"when bad polls drive good polls they’re not so good anymore"

 “And we know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob,” Franklin Roosevelt, Madison Square Garden, 1936 

In 2024 Trump/Vance and Musk/Thiel are trying to unite these dangers. 

When polling was started in the Great Depression era the response rate to polls was over 90%. Today, or as recently as 2015 via the linked story in the NY-er, the response rate to polling was in single digits. 

Trying to correct for “non-response bias” by giving greater weight to the answers of people from demographic groups that are less likely to respond-- means putting pollsters thumbs on the scales, invisible hands on democratic representation 

Elmo Roper, another early pollster, called the public-opinion survey “the greatest contribution to democracy since the introduction of the secret ballot.” But as the historian Sarah Igo has pointed out, “Instead of functioning as a tool for democracy, opinion polls were deliberately modeled upon, and compounded, democracy’s flaws.”

The statistician Nate Silver began explaining polls to readers in 2008; the Times ran his blog, FiveThirtyEight, for four years. Silver makes his own predictions by aggregating polls, giving greater weight to those which are more reliable. This is helpful, but it’s a patch, not a fix. The distinction between one kind of poll and another is important, but it is also often exaggerated. Polls drive polls. Good polls drive polls and bad polls drive polls, and when bad polls drive good polls they’re not so good anymore.

Like might be happening right now. That is MAGA flooding the zone, Silver's aggregate polling model, with partisan junk polls, inflating republican prospects, hoping to boost turnout, tip the scales into an inside-straight steal of the electoral college.  

Not everyone uses the Internet, and, at the moment, the people who do, and who complete online surveys, are younger and leftier than people who don’t, while people who have landlines, and who answer the phone, are older and more conservative than people who don’t. 

Donald Trump is a creature of the polls. He is his numbers. But he is only a sign of the times. Turning the press into pollsters has made American political culture Trumpian: frantic, volatile, shortsighted, sales-driven, and anti-democratic.

Politics and the New Machine @ NY-er

Also, another more recent story about the perils of polls: Rick Perlstein @ The American Prospect