Polls of Midterm Voters Are Prone to ‘Bandwagon Effect,’ Are Unreliable: Experts

Polls of prospective voters, which have been widely cited throughout the 2022 midterm races, are based on flawed methodology, and their use as a tool to achieve the outcome desired by the mainstream media has been conspicuous during this election cycle, political strategists and polling experts have told The Epoch Times.

Whatever limited use polls may have, one of their likely consequences, in the current politicized environment, is the “bandwagon effect.” This describes a phenomenon where the media misuse polls to demoralize political opponents and their supporters and to suggest to undecided voters that they are out of step with majoritarian and mainstream sentiment if they do not get on board with the candidate or candidates whom the polls favor, one expert said. Hence polls favoring candidates whom the media want to win become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Poll results from such sources such as FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics, along with those in mainstream media outlets such as the New York Times, have consistently favored Democrat candidates in the closely watched Senate and gubernatorial races, though the margins have shrunken since the summer.

The bounce in opinion polls that Democrat candidates enjoyed well into the summer and early fall was largely a function of some voters’ wariness over the Supreme Court’s June 24 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, Leitner believes. It is a mistake to construe that short-term reaction as a broad endorsement of Democrat candidates and their views on issues as varied as crime, inflation, border security, the Ukraine crisis, and other issues.

“I think we are seeing that the Democrats peaked too soon as they got a big bounce this summer shortly after the Supreme Court decision re. Roe v. Wade. Polls show that abortion isn’t even the top-three issue for the majority of Americans when asked. Everything is coming back to inflation, the economy, gas prices, and crime,” Leitner said.

These statistically minuscule slivers of the states’ voting-age populations thus cannot be expected to provide reliable samples on which to generalize about the likely outcome of critical races, and the numbers of respondents here are actually at the high end, with many polls sampling four to five hundred prospective voters or even fewer.

“People who are looking at polls where the sample is [made up of] registered voters are wasting their time, because those polls are designed to make Democrats look good. People need to focus on polls that have a larger sample, like 1,000 voters, and they need to be ‘likely voters’ versus registered voters,” Leitner said.

Moreover, polls often fail to take into account the momentum generated by successful candidates in races outside the scope of the polls, which can carry over into the races that the polls do address, the analyst posited. This is particularly the case for independents and voters who have not yet made up their minds.

“When looking at those polls, you will see that Republican candidates from Oregon to Arizona to North Carolina are getting some wind at their backs largely because the GOP base is coming home and undecided voters who aren’t necessarily Republicans know they don’t want Joe Biden and the Democrats,” he said.

“The pollsters claim they fixed their polling for 2022, but I doubt it. There appears to be a bias towards the Democrats by the major media polls, but we won’t really know until the votes are counted. The thing about polling is that it is an estimation, which is always a bit uncertain. But the major media polls’ errors always seem to favor the Democrats,” Keith Naughton, the principal of Silent Majority Strategies, a political consultancy based in Germantown, Maryland, told The Epoch Times.

“I’m a proponent of polling. I think it’s incumbent on those who study democracy to make a solid effort to ascertain what people think,” Daron Shaw, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told The Epoch Times.

“There are people who do it earnestly and do it well. There may be some hacks, but more often than not, you’re talking about people who are credentialed and making a good-faith effort to find out what’s going on,” he added.

Yet even the most sophisticated methodologies come up against the fact that some constituencies are simply more responsive than others, and it just so happens that some of the prospective voters least likely tell pollsters anything tend to lean Republican, Shaw acknowledged.

“Scientifically, it’s absolutely solid, but there are enormous challenges to polling effectively in modern contexts,” he said.

As an example of the difficulties pollsters come up against, Shaw pointed to the constituency that Trump set out to galvanize in 2016 and 2020.

“Trump and others told us they were going to go out and identify those voters, less well-educated whites, who feel that they’ve been left behind. ‘We’re going to find those voters and register them.’ And people who followed voting in the Upper Midwest said, ‘Good luck,’” Shaw said.

But the Trump campaign was aggressive in pitching to these voters, and was successful. “The numbers are fairly indisputable,” he noted.

These efforts led to a high turnout for Trump in 2016 among blue-collar whites, many of whom, Shaw observed, were part of a constituency that had voted Democrat going back to the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In the 2016 race, Trump narrowly won both Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by margins of 0.23 percent, 0.77 percent, and 0.72 percent, respectively.

“They turned pretty Republican, and I mention that only because that’s where all the energy has been concentrated. There were lower response rates for this particular constituency, and they were slightly underrepresented [in polling] in 2016 and maybe again in 2020,” Shaw said.

The mistakes made in the past occurred through a large swath of blue-collar America, including a state, Pennsylvania, where a Senate race that has gained international attention and is considered crucial to the balance of power in Washington now unfolds.

“In 2016, the big misses were in the Upper Midwest states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—and those places were significantly under-polled,” Shaw acknowledged.

Nate Silver, the director of FiveThirtyEight, did not respond by press time to a request for comment from The Epoch Times.