Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1305625
13 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 1 NOVEMBER 2020 to that record. They may be vaguely familiar with the "Dew- ey defeats Truman" debacle of 1948. And they may recall that election polls in 2016 veered off target in key Midwestern states, disrupting expectations that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency. But other cases, such as the un- foreseen landslide of 1952 or the close election that wasn't in 1980, are not often re- called. So polling is at least somewhat shielded from reproach by unfamiliarity with its une- ven perfor- mance re- cord over time. O f c o u r s e , e l e c t i o n polls are not al- ways in error. They can redeem themselves, which is another value in American life. Horse races to high wires Analogies from the sporting world further help to explain polling's tenacity. Election polling, and its em- phasis on who's ahead and who's sinking, long has been likened to a horse race – a metaphor not always agreeable to pollsters. Archiba- ld Crossley, a pioneer of mod- ern opinion research, revealed as much before the debacle of 1948, in a letter to his friend and rival pollster, George Gallup. "I have a distinct im- pression," Crossley wrote, "that polls are still t h o u g h t of as horse-race predictions, and it seems to me that we might be able to do something jointly to prevent such a reputation." Crossley's "distinct impres- sion" endures. Polls, and the coverage of polls, still invite comparisons to the horse race. A better analogy, perhaps, is that polling resembles a high- wire act. A presidential election plays out over many months, typically to growing atten- tion and building anticipation. Whether pollsters will slip up and fail in their estimates inevi- tably becomes a bit of mild elec- tion drama itself. When forecasts go awry, as they did in 2016, astonishment inevitably follows. For example, Nate Silver, the data journalist who founded the FiveThirtyE- ight.com polling-analysis and predictions site, said Donald Trump's victory was, broadly speaking, "the most shocking political development of my lifetime." Many pollsters insist that election polls are snapshots, not prophesies. But they don't much mind crowing when their final surveys come close to esti- mating the outcome. An example of pollster brag- gadocio came a month after the 2016 presidential election, when Rasmussen Reports declared that it had said all along "it was a much closer race than most other poll- sters predicted. We weren't surprised Election Night … look who came in second out of 11 top pollsters who sur- veyed the four-way race." George Gallup did much the same in the early years of modern survey research, taking out self-congratulato- ry advertisements in the Edi- tor & Publisher trade journal to tout polling successes in presidential races in 1940 and 1944. "The Gallup Poll Sets a New Record for Elec- tion Accuracy!" one of those ads proclaimed. Which polls to follow? The proliferation of surveys over the years – Nate Silver's site provides ratings of dozens of pollsters – also allows a sort of team-sport approach to elec- tion polls: Savvy consumers can identify and follow preferred pollsters and mostly ignore the rest. Not that this is necessari- ly advisable, but it is an option allowed by the abundance of polls, many of which can be routinely tracked in the runup to elections at RealClearPoli- tics.com. So, for example, supporters of Donald Trump may take heart from Rasmussen surveys, which have been far more favoura- ble to the president during the 2020 campaign than, say, polls conducted for CNN. Polling, fundamentally, is an imperfect attempt at providing insight and explanation. The desire for insight and explana- tion is, of course, never ending, so polls endure despite their flaws and failures. They surely will remain features of Amer- ican life, no matter how next week's election turns out. Election polling, and its emphasis on who's ahead and who's sinking, long has been likened to a horse race – a metaphor not always agreeable to pollsters Left: President Jimmy Carter and his pollster, Patrick Caddell, who once said, 'Everyone follows polls because everything in American life is geared to the question of who's going to win.' Right: Republican pollster Frank Luntz