Don’t trust the polls? They got the losers right

Don’t trust the polls? They got the losers right

Statistics is simply applied math. Polling is simply applied statistics. Most of the time, political polls are pretty reliable, since it’s simply math. But there are always exceptions.

President-elect Donald Trump has always been skeptical of polls, a symptom of his 2016 charge of “fake news” against American media — and rightfully so. This year, Trump outperformed polling for a third national election in a row, a feat no candidate from either party has accomplished in 52 years.

This hat trick shows convincingly that the polling firms can’t poll Trump, and his sweeping victory will appropriately be the top story of this election. But outside the presidential race, there was wisdom to be gained in the polls: Terrible candidates are terrible, and losing candidates lose. If common sense didn’t make this apparent, the polls most certainly did.

GOP voters selected two distinctly terrible candidates this election, and both managed to suffer humiliating defeats in states Trump carried with relative ease.

Fresh off the heels of an embarrassing loss in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election, Kari Lake ran for the U.S. Senate and doubled down on her abiding unpopularity with a considerable portion of the state’s GOP base. In the final two weeks before the election, only three polls showed her leading Democrat Ruben Gallego — and all three were from AtlasIntel, which heavily favors GOP candidates. Unsurprisingly, Lake lost.

GOP gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson of North Carolina was enveloped in a scandal concerning an alleged array of online comments from nearly a decade ago. He trailed in every single poll. Even that characterization is too generous: Robinson’s best poll, again from AtlasIntel, had him down a staggering 11 points to Democrat Josh Stein. True to the polls, Robinson underperformed GOP candidates considerably.  To punctuate his nearly million-vote loss, thousands of Republicans broke for his opponent.

But the Democratic Party ran bad candidates of their own. They fumbled two highly winnable elections in red states, and it cost them the Senate.

The Democratic Party’s unwillingness to tolerate maverick behavior meant Jon Tester, a long-time Democrat senator from the red state of Montana, spent the last six years leaning fully to the left. His job approval rating among conservatives in 2018 was down 20 points, still good enough for him to pick up a portion of the conservative vote and win. Noting his leftward turn, that same figure was down 49 points in April of this year. He could not add enough conservatives to win the state, but Montana’s Democratic Party was unwilling to retire him in favor of a maverick. From June up to Election Day, only one poll showed Tester ahead, and he lost to Republican Tim Sheehy by seven points.

Compounding their loss in Montana, the Democrats squandered a golden opportunity in Texas. After nearly unseating GOP senator Ted Cruz in 2018, the Texas Democratic party ran former NFL player Colin Allred to challenge him in 2024. They chose Allred for his appeal in the state’s major cities, which led them to bleed the Latino support that brought Beto O’Rourke to the brink of success in 2018 — Latino support that primary candidate Roland Gutierrez already had, particularly in border counties. From his nomination through November, Allred trailed Cruz in all but a single poll. While he won the cities, he lost 14 of 18 border counties as Latinos broke 55% for the GOP. In a shocking seven-point swing from 2018, Allred lost by nine points.

So what does it all mean? With significant shifts in both parties this election cycle, polling wasn’t effective in showing what people wanted, but it revealed precisely what they didn’t. That’s the reason the recurring “Is the country headed in the right direction?” poll was so often cited. Where polls showed candidates underperforming, they were startlingly accurate: Terrible candidates polled terribly. Polling didn’t find the winners this election cycle, but it pointed out the losers remarkably well.

 

Lewis Thune is a junior studying politics. 

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