Survey Says
There seems to be a great number of polls having been released in the past few days, measuring people’s preference for president. That, of course, is followed by people telling you which polls you can trust, why this one is bad, how you can’t believe polls—unless they favor that commentator’s candidate, in which case the pollster is the second coming of George Gallup.
Let’s make this easy…national preference polls for president are worthless because we do not elect presidents based on national popular vote. For the umpteenth time, national preference polls are worthless…and not just because polling is harder than ever because traditional methods of reaching people to survey have been upended due to changes in technology.
We elect presidents based on the vote of each state in the electoral college. So if you want to know who will get Iowa’s six votes, then show me a preference poll of just likely voters in Iowa. Same for the other states…the preference poll needs to be state-based. Only if it’s a proper sample in each state—the right number of voters, weighted for demographics, and of likely registered voters only—should we even care. That’s when you can look at the poll in each state, and then start doing the math to see who winds up with the required 270 electoral votes.
The rest of it is just sport during a lull in the process, since both major party nominations have been wrapped up.
For example, let’s say a Democrat is ahead in the popular vote in a national poll…but that lead is skewed because of a landslide in a state like California. Winning candidates need individual state wins, so the national popular vote total is not important. Witness 2000 and 2016…the Democrat had more total votes, but only because of massive wins in a few blue states. Take California out of the equation and Trump beat Clinton in 2016 in the popular vote as well as the electoral vote.
So since the national popular vote total is meaningless…national preference polls are similarly meaningless. Listen to news stories and commentary about them, therefore, with a grain—or a pound—of salt.
