No, Please, Not More "Polling and Ad Testing"

This headline in Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire got my attention.

“Longtime Democratic operative Guy Cecil has launched a new research initiative aimed at boosting the party’s numbers and appeal — an effort that comes amid debate over how to best win in the midterms and 2028,” Bloomberg reports.

“The American Horizon Project is circulating their first round of analysis among party officials. It includes polling and ad testing on voters’ views on artificial intelligence and health insurance. More topics will be addressed in the coming months, including faith, education and views of younger voters.”

You probably read a lot about polling and voters’ views on Substack, the Bulwark, and blogs like Political Wire. All of that is fine, but there’s something you should remember. I first came across it before the 2022 midterms, when I suggested that

A story in National Journal headlined “Horse-Race Polls Are Not Fixable” said,

“The entire concept of polling depends on having a set population from which one can take a random sample and get a generally representative snapshot. Pre-election polls have no existing population—the election hasn’t happened yet, and voting isn’t compulsory in the U.S., so we simply don’t have a population of who voted until all the polls have closed on Election Day.”

“We can’t remedy that. The population of voters will never exist prior to the election. Expecting polls to be able to consistently, accurately predict an election is asking more than is statistically and theoretically possible.”

Donald Trump confounded pollsters, pundits and politicos like me by inventing a new electorate—twice—consisting in part of people who’d never voted or seldom voted, and those who liked him because they thought he was “funny.”

As I’ve reported here before, analysis from the data firm Catalist finds that the 2024 election was determined by voters who were “less likely to have cast ballots in previous elections and are generally less engaged in the political process.”

And post-election surveys found that voters who paid attention to political developments “a great deal” or “a lot” broke for Harris, but those who followed the news “not at all” favored Trump, 51 percent to 32 percent.

New data shows that those low-knowledge voters have swung 25 points away from Trump, from backing him by a net margin of 11 points in 2024 to disapproving of the president by 13 points today.

But disapproval, even disgust, isn’t the same as voting.

Groups like Guy Cecil’s are trying to capture the attention of young voters, and harness the energy we’ve seen them show in places where Democratic socialists can win elections. Targeted ads and social media seem like the way to reach voters who think change happens on their phones.

But we still don’t know what it takes to get them to vote. We can poll and focus group and analyze how people feel, but what actually gets them to leave their house (or cast a mail ballot) and become a voter is impossible to predict.

That’s why elections depend on turnout—and who turns out. I’m still focusing on how to get young people to take voting seriously, outside of those hotbeds of youth activism that are popping up this primary season.1

Not all of them grew up thinking and caring about politics. They didn’t watch their parents vote, or put a sign in their front yard. They didn’t rush to vote the first year they could, and rarely, if ever, miss an election since.

It’s worth asking, gently, about someone’s voting history because it reveals their degree of belief in the ability of voting to facilitate real change.

Here comes my dog food analogy again (you may avert your eyes):

Congressman Tom Davis, a former Chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, once said if the Republican Party were a brand of dog food, “they’d take us off the shelf and put us in a landfill.” Now it’s both parties, along with any belief that politics should be taken any more seriously than professional wrestling.

We used to be able to count on the foundational truth that people voted for a reason—to act on their most deeply held values and beliefs, endorse policies, programs or parties, or defeat someone standing in their way.

Now, many people use their vote as a card to play, a score to settle or even a joke.

They’re not buying the dog food! And they’re not voting. Crucially, the young voters who have the most at stake in elections—and, according to polls, the most interest in working for change—haven’t matched that with a belief in elections as a way of achieving it.

As I wrote here,

The left will continue to win in greater numbers than they used to, because there are more people who embrace left-wing ideas and they are better organized than Eugene Victor Debs. But don’t write off the “Democratic establishment.” Most Democrats are winning their primaries the old-fashioned way, by knocking on doors, energizing their base, and meeting voters.

We can spend money and make assumptions about what “voters” care about, but we need to remember that that word does a lot of work.

“Voters” can mean someone who votes in most elections or someone who can vote but doesn’t always. That doesn’t mean they won’t talk to pollsters, but again, no poll can accurately forecast who will end up voting.

So we end up doing everything everywhere all at once2 to turn out voters. As we should.

But please, let’s remember that we don’t have a clue who those voters are going to be, and we can’t assume that the voters we need to win the key contests—in places like Iowa, Ohio and North Carolina—follow politics as closely as we do.

Democrats will win the midterms by a combination of things, from turning out new Gen Z voters to knocking on more retirees’ doors.

Consultants will profit from polls, focus groups and market research that will add up to confirmation of what they say in Hollywood: “Nobody Knows Anything,” and also what I learned from the Firesign Theater: “Everything You Know Is Wrong!”

Firesign Theater Video of the Day!

But if we want to win Democratic majorities in the House and yes, the Senate too,3 we still have to convince more people that in fact, change does not happen on their phones and their votes matter.

Got some ideas for that?

Leave a comment

Song of the Day