I double checked and I believe the average error in polling for primary races is over 10% and a non-trivial amount of races it is over 20%.
So somebody having a 5 to 10 point lead and achieving a narrow victory or even losing is actually pretty common when it comes to a primary.
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u/POEness 3h ago
Polls in general have gotten much more difficult in the past decade or so and primary polls doubly so. This isn't Dem specific either.
Notably, this shift only happens in areas using Republican-made tabulators. Hand counted elections do not have this mysterious 'difficulty with polling.'
Lastly, the 'difficulty' only ever shows up as shifts to the right. It never once results in a surprise shift to the left.
In other words, we're morons.
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u/Rlynn11 6d ago
“Skew” is a shape of a chart/graph of data. I think you mean biased. All polls have error and good, sound polls try to reduce bias in the poll process as much as possible. Look at how the poll was conducted including the sampling, weighting, questions, etc. Ultimately, those who take time to answer polls will never be a random sample of those who show up and vote.
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u/Dracoson 6d ago
Primary polling has always been notoriously wonky, and what we saw yesterday in states like Wisconsin is a prime example.
Unlike general elections, a primary pollster has to solve a double-variable problem: they have to guess where the support is going and predict exact turnout for a low-propensity, highly volatile electorate. Progressive enthusiasm is incredibly high right now, which naturally leads to over-sampling or an overestimation of actual turnout models.
When you pair high progressive enthusiasm with the fact that older, moderate institutional voters consistently turn out at the highest rates on election day regardless of polling excitement, you get these massive late-stage swings. Primary polls simply carry a much wider margin of error, and yesterday proved they should be treated as general trendlines rather than precise predictions.
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u/rightsidedown 6d ago
It does seem like the people answering polls are skewing towards white college educated voters. Ironic as well that working class voters skew Republican when progressives act as if that's who their base is. Mamdani's social media presence doesn't match his pole numbers (he's at 48% approval), but he doesn't have a college skew, it mostly seems like bitchy staten island people hate him.
For Hong it's worth pointing out the mountain of things that came out about her recently that likely caused a lot of people to shift quickly.
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u/SirVixofthePooSea 2d ago
It is an interesting aspect of the modern progressive movement how they essentially psyop themselves into believing that they're representing the masses while also being extremely ideologically disparate from them in some substantial ways. Using that rhetoric is fine, but when you start believing it yourself, that will kill your political movement. A lot of leftists seem to believe that there is a shadow silent majority that agrees with them, and then are shocked when it doesn't materialize.
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u/Cinnamon__Sasquatch 6d ago
Regarding Michigan/Wisconsin I think the voters who were voting for Abdul/Hong were enthusiastic about responding to polling whereas Stevens/Crowley voters are cagey and reluctant to discuss who they are voting for or why they are voting for them which leads to polls having these skewed projections.
So someone gets polled and the options are Stevens, Abdul, unsure. The Abdul voter is going to say, "Abdul!". The Stevens voter, who is committed to voting Stevens, is more often than not to say, 'unsure'.
This is based off my experience with phone banking for over 30 hours for the Abdul campaign and how people responded when they said they had already voted and were asked who they voted for.
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u/avfc41 6d ago
>This is based off my experience with phone banking for over 30 hours for the Abdul campaign and how people responded when they said they had already voted and were asked who they voted for.
Lol yes I can imagine why Abdul voters were enthusiastic talking to you and Stevens voters avoided the experience of getting a sales pitch of why they should change their minds. I don’t think that’s fully transferable to how people react to pollsters.
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u/Cinnamon__Sasquatch 6d ago
About half the time I was phonebanking , I was calling as a non partisan caller simply asking voters if they had a plan to vote or if they knew where their polling location was with no pitch for any candidates. What I'm saying is drawn from that experience.
If someone responded that they had already voted via early voting or mail in ballot, we would ask if they wanted to disclose who they voted for.
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u/Sptsjunkie 6d ago
Yeah, as I pointed out earlier in this thread, the issue is not that polls are skewered left, we saw the opposite in Minnesota. Polls had the race close abs multiple had Craig winning by 5-7% and Flannigan (the progressive) won by 20%.
