It was November 3rd, 1948, when the Chicago Daily Tribune went to press with their feature article concerning the 1948 Presidential Election. They couldn’t wait for all the results to come in from the various states, so they went ahead with the best information they had.
You may have seen pictures of that headline, if not the actual newspaper itself.
The Tribune article went on to say that New York Governor Thomas Dewey, a Republican, would win the White House in a landslide, defeating incumbent President Harry S. Truman, and that the Republican Party would retain control of both the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, and they were all willing to work with President-elect Dewey.
There’s just one problem.
Governor Dewey didn’t win the White House.
In fact, when it was all over and done with, President Truman won the Electoral College by a count of 303-189-39, with the 39 electoral votes going to a certain third party candidate named Strom Thurmond.
Oh, and the talk about the GOP retaining control of the Congress? Also, dead wrong. The Democrats swept control of both houses.
So, what the hell happened?
What happened was simple: the Chicago Daily Tribune couldn’t wait for the truth to come in.
Printing newspapers takes time. Hours. It’s not an instantaneous process like today’s online media. And it was hours that the Tribune did not have in order for the results to come in. Rather than leave people hanging, the paper’s higher-ups went ahead with what they firmly believed would happen, as according to their best guy, Arthur Sears Henning. A veteran political analyst who supposedly successfully predicted four of the five previous presidential elections, Henning used conventional wisdom along with several polls that predicted that Dewey would win outright. Even when the various state results started coming back in, Henning doubled-down on his convictions that it would be a sweep for Dewey. After all, the polls said so, and the polls couldn’t be wrong, could they?
The writing should have been on the wall back then, but nobody in the news services wanted to see it.
That writing is now on that same wall in boldface large letters and in neon colors.
*End the polls!*
Polling has been the news services’ bread and butter since the 19th century. They give the illusion of a scientific study of what people want or prefer. I say “illusion” because they don’t measure every human want or preference. They only take a sample of the populace and then report on what that sample represents and then infer that this is what everyone else thinks.
But what constitutes a “sample”? If you just ask your friends at work what they think, that’s not indicative of the whole workplace. If you just ask a handful of people at a Walmart, that’s not indicative of the whole consumer audience, never mind being indicative of all the Walmart shoppers.
And by inferring that the results of this “sample” group are indicative of the whole, that’s pretty much misrepresentation, if not borderline fraud. That’s why you sometimes see a little disclaimer under the polls.
Now that’s fine if you want to pretend to know if people consider jeggings to be either pants or athleticwear, or which actor played Batman better in the movies, or which flavor should be in a new bag of potato chips. The fate of the country doesn’t hang on those trivial matters.
The problem comes when the media starts using the polls for continual campaign coverage. And not just “using” but overdosing on it every single day. There has not been a single minute in the past few years when the various news agencies didn’t shove some poll down our gullets as to what the “approval-versus-disapproval rate” is for any given politician, which wannabe candidate is “trending”, and who is “leading” in any campaign, be it a primary, caucus, or general election.
This is important, because political debate organizers are actually using polls as a determination as to which candidate is “worth” including. Oh, you’re a candidate running for political office, but you aren’t showing up in any of our polls? Too bad. Sucks to be you. You’re not “qualified” to be in our debate and thus get needed airtime with those we declare to be the “frontrunners”. Good luck getting that needed campaign money now. Better luck next time... or never.
Now, maybe that is “okay” during the primaries and caucuses, and maybe we can ignore the “approval” numbers as just fantasy, but what about the general elections?
For the past several elections, we have been inundated with daily polls about who is “leading” over the other candidate. A nonstop cacophony of numbers and ratios and points and margins-of-error and who is ahead and who is trailing and how they’re doing among various demographics and how they differ from previous days, weeks, months, elections. Over and over and over, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
And, come election day, we find out that all of their so-called “scientific” polling is *wrong*!
If the media predicts a horserace, it ends up being anything but one. And if they predict a sweep, not only will it be a close race, but the person they predict will win often ends up losing.
Look at the 2020 Con and Possible Coup. For endless weeks, it was predicted that former Vice President Joe Biden would sweep the election in most of the states, and by sizable margins. Not only that, but these same “scientific” groups were predicting that the Democratic Party was going to sweep Congress as well. A supposed “Blue Tsunami”.
And what happened? Biden still won, but not by the margins that were predicted. It was a horserace for many states, several of which, like Georgia, were complete surprises. But it was far from that predicted “sweep”. And the Democrats certainly didn’t sweep the Congress as predicted. Hell, they lost seats in the House of Representatives. Incumbents that were supposedly in danger got re-elected by obscene margins.
In other words, these so-called “scientific” polling groups were *dead wrong* about everything they predicted!
Now you may think that this is just a fluke. After all, it’s 2020. But, no, if you look back several years, you’ll see the same error repeated over and over again. This commentator has put up with countless years of polls predicting horseraces that ended up being sweeps for incumbents, and sweeps that end up not only being horseraces, but horseraces where the predicted candidate loses. And every single time... every single goddamned time... what happens? The so-called “political experts” simply shrug and say “Oops! Guess we misread the voters!”
If it was just a fluke... one time in 1948 where the so-called “experts” got it wrong... we could excuse the error. But if it happens over and over and over again with the pattern repeating itself over and over and over again, year after year after year, and you know that there’s a chance you’re going to be wrong, guess what that’s called? That is called misrepresentation. You’re not predicting. You’re engaging in fantasy and trying to pass that off as a future reality.
So let’s get brutally honest here... and this is to all the news services big and small and to their corporate masters... you need to end these polls! Now! Today! Send them packing!
You have proven repeatedly that your polling does not work. It does not accurately reflect the will or minds of the American people. Even with your supposed “margins of error”, your data is skewed, your sample representation is wrong, and your conclusions cannot be trusted. The problem is not with the data, but with the idea that you can somehow gauge the will and interest of the people on a daily basis using a sample that clearly does not reflect the whole.
Let’s put it this way... if you had a meteorologist who continually made on-air weather forecasts that turned out to be wrong day after day after day, how long would that person be on the air?
If you had a market analyst whose stock forecasts turned out to be wrong day after day after day, why would you keep that person employed?
If you had a reporter that could not, for the life of him, tell the truth in his articles, how fast would you quietly kick him to the curb?
If you have a consultant that screws up continually, you don’t shrug and say “oh well, better luck next time.” You terminate that consulting job and you send that consultant packing.
And that is what the news services need to do with their so-called “experts”. The fact that some of the networks and publications attach their own names to these polls does not make them any more credible. That only means that they are also on the hook if those polls are wrong.
I understand why the news services would come up with these daily fantasies. It gives them something to do in the world of the 24-hour news cycle. It’s like fast food for the media. Greasy, fatty, loaded with salt and sugar, fills the belly and possibly damages your body. The problem is that it is also killing their credibility.
Look at what happened when the Chicago Daily Tribune screwed up in 1948. They became the laughingstock of the nation. Truman held up a copy of the newspaper to the other reporters to gloat and now that image is a part of history. Maybe if the rest of the news services took that embarrassment as a hint to make some changes, then maybe they wouldn’t have a problem today. They certainly wouldn’t be inundating us with these fantasy speculations that may or may not be accurate.
Take the hint now, news services. End these polls now and you’ll keep whatever is left of your integrity.
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