If the polling is this wacky, why bother publishing it at all?

If the polling is this wacky, why bother publishing it at all?

Over the weekend, ABC and the Washington Post published the results of a poll that made both operations look like its results were the product of a month-long exercise with a Magic 8-Ball. The way you know it was an embarrassment is the Post story about the poll began by telling us all we should probably ignore it completely.

The Post-ABC poll shows Biden trailing Trump by 10 percentage points at this early stage in the election cycle, although the sizable margin of Trump’s lead in this survey is significantly at odds with other public polls that show the general election contest a virtual dead heat. The difference between this poll and others, as well as the unusual makeup of Trump’s and Biden’s coalitions in this survey, suggest it is probably an outlier.

  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    01·
    1 year ago

    Putting aside a LOT of other issues, the reason we’re seeing more polls that are very clearly nonsense is twofold:

    • spam calls have proliferated to an absolutely absurd degree, to the extent that most people refuse to pick up the phone unless it’s a known contact - and even that’s not necessarily a sure bet, because caller id can be trivially spoofed.
    • the mainstream media “outrage narrative”, which drives engagement/addictive consumer behavior/ad views - it behooves media networks who sell ads to present as many situations as possible as a toss-up, regardless of whether or not that’s an accurate representation, simply in the interest of profit.