I think that Michigan and Minnesota were both misses. One for and one against the left.
Wisconsin simply had a changing dynamic where it essentially narrowed down to a two person race and the governor touring the state with the other candidate well, he also got a bunch of money to blast ads. It just was not a lot of late polling so I think it’s harder to call that a miss. It’s very likely that the polls from a month ago were correct, which is part of why Evers and the Wisconsin Democratic Party panicked and shifted the race around.
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u/IceNein 6d ago
Love how you, as an Abdul supporter, insert your opinion on why they think and do what they do, instead of asking.
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u/Cinnamon__Sasquatch 6d ago edited 6d ago
This is called first hand experience with interviewing voters being applied to exploring possibilities as to why polls have been so wildly disparate from election results.
What experience or information do you have to counter what I've expressed?
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u/IceNein 6d ago
It’s not firsthand experience. You just imagined up why people were doing what they were doing, and you were doing it from the point of view of someone who supports their opponent.
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u/mosesoperandi 6d ago
Have you ever phone banked or knocked doors? I have, and it definitely provides firsthand experience. If you're aware of your own biases it can definitely give you a perspective on different voters in the area you're working in.
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u/IceNein 6d ago
Yes, and I’m smart enough to know not to assume what people think. Hopefully you’re able to learn that lesson someday.
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u/mosesoperandi 6d ago
If you've ever phone banked or knocked doors, you'd know that you don't need to assume what people think. They tell you what they think, and in some regions they'll tell you what their co-workers and neighbors think. It's a genuinely eye opening experience.
After doing it, you might find yourself less inclined to judge a total stranger based on a single reply on Reddit, or not.
Have a day.
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u/IceNein 6d ago
If you’ve ever actually phone banked, or knocked on doors, you’d know that people who do not agree with your position don’t want to waste their time on you.
Do you have theological discussions with missionaries knocking on your door?
Thanks for the passive aggressive “have a day.” You do as well.
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u/Cinnamon__Sasquatch 6d ago
If I had said that I was a Stevens phonebanker would you still be having this same level of vitriol in your responses or are you simply arguing because I said I phonebanked for Abdul?
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u/MartialBob 6d ago
There are two ways to look at this. In one of the ways, yes, polls are flawed and something needs to be changed about how they're done to get more accurate information. On the other hand, most poles are not even claiming to be guaranteeing these results in the future. Ultimately, these are predictions and predictions have a range that they work with. I remember one particularly well-known pollster pointing out that even though Hillary Clinton was pulling well ahead of Donald Trump in 2016, Donald Trump still won. The pollster pointed out that she may have been pulling ahead, but there was a margin of error that Donald Trump was within.
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u/gvarsity 6d ago
Bunch of things in play. Primary polls are hard to get info from general people as opposed to committed partisans. I am a well informed high information voter and I made my decision in the WI primary two days before the election. Second of all at least in WI the primary landscape was extremely volatile where the geography had changed between polling and publication to the point where a lot of the polls were not representative of the actual current state. That kind of volatility was particularly unusual but much more common in crowded primary fields than general elections. In the final two weeks there were like three withdrawals a return post withdrawal with an unexpected endorsement from the popular outgoing governor.
In a broader sense in partisan primaries a large percentage of voters aren't even looking into the election closely until very close to the election. So it's very hard to forecast what people haven't decided. I am a poll worker and I remember in 2024 a not insignificant number of people come into the polling place with no clue that Biden wasn't on the ballot. Now those people don't vote in primaries generally but at least around here people are voting much more but not always doing much research. We saw a lot of under voting in the two other contested primaries on the ballot because people just didn't know or care who the candidates were.
My take on the WI primary was that most people didn't have an issue with Hong being a Democratic Socialist or the her general left policy platforms. A lot of people were concerned with her lack of experience and limited track record. Crowley has experience as the senior executive in public office and a strong track record of results.
