We’re fewer than ten days out from Election Day. I sat down with Elliott Morris, author of Strength in Numbers, to get his take on the first early voting numbers. He looked at data coming out of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, and his takeaway is pretty bold: anything less than a blue wave would be shocking.
Morris also had some tips for following the polls without losing your mind.
Look at the averages.
Follow “the polling,” not the individual polls. That means you’re looking at the average across the outcomes of a variety of different - ideally reliable - polls. There are people out there putting out fraudulent surveys. So if you’re just following the word “poll,” you’re going to get fake ones, or worse— editorializing. That’s where you get those “hair on fire” takes.
Averages also control for random statistical noise. You might have seen a poll in Texas a week ago saying that Talarico was up three points over Paxton, and another this week that says it’s only one point, and you might freak out over that two point drop. That’s noise.
Not all polls are created equal.
I know it’s really addictive to look at individual polls. And if you’re going to do that, look at the ones conducted by big media companies that have the resources to contract with professional pollsters. University polls are also reliable. Even better, see if you can find information about how the poll was conducted. Beyond fraud, there’s just a lot of junk polls out there.
Polls are tools. The people conducting them have agendas— whether that’s to manipulate the narrative or meet fundraising goals. So it’s important to keep that in mind when you’re seeking out this kind of information. With media pollsters, sure there’s some incentive to make “news.” But they have far less of an incentive to show one party winning over another than, say, a partisan actor.
The polls can be wrong.
And they’ve been wrong, famously, and recently. They underestimated Trump in 2016 and 2024. But it can go in the other direction, too. The Democrats can also beat the polls, like in the 2022 US Senate race in Pennsylvania. Or in the 2018 House elections. We also expect some error. It’s just that no one has any idea in which direction. No one wants to be surprised on Election Day. A good way to prepare yourself is to remember that these are just measurements. For pollsters, it’s part science, part art. We’re asking 500 people to stand in for an entire population, and sometimes that attempt at representation gets things wrong.
Don’t look at prediction markets at all.
Polymarket and Kalshi - these are not independent information sources. There is no actual probability that we can predict whether Republicans are going to win an election. Polls directly measure the thing that we care about: who’s going to vote, and how many of them for each party. That’s what gives polling its power and accuracy.
Prediction markets are proxies. I don’t trust the random number of people who have downloaded Polymarket on their phones or these “experts” to bet on elections. These companies have a huge incentive to convince you that they can see the future. Do not trust what they say about the accuracy of their technology. We have far more accurate technology: it’s called polling.
Just for some context: prediction markets put the current Pope at a 1% chance of becoming the pope on the day he became the pope. That’s how accurate they are.
Forget about AI.
If prediction markets exist to separate you from your money, then these AI tools exist to separate you from your democratic freedom. The makers of these chatbots and LLMs want you to believe they’re giving everyone access to all the information and that we’re witnessing democracy in action. It’s the exact opposite. They’re making themselves the one central source of information. It’s authoritarian.
At the end of the day, polls are a direct line to the people who decide elections: voters. That’s about as democratic as information gets. Be smart about how you use it - go with the averages, not the outliers. Think critically about the source. And don’t mistake measurements for outcomes. That’s still yours to decide with your vote.
Musk is gonna screw us over AGAIN. People refuse to put a stop to the insanity overlording our country.
I think these polls miss my kids generation entirely. They are in their 20s and hate what this regime has done. I work in information security and taught both my boys not to trust anything unsolicited. They never respond to emails, texts, or calls.
They are quiet because this is all they know and debating anyone is a waste of their time. One of them even has a political science degree. I wonder if others like them are just going to quietly vote and these polls miss them entirely.