We live in strange times, but this was very strange:
A 21-year-old recent college graduate was behind an anonymous website that put out widely shared fake election polling in Wisconsin, Nevada and California, the Guardian can reveal.
The website, Median Strategies, abruptly shut down and withdrew its polling earlier this week following questions from a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. In an unsigned statement, it described a “short-term social experiment” to examine how fake polling “could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification”.
“I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily,” Rahil Prakash told the Guardian on Thursday when reached by phone. “And as it turned out, it could.”
Meridian polls showed Karen Bass up in the LA mayoral race, Hong up 20 in Wisconsin and Republican Governor Joe Lombardo up 5 in Nevada. All of those “results” were apparently pulled straight out of Prakash’s ass.
Since we’re all political junkies here, I’m not going to pretend that I don’t read polls. But I have a few things to say about them.
First, it’s not odd that over the years we’ve spent more time concentrating on polls. National polling and state polling were pretty good for a while, especially when almost nobody had a cell phone. Actual reporting on the ground is expensive, and ultimately anecdata, so political reporters are relying on polls, to their detriment. Here’s a story on Aisha Wahab, the woman who won the special election for Eric Swalwell’s seat:
While Wahab held a major lead throughout the race, Hernandez’s campaign received a significant boost as Super Pacs connected to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) poured money into the race. With 92% of votes counted on Thursday afternoon, Wahab led Hernandez by just over six points – a much closer race than expected.
How did the Guardian judge that Wahab had a “major lead” — presumably a poll. This is a D+20 district, so not a hotbed that needed regular polling to figure out the winner in the general election. So how in the hell would pollsters know which 500 or 750 voters to sample, and whether to trust that they’re going to actually turn out? Still, the Guardian reports the outcome versus expectations by using polling as the expectation, as if it were some kind of fact rather than a sample in time.
Josh Marshall has recently written a couple of good pieces on polling. One piece is about the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini’s post detailing how Senate polling has a Democratic bias which is larger in earlier polls but still exists in later polls. Here’s Marshall’s guess why:
[…] My best guess is differential response: more social trust-oriented and engaged voters respond to polls more. And demographically those tend to be Democrats. It’s not an overwhelming difference but enough to show up as a small but at least broadly predictable bias. There’s also another more mundane explanation of the growing accuracy in the final months of the campaign. In the early months of a campaign, pollsters tend to poll “adults” or “registered voters.” They apply “likely voter” screens more aggressively in the final months and weeks as the contours of the electorate (who is going to vote) becomes more clear. You’d expect them to get more accurate, if we judge accuracy as the result on Election Day. Historically, “likely voter” filters favor Republicans, though that’s become less the case over the last decade as coalitions have shifted. This year, it seems to be the opposite.
I agree with the first part of this assessment — MAGA is a movement that considers polling part of the “fake news” ecosystem. The second part is true, but also points out how problematic the whole polling enterprise is.
Marshall’s second piece is an overall take on polling, and here’s what I think is a gift link to let you read the whole thing.
My fundamental take is that polls are an insight into the race that shouldn’t be trusted or used as a solid prediction, but if your candidate is polling over 50%, that’s a good sign. Also, issue polling showing 60/40 or better is worth a solid look. Other than that, they’re not to be taken as seriously as they often are, including by idiots like Trump (when they’re in his favor).