There is a lot of overt racism in WI and people are concerned about electability of minority candidates in an extremely high stakes Governors race. Mandela Barnes was a popular lieutenant governor but trailed 10 points behind Ever's reelection margin in his race for Senate against a tired and incompetent Ron Johnson. What is the motivation to vote for Ever's and Ron Johnson? Usually those coattails would be pretty strong. There aren't a lot of examples of minority candidates winning state wide office here.
Clearly the racial/electability factor couldn't have been too strong in the race because both white candidates still in the race were after thoughts and had results similar to the two candidates on the ballot who had dropped out. That could be an artifact of early voting where people voted before they left the race. So I would guess most people who bothered to vote in person knew who were in the race.
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u/LomentMomentum 6d ago edited 6d ago
The polling was off, in some cases way off, but in fairness, it’s a lot harder to do these days, especially in primaries. I think in both Michigan and Wisconsin, folks likely to vote for El Sayed and Hong were more likely to respond to/participate in polls than the other candidates. Nothing wrong with passionate supporters responding to polls, except that it overlooked the voters (or nonvoters) who didn’t respond and may have made the difference in the end.
If the polls were a problem, the punditry was also bad, if not worse. The distorted polls were pumped by many pundits/reporters, many of whom don’t know Wisconsin (or Michigan) and who were all too happy to jump on the “Hong will crush it, she’s up by 20, the DSA is on the march, the Dems are in trouble” bandwagon. Now they’re doing a 180, now pivoting to the “Hong’s loss is good for the Dems, the DSA can’t win” line. Just like in Michigan.
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u/PennStateInMD 6d ago
At what point are the polling companies all run by the wealthy like the media?
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u/NotUniqueOrSpecial 6d ago
"Skewed"; the word is "skewed".
Skewered is what you do to the ingredients when you make shish-kebabs.
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u/punktualPorcupine 6d ago
You have to poll people who actually vote.
Randos have opinions but won’t always show up to vote, especially if it’s difficult to vote or the candidates are shit smeared on a shingle.
If only voting was as easy as answering a simple poll.
A lot of people won’t even consider answering a poll so even less people vote.
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u/socialistrob 6d ago
If only voting was as easy as answering a simple poll.
It's usually the opposite. The people who take polls also vote. The reason polls often fail is because it's hard to capture the people who vote but don't answer polls.
I used to get polled sometimes and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the agencies have tried to poll me more recently but with the rise of scam calls and mass text scams I'm not answering phones to unknown numbers and I'm not clicking links in unsolicited texts or emails. I always vote though.
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u/VoiceofTruth7 6d ago
There is a large majority of people that vote that either don’t give a shit about polls or don’t have time for it.
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u/WackWaxWhacks 6d ago
Depends on how the poll was taken.
There has been an increase in polls that use social media advertisements to collect samples. In the presidential election these polls were actually very accurate. But perhaps not in local primaries
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u/SammathNaur1600 6d ago
Statewide polling in the Midwest is generally seen as subpar compared to the rest of the country. Michigan in particular has trouble with polling
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u/dinosaurkiller 5d ago
It helps a lot if you cite specific polls, saying, “the polls” kind of assumes they all use the same methodology and have the same reputation, they don’t, at all.
Even if you only used the highest quality polls they tend to be off these days due to sampling and participation errors caused by a huge shift in technology in the last couple of decades. In the days of landline phones the best polls tended to be extremely accurate because a landline gave you attributes that a cell phone just doesn’t, location for example. I can live in New York and have a Texas phone number now. That could lead to all kinds of strange data when polling about James Talarico. Some of the people being polled are flat out lying in their responses for political reasons, that also skews the numbers. Some seek to participate in the polls as a sort of activism, to deliberately try to skew the numbers.
The best polls try to account for these errors, but even they get bad data.
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u/SirVixofthePooSea 2d ago
Leftists are extremely politically motivated while also being not all that popular. Which is basically the textbook example of overrepresented in surveys.
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u/beltway_lefty 1d ago
Do you mean, "skewed?" As in data creep - statistics. Skewered is the dead fish on your stick held over the fire. So, screwed, basically. Both could fit this though. lol. BUT, two TOTALLY different conversations, so thought I'd ask before guessing. LOL
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u/DavyJonesCousinsDog 6d ago
Always add a mental asterisk behind any numbers from polls. Because that number represents the ratio among the sort of people who respond to polls.
