Exposing slimy political polls for what they are

Stop paying attention to political polls because they are as dangerous as they are inaccurate.

That’s my column for this week. You can thank me later for this gold-plated advice. Have a good day, friends …

No good? I’m not going to get out of here that easily? You mean you want some facts to back up my bold assertions? I just can’t put any old thing out there and expect you to believe it?

READ: Biden's brain, Trump's brain — and this week's bombshell

You mean you don’t trust me as much as you do a bunch of numbers gleaned from some silly, random political poll?

Fair enough, I’ll expand on this important but tired subject one more time, before hopefully doing away with it for good until 2025.

For today’s offering aimed at the media’s new favorite sport “polling for dollars” I am going to actually enlist the help of The New York Times polling guru and chief political analyst, Nate Cohn. Nate and I are going to help extinguish your need for any poll, ever again.

We are going to get you off a very nasty habit, and back on the road to healthy political prognostication, where issues, engagement and actual results are more determinative of what we can expect to see at the voting booth than these dreadful, clickbait polls, which say more about the crooked organizations that are serving them, than they do the consumers they hope will swallow them whole.

You might have heard of Cohn, who seems to be a smart enough guy, but like everybody else has absolutely no idea what is going to happen in an election until people have actually voted in that election.

Lately, to Cohn’s credit, or because a smart editor ordered him to, he’s taken to inserting this line into all of his polling pieces: “The limitations of polling are well known, especially almost a year before an election.”

Isn't that great?

Essentially, he is telling us to sit down, and listen up, because he has some important information to pass along that he knows is complete bullshit. This is like a geophysicist warning us that she has some very important information to bring us about an earthquake next year, which might strike California or France, but because of limitations in forecasting earthquakes that far out, it’s probably best that everybody in the world ducks for cover just in case.

So tell me, how many polls have you seen the past three months or so and “almost a year before the election?”

Forty? Fifty? One hundred????

Be honest, how many of these polls got your blood to boiling? How many of them made you afraid? Have any of ‘em made you feel better?

Polling is the crack cocaine of election journalism, and I am using the term “journalism” very loosely here. It’s cheap, addictive, horribly unhealthy for you, and if dealt the right way, designed to keep readers and viewers hooked for life.

Polls are raw sewage that media organizations have gotten into the horrendously bad habit of dealing to their readers and viewers to try to make news, instead of reporting on it.

It is truly revolting, and it is not journalism.

“We just polled 1,000 people across this country of 332 million, and based on their responses, you should believe this is going to happen, even if the “limitations of polling are well known, especially almost a year before an election.”

It's endless. This past week alone, two “major” polls were released — one had Joe Biden winning in November, the other had him losing. I’m sure there were five others I missed. You can find all those polls if you want, but not here. Ever.

In Cohn’s latest piece that goes out to Times subscribers like me (who apparently have our own addiction problems), he took his disclaimer on having no idea what voters are doing until they actually do it, by expanding on it further by typing: “The limitations of relying on special elections, on the other hand, are not as well understood.”

So of course, Cohn was then going to spend the next five minutes getting into special elections that aren’t well understood because, “Unlike polls, special election results are hard facts, which make them tempting to view as a clear read into the 2024 electorate.”

Holy hell.

How sad, because Cohn was this close to coming clean and living a healthier life by writing about facts instead of fiction. He was actually going to wander out of the darkness of the forest and into the fertile, sunny field of results. He almost took yes for an answer, but decided to hang out on his corner of The New York Times dealing his polling dope to eager readers who by now should know better.

What Cohn did was spend a lot of his piece telling us what we already know: Democrats have been doing very well in special elections ever since Republicans decided to throw in with a revolting, America-attacking, orange man, who has never told the truth, and is almost singularly responsible for eliminating women’s domain over their bodies by appointing three lying Supreme Court justices who did just that.

He breathlessly typed that, “The source of Democratic strength in specials over the last year, our analysis confirms, is therefore quite simple: It’s about turnout.”

It’s about turnout …

Whoa! Look, you aren’t going to get that kind of incredible analysis just anywhere — especially when you can it get it literally everywhere! Raise your hand if you didn’t realize that the more a party can get their voters to turn out, the better it is for said party.

It would be insulting, if it wasn’t so completely laughable.

Cohn then goes onto to say we shouldn’t pay any attention to what has actually happened, because based on polling he has already told us not to trust, this year’s general election will have a lot of other people voting besides the people who really care passionately about their Democracy and other important things like women’s rights.

These other people Cohn is warning us about care about God knows what, because they rarely vote. Who knows what they’ll do!!! But don’t you worry, because he’ll be polling these people who don’t vote much to get a better idea of what they might do despite all his limitations!

It is really one of the most incredible pieces I have read. I mean, how strung out on polls can you actually get? Somebody needs to have an intervention with Nate. He is desperately in need of detox.

Look, polls are inaccurate and have generally been a disaster area. In addition to putting money in pockets of the media that deal them, are now used by politicians as weapons to scare the hell out of people, or worse, dissuade them from voting altogether. See enough bad poll numbers on your candidate, and you might feel like it is a lost cause.

Remember all the polling before the Midterms in the 2022, and the vaunted Red Wave that was supposed to crash ashore?

Yeah, that never happened.

I’d argue Democrats would have done even better if the negative polling didn't scare them off their candidates. This happened in Wisconsin when the reprehensible Republican Ron Johnson beat Democrat Mandela Barnes in the U.S. Senate race by ONE percentage point. Polls released just before the election had Johnson winning comfortably.

Tony Evers, the Democratic governor, handily won re-election by three-plus points over his Republican foe. The polling in that race just before the election was even.

That is but two examples of many where polls have simply been recklessly wrong, and in some cases affected the outcomes of elections.

Remember all those polls that had Hillary Clinton comfortably ahead of Trump in 2016 …?

Why would you ever listen to another one?

I am telling you that Democrats are going to demolish Republicans in November. Not because of what I think might happen, but because of what I’ve seen absolutely happening in one election after another since 2016.

Here in Wisconsin, Democrats and the Left have won 14 of the last 17 statewide elections since 2017, including the State Supreme court race last April in which Trump and abortion rights were front a center.

The liberal justice won that race by a whopping +11. This is a deep purple state, people. Trust me, that gigantic win sent shockwaves through the Republican Party, because it looks like Trump and abortion rights will be on the top of the ballot again.

But smart guys like Cohn would rather scare us into believing every poll they provide — despite all their limitations — instead of trusting what we have already actually seen.

No worries, Nate. I know better than to be to overconfident, so I will end this piece with my own disclaimer: Past political performances, while wildly instructive, aren’t always indicative of future results, so please remember to vote your asses off. It’s about turnout.

NOW READ: GOP sues AZ elections chief over new procedures manual

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough and on his website.