"...They are all fighting the last war in this election season and we don’t even know which war it is! Most are re-fighting the last presidential campaign in 2020 but consider that it was one of the most unusual races in history with a global pandemic that had tons of people not working or working from home, glued to their TVs and computers and mass voting by mail. 2024 is nothing like that. Others are apparently using a method that combines 2020 results with 2022, which was not only a mid-term and therefore very different from today, but also one which came after the cataclysmic Supreme Court decision in Dobbs which may have actually realigned the electorate. (We’ll see about that.) Now we have the weird circumstances of a former president who was fired running again, against the first Black woman candidate who wasn’t even in the campaign until late July. It’s a little unusual!
"You can see why fighting the last war might not be exactly accurate. Or it might. We just don’t know." -- Heather Digby Parton, on pollsters and polling in 2024. Her comments are in response to an interesting essay from historian Rick Perlstein on the last 100 years of polling in this country (link here). The bottom line is we don't know how accurate or not polling is today (much like we haven't known for certain in the past), because much of the polling methodology relies on data and results from the past. As Perlstein puts it, "They adjust their methods—but to fight the last war. What else can they do?"
So, even if your a poll junkie (we have to fight the urge every day), the banal maxim still applies: the only polls that matter are the ones where you vote on Election Day! So VOTE!