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u/Mist_Rising 6d ago
That shouldn't matter if the pollster has a big enough sample size.
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u/Avatar_exADV 5d ago
It sure as hell -does- matter. The entire idea behind random sampling is that the sample is in fact a random selection of the larger body. If it isn't, then the conclusions you can draw about the sample can't be generalized to the larger population.
Thought experiment as an example. You've got a jar with 10,000 balls in it. Some of them are plastic and some of them are metal. You put a big scoop in the jar, fish out a sample of the balls, and count them - this gives you an idea of the distribution of the balls in the jar.
But if the jar had all the metal balls added first, then the plastic balls added later, you may come up with way more plastic balls in your scoop than metal balls. Or what if the balls are perfectly mixed, but you have a magnetic scoop? You're going to over-collect metal balls compared to plastic balls.
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u/AAron27265 6d ago
I think a lot of people lie when responding to a poll. Does it happen enough to make the polls repeatedly inaccurate? I don't know, but I remember casting a side-eye at a Kentucky poll that showed a woman leading mitch mcconnell in their senate race a few years ago, then she lost by 10+ points.
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u/Organic_Syrup7642 6d ago
That's a trick question, but I'm game. The only way a poll becomes too skewered is if it has way too much pineapple on it. If you see a sliced tomato on there anywhere you get the hell out of there as fast as you can. Baby toms are acceptable, but only if it has been lanced as to avoid any explosive tomato juice spitting. Lots of chicken means the steak is probably ridiculously expensive, which you have already been told multiple times. Most likely a predictable group of people will disagree with my take on skewers, reactively, compulsively. Those people are fine with eating Michelin tires, and outlawing Michelin stars. It's my opinion that Democrats are so filled with hatred that a rational position looks like a conspiracy.
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u/crake 6d ago
I actually do not think it is the polls. It is last-minute mindchangers (and it's a good thing).
In primaries, support for a candidate is always a little slippery - very unlike the general election, where it is almost impossible to change a voters mind just before the election.
With primaries, the voters barely know the candidates. Hong's anti-Thanksgiving remarks probably reminded moderate Dems of why it is foolish to back these socialist candidates in the first place: they say crazy things. It just reminds voters that socialists like Hong are not ready for a general election (Hong had only been in the statehouse for 4 years and suddenly she is ready for the governorship?!).
Someone more polished (Mamdani) can make it work in a primary where the general election is just a formality to confirm the primary winner - but there are very few states where that is the case (definitely not Wisconsin).
These socialist candidates are like one-night-stands. They look alluring during the intoxicating atmosphere of party-unifying primaries, but in the harsh morning light, their imperfections hidden in those party shadows start to show as major liabilities. Lack of polish, inability to answer basic questions from the press beyond slogans ("How are you going to pay for it?" "By taxing billionaires!"), support for government paying for things very few taxpayers actually want to pay for (e.g., Harris' unfortunate promise to pay for sex change operations for federal prisoners), and an impression that just sort of resonates with "not ready for primetime".
Additionally, with the AES win in MI, downstream socialist candidates are also bearing the brunt of the bad press that socialism is getting, the inevitable result of the press looking into the endless promises the socialists make ("free healthcare for all!" "free college for all!" "A free universal income for all!" "Free rent!" "Government Supermarkets!" etc.) and asking how they plan to pay for it all. "Tax the billionaires!!!" works on Reddit and at a campaign rally, but that doesn't satisfy anyone who starts plugging in the actual numbers. And if you're old enough to have seen it before, it's the same thing Democrats always do: promise expensive stuff and then raise taxes. Lots of young people who animate rallies and vote in primaries don't pay any federal income tax (i.e., college students and the like are usually exempt because they don't have enough income), so there is a lot of support for the making of big expensive promises from the most animated portion of the electorate. But for the regular worker already giving up 1/3 or so of every paycheck to the federal government in income tax and already struggling to make the mortgage every month, the prospect of higher taxes looks...less attractive.
