Wednesday, November 20, 2024
Opinion Today: Nate Silver on the future of polling
Debates over polling have become as divisive and harsh as, well, political debates themselves. In a guest essay for Times Opinion, the statistician and polling aggregator Nate Silver reflects on the increasingly fraught interaction of polling and politics. In a brief Q&A with Silver, I dug a little deeper into his guest essay on the relationship of political observers to polling and how the political era of Donald Trump has contributed to the notion that, as Silver put it, "polls just can't win in the court of public opinion — the very thing they're designed to study." In a recent podcast, the pollster John Anzalone said that, particularly around Election Day, pollsters "have become therapists." How do you think about the pop-culture role of pollsters and people who write about polling like yourself? After 2008 and 2012, the phrase I heard most often from random Democrats in my life was "you kept me calm" or "you kept me sane" — almost always that exact terminology. And that was because, in both years, the race was less close than the media had been portraying: Barack Obama had a big lead for most of the 2008 race, and in 2012 he had a steady and robust lead in the Electoral College, even though the national polls were close. But that's not an inherent property of polling-based forecasts. In 2016, Democrats should probably have been more worried than they were. And in 2024, nobody should have been feeling particularly secure about anything. I try to write with a sense of detachment mixed in with occasional humor, but basically give it to people straight. I'm not sure that's what a good therapist would do. Maybe more the friend who you can trust to give you honest advice. In your essay, you point out that polling misses in recent elections have often coincided with years in which Trump was on the ballot — and in each case, they underestimated him. Do you think the Trump-era shifts toward the G.O.P. among certain groups (such as Hispanics and younger voters) are durable, or does Trump have a charismatic appeal that the party will have trouble replicating after him? People neglect the degree to which support among these groups has always bounced around. For instance, George W. Bush got similar numbers to Trump among Hispanics and Asians. Really the only recent durable coalitions in politics have been Black voters for Democrats and, since 1980 or so, evangelical white voters for Republicans. Obama deserves more credit for his strong numbers among all minority groups, brought about in part because he did so well among young voters and because those groups have younger populations. And Hillary Clinton always really overperformed among Hispanics in just about every election she ran. I have no idea what will happen next. Here's what we're focusing on today:
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