That debate launched a thousand polls and changed…zilch
So there’s not going to be another TV debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and little new fodder for the opinion polls. Less than six weeks before the end of America’s election season, the real poll is the only one that matters. Excerpts from This Week, Those Books on why opinion polls should be seen like a weather forecast. Sign up at https://thisweekthosebooks.substack.com/ and get the post and podcast the day it drops
Welcome to This Week, Those Books, your rundown on books new and old that resonate with the week’s big news story.
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– Rashmee
The Big Story:
The one clear result from that zinger of a Kamala Harris-Donald Trump TV debate on September 10: It set off yet another round of opinion polls. These will drive the conversation for the 56 days until America’s November 5 election.
But should political polling, a two-centuries-old American invention, really count for so much of the chatter about the US presidential election?
After all, as G Elliott Morris, editorial director of ABC News Data Analytics, has written…Most people believe “that surveys are more like an assured statistical calculation than a rough estimate, such as a weather forecast”.
In fact, the only thing polls have really been able to say about the 2024 US presidential election thus far: It’s very close.
This Week, Those Books:
- A brilliant survey of the science and art of polling.
- A short story that shrinks the sample size to one.
- BONUS: The dangers of using bits and bytes to create political models.
The Backstory:
- The opinion poll is defined as the systematic posing of a series of questions to a group of people with the answers adjusted to make them representative of a wider group.
- The word ‘pollster’ was first used by TIME magazine in 1939.
- Straw polls – simple tallies of support for political candidates – were the precursor to modern political opinion…
- In 1936, George Gallup predicted Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide win
- Gallup changed polling by using a new method based on sampling…
- A 2012 study said that nearly 40 countries ban the publication of pre-election polls in one form or another.
This Week’s Books:
Polling UnPacked: The History, Uses and Abuses of Political Opinion Polls
By: Mark Pack
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Year: 2022
British politician Mark Pack corrects the misreading by my tribe – journalists – of the polling industry. He argues that there is no crisis in polling. In fact, pollsters have a better track record of forecasting elections than the media understands or admits…
Pack explains the science of polling using small samples with a brilliant metaphor: “A blood test takes a tiny portion of your blood, yet those few drops are sufficient” to draw conclusions about one’s health…
Choice quote:
“…during the nineteenth century, the idea of sampling began to take hold. That is, rather than having to count everything, counting a representative sample would still enable you to reach the truth – more quickly, cheaply and easily. A pioneer was Statistics Norway…”
Franchise
By: Isaac Asimov
First published by magazine If: Worlds of Science Fiction
Year: 1955
This short story, republished in the 1957 collection Earth is Room Enough, imagines a future in which computer modelling has become so refined that American elections involve only one person voting…
Choice quote:
…“Multivac already has most of the information it needs to decide all the elections, national, state and local. It needs only to check certain imponderable attitudes of mind and it will use you for that. We can’t predict what questions it will ask, but they may not make much sense to you, or even to us. It may ask you how you feel about garbage disposal in your town; whether you favor central incinerators…”
– John Paulson, ‘Senior Computer’ to Norman before the 2008 voter ‘speaks’ to the machine
Bonus Pick: The 480
By: Eugene Burdick
Publisher: McGraw Hill
Year: 1964
A bestselling novel by the glamorous political scientist and TV pundit of the JFK era, it criticises the use of polling and computers to the point of manipulating voters. The title refers to…
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Originally published at This Week, Those Books