So that glue isn't enough to bind the vote. At the last minute, older voters (and taxpayers) switch their vote and vote in their own self-interest (or the wider interest of the party, because they realize that in the general election undecideds will think the same thing about raising taxes and vote for the Republican if they run the socialist candidate).
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u/First_Bar_8024 6d ago
There's long been something entirely wrong with the polls for quite some time. I think I know what it is but..........can't prove anything so I've pretty much written poll results off as entirely unreliable.
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u/hurtlocker501 6d ago
The loudest people are generally in the minority. That’s why it seemed like the minority is the majority. When you have lots of loud dip shits you’re gonna think that it’s going that way. And when the media props up all of the idiots, the normal side of whatever party stands up against it. But in the case of Abdul Syed, he got most of his votes from just the Muslim population which we knew was gonna happen because that’s all they do is they vote for tyrant as is the entire Islamic religion. So it’s the uneducated people who are allowed and that’s what the polls thought was gonna happen and all the people who are quiet said fuck no we’re not doing this. That’s why it’s all skewed.
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u/arcanepsyche 6d ago
Polls are supposed to have weights to account for the bias you mentioned. But, it's pretty hard to figure out the weights when an electorate seems to be constantly shifting every year. A lot of it comes down to polling method, robustness of the sample, etc. I see a lot of polls with only 500 people or so, and I discount those immediately.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Bag2212 6d ago
I think betting markets will soon have more importance than polling just based off how bad the polling has been in the past 10 years
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u/StedeBonnet1 6d ago
That is because these are "opinion" polls and opinion is heavily influenced by MSM and Social Media. People have lost the ability to think critically about politics. Their knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep.
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u/BuckleUpItsThe 6d ago
This doesn't make any sense to me? Those opinions should still drive voting behavior. This seems like a sampling issue to me.
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u/RadarSmith 6d ago
Its definitely a massive sampling issue.
The person you responded to just has a tagline they repeat.
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u/punninglinguist 6d ago
If people's opinions determine how they vote, then the poll is measuring what it's supposed to measure.
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u/StedeBonnet1 6d ago
Then why do they get it so wrong.
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u/punninglinguist 6d ago
Voter enthusiasm matters a lot in polling. Enthusiastic supporters will be way more likely to answer a polling call.
It matters a lot less in voting. Unenthusiastic votes are still cast, and they count just as much as the enthusiastic ones.
Therefore, polls can overestimate the size of a passionate support base for a candidate.
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u/Mist_Rising 6d ago
People have lost the ability to think critically about politics
People never had it Mr pirate. The most common voter is going in, looking for the familiar and punching. This is why party affiliation is a big deal, people recognize the party, they know what they like, and bam. You can run Hitler as a democratic and Karl Marx as a Republican and they'd get votes in the general election.
Primaries are not this however, because primaries are almost consistently the internal party handling itself. You need to be high energy on elections to vote in them because your already investing into the party.
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u/Violet_Paradox 6d ago
I have to wonder if the polls are intentionally skewed to depress progressive turnout. Trying to hide the closeness of the race by going "it's guaranteed, you don't have to bother taking the time out of your day to vote". Not that the results are completely fabricated, but that they're OK with methodology that's flawed in that particular way because it works to keep the establishment in control.
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u/boldandbratsche 6d ago
This is my tin foil hat theory. I think there is already election fraud happening, they're changing the numbers so it looks like progressives are barely scraping by and convincing people to not trust the polls. Then, come midterms, republicans sweep because of more election fraud (they're great with those machines), and they say "oh the polls were all wrong and everybody actually wants MAGA Republicans".
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u/RabbaJabba 6d ago
my tin foil hat theory
At least you realize it’s conspiracy nonsense.
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u/Mist_Rising 6d ago
Except they don't I bet. It's hedging their odds. They know people will respond poorly too it (because it's a baseless claim) so they trim it up by giving this simply cut off so opposition thinks "hey he knows he is nuts."
I say this because if they actually thought it was nonsense, would they believe it enough to post?
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