Breaking news: The presidential race is stable
Hillary Clinton isn't really in trouble. The pollsters are.
Nothing makes the political world lose its gravity as much as gyrations in polls during the final few weeks of a presidential race.
But if we let social scientists serve as psychological balms for our collective panic, we find that a large degree of that uncertainty can be accounted for by errors that humans make, by methodological traumas inherent to polling, and by differences in how likely certain groups of voters are to respond to pollsters when their candidates suffer through a bad news cycle.
It seems logical that Hillary Clinton would suffer in the polls if a negative event, like the FBI director's letter to Congress about her emails, dominates news coverage. It is not logical. It is, in fact, a classic example of a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. For one thing, there is no actual proof that a large enough cohort of undecided voters is going to shift their preferences at this late a date because they're reminded of Clinton's email scandals.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
For another, this type of explanation filters out everything else that's going on, including slower-developing, but more plausible drivers in voter preferences. It also ignores a quite obvious and well-studied phenomenon in polling: News events change the inclination of committed but less partisan voters to respond to pollsters. Simply put: If your candidate has a bad news cycle, you aren't as likely to be as enthusiastic about your vote, and you're less likely to respond to a pollster, or to be honest with a pollster about your partisan or ideological affinities.
And because the media will cover polls that depart from the mean, bad news cycles can be artificially prolonged, and the event that triggered the news cycle can suddenly acquire a salience that it doesn't actually have.
This is what's known as "differential non-response," and it's one of the biggest issues that survey takers have to deal with this close to an election. It turns out that, for a variety of reasons, it's much easier to get certain demographic groups to respond to a pollster's telephone call, regardless of the circumstance. If you're a white woman over the age of 50, you are more likely to respond to a pollster than if you are black, or Hispanic, or a millennial. Pollsters try to control for this in their weighting, but their sample sizes are often so small that tiny changes compound error rates.
Second: There are fewer pollsters conducting fewer state polls than before, which means that there is more variation across the average of these polls. Small fluctuations — essentially random fluctuations — seem larger than they are. Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst at Real Clear Politics, notes that "if the polls are coming slowly, where we only have three to five polls in an average at a time, the swings are going to look wild." FiveThirtyEight's Harry Enten found this troubling statistic: "From [a] month before election to nine days before it, we had 80 live interview polls in 2012 in 10 states closest to national vote. In 2016? Thirty-six."
Add to these layers of uncertainty two more facts:
1. Over time, the percentage of Americans who say they would participate in polls has declined significantly, from nearly one out of three in 1997 to one in 10 in 2016, according to Pew.
2. Half of American households don't even have landlines. The younger you are, the less likely you are to have ever used a telephone with a cord attached to it.
Again, pollsters try to correct for these skews by weighting and finding other ways to sample voters. But every interpolation creates additional room for error, quite apart from the survey's statistical "margin of error."
To be clear: The best evidence we have right now is that, as Mark Blumenthal of SurveyMonkey says, virtually all of those likely to vote have made up their minds by now.
Those polls point to a narrow, but solid, Clinton victory.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Marc Ambinder is TheWeek.com's editor-at-large. He is the author, with D.B. Grady, of The Command and Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry. Marc is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and GQ. Formerly, he served as White House correspondent for National Journal, chief political consultant for CBS News, and politics editor at The Atlantic. Marc is a 2001 graduate of Harvard. He is married to Michael Park, a corporate strategy consultant, and lives in Los Angeles.
-
'The House under GOP rule has become a hostile workplace'
Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
By Harold Maass, The Week US Published
-
The Shohei Ohtani gambling scandal is about more than bad bets
In The Spotlight The firestorm surrounding one of baseball's biggest stars threatens to upend a generational legacy and professional sports at large
By Rafi Schwartz, The Week US Published
-
Feds raid Diddy homes in alleged sex trafficking case
Speed Read Homeland Security raided the properties of hip hop mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs
By Peter Weber, The Week US Published
-
The debate about Biden's age and mental fitness
In Depth Some critics argue Biden is too old to run again. Does the argument have merit?
By Grayson Quay Published
-
How would a second Trump presidency affect Britain?
Today's Big Question Re-election of Republican frontrunner could threaten UK security, warns former head of secret service
By Harriet Marsden, The Week UK Published
-
'Rwanda plan is less a deterrent and more a bluff'
Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
By The Week UK Published
-
Henry Kissinger dies aged 100: a complicated legacy?
Talking Point Top US diplomat and Nobel Peace Prize winner remembered as both foreign policy genius and war criminal
By Harriet Marsden, The Week UK Last updated
-
Trump’s rhetoric: a shift to 'straight-up Nazi talk'
Why everyone's talking about Would-be president's sinister language is backed by an incendiary policy agenda, say commentators
By The Week UK Published
-
More covfefe: is the world ready for a second Donald Trump presidency?
Today's Big Question Republican's re-election would be a 'nightmare' scenario for Europe, Ukraine and the West
By Sorcha Bradley, The Week UK Published
-
Xi-Biden meeting: what's in it for both leaders?
Today's Big Question Two superpowers seek to stabilise relations amid global turmoil but core issues of security, trade and Taiwan remain
By Harriet Marsden, The Week UK Published
-
Will North Korea take advantage of Israel-Hamas conflict?
Today's Big Question Pyongyang's ties with Russia are 'growing and dangerous' amid reports it sent weapons to Gaza
By Harriet Marsden, The Week UK Published