It’s a familiar vision: an American family gathered around the TV to enjoy a football game with barbeque, condiments, and a generous bucket of popcorn. Except this is not a football game at all. Instead, it is another uniquely American spectacle: a two-party electoral race. As Election Day approaches faster than you can say “TOUCHDOWN,” polls are increasingly prevalent. They are commonly cited by pundits, used to make strategic decisions by campaigns, and covered by political analysts of major news networks. Polls have significant utility, but their ability to make accurate predictions is questionable. Moreover, their saturation in media contributes to shallow American dialogue, emphasizing partisan election polling coverage, or horse race politics, over substantive policy debates.

Electoral polls record the thoughts, opinions, and intended decisions of likely voters before and after an election [1]. High-quality electoral polling can help Americans anticipate future leadership, provide feedback to politicians, reveal voting coalitions, and give insight as to when, where, and why Americans vote in the first place. Professor of Political Science at Fordham University and former election night analyst Monika McDermott points out that political polling is crucial in determining the strengths and weaknesses of a candidate’s messaging [2]. Polls direct the allocation of limited campaign resources by showing which issues to prioritize, which opponent weaknesses to target, and which voters are worth trying to persuade. However, as researchers at the Brookings Institution highlight, polling is a tool whose usefulness depends on careful implementation to explore complex relationships between citizens, policies, and government [3]. Quick and cheap surveys bastardize the meaning of polls as direct scientific mandates for campaigns to pursue. In reality, public opinion is characterized by fragility and ambivalence. The fact is, most people have not thought deeply about the litany of problems facing America, yet polling encourages respondents to signal a solidified position by checking a box or filling a bubble. It’s not hard to see that oversimplifying nuanced opinions may be in the best interest of campaign consultants or politicians. They can use public opinion, an essential element of democracy, to declare broad support for themselves or their agenda.

Unfortunately, electoral polls suffer from several challenges impacting their accuracy, ranging from voter turnout to a fundamental misunderstanding of how elections work. 

Of course, electoral polls have to contend with the traditional concerns of surveys, like generating a strong representative sample, addressing biases in language, or filtering out bogus responses. Adding to these limitations are the impacts of voter turnout. Experts at the Pew Research Center reveal that perfectly acceptable data can be compromised if the respondent refuses to go to the ballot box and express their recorded intentions [4]. Furthermore, political scientist and historian Allan Lichtman questions the foundational assumptions made by electoral pollsters, arguing that elections are a referendum on the political party in power rather than a result of campaign strategies [5]. If Lichtman is correct, electoral polling is destined for inexactitude. It will inevitably misattribute impact to snapshot events like TV ads and campaign rallies when influence actually belongs to large-scale holistic factors like economic performance, civil unrest, and party unity.

These problems in electoral polling manifest in the mixed historical record of their accuracy, defined by incorrect predictions and results outside the margin of error. Exceptional polling failures go as far back as 1948 when rival pollsters Elmo Roper, Gallup, and Crossley formed a coalition united by disastrous error: estimating to-be victor Harry Truman’s chances at near zero [6]. With data from more than 1,400 polls spanning 11 elections, UC Berkeley researchers Don Moore and Aditya Kotak discovered that modern polls correctly predict the presidential outcome 60 percent of the time [7]. This is a fine rate of accuracy if you are a statistics junkie, but if you are an average American voter wanting to know who is going to win an election, polls provide little more assurance than a coin flip.

Besides its inaccuracies, electoral polling distracts from the why of our politics, shifting focus away from policy discussions and how Americans can actualize change to the question of who is winning a new desk. This shortcoming is reflected in the research of Thomas Patterson, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government who analyzed news coverage distribution during the 2016 presidential election cycle. The largest share of news coverage, at 42 percent, was none other than horse race politics [8]. In contrast, coverage of candidates’ policy positions was one of the smallest categories, at a measly 10 percent. Patterson’s analysis of the 2020 election showed that roughly 75 percent of CBS Evening News segments discussing Democratic candidate Joe Biden were horse race segments [9]. Dedicating the time spent on horse race politics to policy-targeted debates would give the American people valuable access to policy experts, historians, and political scientists. Discussions might also be facilitated across party lines. After all, American democracy functions on assumptions of a well-informed citizenry and a capacity for compromise between different groups. The oversaturation of electoral polls does nothing to provide either of these benefits. Instead, it decreases the quality of political discussions and contributes to an uninformed electorate. Consequently, it promotes the acceptance of unhelpful continuities, like the two-party binary and fierce polarization between Republicans and Democrats [10].

Depending on who you are, football and politics can be entertaining. However, when important occasions like voting in a presidential election arise, it is time to hold the popcorn and take one’s civic duties seriously. Electoral polling is a neutral tool that is often wielded to unproductive ends. Fortunately, as critical media consumers, we have the power to read fewer articles about electoral polls, understand the limitations of survey data, and dedicate more time to researching and discussing policy issues relevant to our ballots come election season. Less talk about winners and losers is a win-win. It betters ourselves, our communities, and the health of American democracy.