Commentary | Stop obsessing over election polls — the less attention voters and the media give them, the better – By Sophia A. McClennan (Salon) / Oct 8, 2022
Stop expecting them to offer clear and accurate predictions — and stop being surprised when they don’t
In the days leading up to an election, I have two predictable habits. Each morning when I wake up, and occasionally when I doom scroll at 3 a.m., I obsessively check the polls. I go to FiveThirtyEight, then to the Washington Post, then check Quinnipiac. I look at them seeking some sort of certainty. If they don’t give me the answers I like, I keep looking. I want them to tell me that the candidates I care about are going to win. When they don’t, I keep checking, hoping that their predictions will shift. When they offer favorable results, I worry they will change. So, I check them again. By the time we are a few days from Election Day, I am checking them about 10 times a day
I can also be counted on to never, ever answer a poll — whether the requests come to me via email, spam call or text. I am not doing it. I never have. Sometimes when I am out with friends we joke that none of us has ever done one. Who has time for that? Who picks up calls from unknown numbers? I have yet to find a single friend who tells me they have answered a poll. Even weirder, we seem pretty smug about the whole thing.
Then, as if that weren’t enough, when election results come in and they differ from the polls, and when this means a candidate I thought would win, doesn’t, I am crushed. Like stuck on my couch in my PJs at 4 in the afternoon down. How could the polls have been wrong? I thought we had this.
I am an idiot.
