Imagine having a job where you are paid insanely well and are rewarded for failure. The intelligentsia keeps trotting you out there as a legitimate authority on what voters are thinking, yet you’re routinely wrong. This is the life of mainstream political pollsters.
Nobody expects polling to be 100% accurate. There are always factors which make that impossible. Certain types of people are more likely to ignore survey requests. Some people lie on polls or will refuse to even answer them.
That said, anyone with common sense could tell that most of the polls were full of shit leading into the election. Biden +17 in Wisconsin? Yes, according to an ABC/Washington Post poll.
And yes, these people will keep their cushy gigs.
But while lesser known pollsters are at least close to or within the margin of error, the “election mafia” tries to de-legitimize their success. All while defending its own failure as a fluke, or an example that somehow they got it right.
Exhibit A:
The level of cognitive dissonance is mind boggling.
You’ll see a pattern when you look into which pollsters were the least accurate in both 2016 and 2020. Many are affiliated with major media companies and/or universities. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight is one of the most celebrated political prognosticators despite being wrong in both 2016 and 2020.
Small, independent pollsters such as Trafalgar and Big Data Poll get no love from the mainstream, despite being some of the only ones to predict Trump’s win in 2016. Polling, much like many of our institutions, membership in the “club” isn’t about results.
Imagine your local weatherman calling for 75 and sunny, and it snows. If he does that long enough, he’s out of work.
These polling operations are 1 of 2 things: completely incompetent or agenda-driven actors which exist to suppress Republican voters and gin up donations and excitement among Democrat voters. Perhaps they are both.
Either way, their reputation has been completely shot. Like many of our institutions, they live in a giant feedback loop. They rarely are held accountable except by those outside of that loop. The big media corporations who fund these polling operations will continue to do so because they help propagate the narrative. Getting it right is besides the point.
There are ways in which polls can be fixed to produce a desired result. Here’s a good break down from Red Eagle Politics (coiner of the term “election mafia”) on YouTube:
Watching people like Nate Silver, Dave Wasserman (NBC), and Nate Cohn (NYT) squirm as people call them on their shitty polling has to be one of the lone bright spots of this recent election cycle.
This can be a potential red pill moment. More people might now see the agenda behind the pollsters. At the very least, people will stop attributing meaning to polling.
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