The Polls Are Wrong

I will bet everything on this

First off, the modern obsession with them is terrible. Like so many things, polling started out innocuously enough. Let’s use math to try to measure public opinion so as to better guide us in a democracy! But that was long, long ago… now it is weaponized, subverted, corrupted and commercialized. Campaigns pay for fake polls to make it seem like bad ideas and bad candidates are more popular than they are. The media use polls for an endless stream of lazy content. Consultants can test out which lies are the most effective while also disseminating those lies in push polls- a real dishonorable twofer. And the real cherry-on-top? Polls are also basically useless at predicting who will actually win.

For the sake of simplicity, and, perhaps, our sanity, let’s just look at one state, Pennsylvania. Every poll uses the closest analogous contest as a baseline from which to *guess* how things have changed and what the upcoming electorate will look like. So, for the 2024 presidential election in PA, they use the 2020 election. Same state, most of the same people, same office, even two of the same four candidates at the top of the ticket. In 2020 Trump got 3,377,674 votes in PA. Biden got 3,458,229 and won the state with roughly a 75K vote margin.

Now, obviously, if the *exact* same people voted the same way we would get the same result. There is movement on the edges though. About 600,000 people died in PA in the last four years. That is slightly above average due to Covid19 excess deaths…