Don’t want this thread to be about Biden vs. Trump itself (we have a hundred other threads for that,) but rather, about one particular subset of politics:
Anytime someone cites polls that show that a particular candidate is facing a serious chance of losing (such as, holding only a slim lead, tied, or trailing,) there is often a tendency for that candidate’s supporters to lash out against the poll, or person, as if the person somehow doesn’t want the candidate to win.
It makes as little sense as saying that someone who reports that the Yankees are trailing by 2 runs doesn’t want the Yankees to win.
Example: If someone cites polls showing that Biden is facing a tough slog and Trump has a very real chance of winning (or vice versa,) Biden (or Trump) voters will then lash out. They will accuse the person who cites the poll of being anti-Biden or anti-Trump. Either that, or they will say “It’s only May, it’s too early” (which is a perfectly fair statement, except that these people often latch onto polls that are favorable to their candidate without attaching that same caveat - “It’s only May, it’s too early.”)
The same Trump voters who reject all polls that showed Hillary or Biden leading, often enthusiastically embrace any polls that show Trump winning - as if polls that favor Trump are somehow more scientifically run.
Is it…an aversion to bad news? A desire to wish bad news away? I don’t get this mindset. Assuming that a poll is run scientifically, it’s simply a statement of fact. (And, of course, one could challenge the accuracy of the poll, but there is, as mentioned, a strange double standard where polls that favor one’s candidate are held to the loosest of standards while those that are unfavorable to the candidate are held to the toughest of standards.)
“Polls that favor my candidate are solid; polls that go against my candidate are garbage.”
Even the legit news programs tend to spin the polls results one way or another. Slim lead, tied, and trailing hardly represent a serious chance of losing and I think people are objecting to them being categorized as anything but an indication of a close race. Then some people do just want to shoot the messenger because they see it all as cheering for one side or the other and they consider you as someone cheering for the away team.
Additionally, right-wing pollsters have flooded the zone in recent years. IMHO, polling is too easy to game with modern media to treat poll numbers as determinative. “Where things stand”, unfortunately, is now purposefully occluded at best.
The latest uproar on parts of the Internet is the NY Times/Siena poll, which to my knowledge is a perfectly fine poll. (I once got a poll call from Siena when I lived a few miles from the college years ago.) The comments are the standard NY Times readership encapsulation of everything described in this thread and in the “Who to Blame?” thread.
To some degree, I think the last eight or nine years has really affected how a group of people think and react far out of proportion to how they were actually affected. And that this continues to affect how they respond to things like an unfavorable poll to where you get comments like “The youth care more about being antisemitic than they do about living in a dictatorship once they let Trump win.”
It wasn’t only about Biden-Trump, but I had to cite the most recent example, which would be the ongoing election. But this phenomenon has been present for many years. Basically, many people will accept polls that favor them and reject polls that go against them, even if run by the same pollster or same organization.
Yes, that’s human nature. People are more willing to accept things that fit their preconceived notions than not.
That’s not even a bad thing. If people didn’t do that, experience would be meaningless. It only becomes a problem when people take it too far and become willfully ignorant in the effort to prove themselves right.
That’s true. However in your OP you mentioned a particular candidate having a serious chance of losing, not both of them. If you just name one of them it sounds like you’re implying the other one has an advantage.
But it’s very often not phrased that way. It’s very often phrased as ‘X has a serious chance of losing! Those who favor them should be worried’ which really doesn’t come across the same way as ‘X and Y both have a serious chance of losing! Anyone who favors either of them should be worried’.
The New York Times is out with its Battleground States Poll, so time for everyone to panic. But not me! I’m here to make sure everyone takes a deep breath and puts out any fires they may have set to their hair.
And fires were set, indeed. In fairness, if you were to view just the headlines and breathless cable news coverage of the poll, you might just have an anxiety attack. According to the Times, Trump is leading Biden in 5 out of 6 battleground states—and there goes the election, our democracy and the world!
One common reaction among readers is to sigh and simply say, “Ignore the polls.” While this is understandable, given how wrong they usually are and how much stress they inevitably cause, I want to push back on this approach.
I prefer instead to question the polls and their methodologies and call them out on why they are non-predictive and how they have been misused to create electoral agita. In doing so, I hope to arm readers with actual arguments and data that they can absorb and perhaps even transmit to others whose hair may be on fire. Telling the fire-setters to ignore the polls, when none of the media ever does, is unlikely to prove effective. Explaining, on the other hand, that the poll they may be citing is an outlier, and not to be taken at face value for the following reasons, is a far more informed and productive path, in my view.
Let me say this plainly: The Times poll is intentionally Trump- and conservative-leaning, both in how it was structured and how it was promoted. There may be fine reasons for this, but they are not discussed anywhere. And its data contains some eyebrow raising anomalies that it either glosses over or ignores completely.
Exactly. For me it has nothing to do with partisanship on my part, but rather the motivations of people who spout these things without even acknowledging the numerous flaws in these polls, which makes me wonder what might be the actual agendas of the ones pointing out the poll, hidden or otherwise. If they simply haven’t done their homework then I can likewise discount their motivations since they are too ignorant to worry about.
Plus in this specific election any convictions of Trump (or subsequent actions of any dire sort) would presumably be total game-changers, so getting all hyper over a poll 6 months before the real thing are pretty pointless.
My perspective, and why I don’t read those threads, is two-fold – I no longer trust polling (nor the interpretation of polling by news organizations) to predict anything very accurately, and in a close race even less so, especially this early. Second, and a much stronger reaction for me, is that this election is so important, and so fraught, and I constantly feel helpless to move the needle (especially since my state is already so reliably blue) that it is emotionally painful to me to contemplate a negative outcome. By not reading the threads I am putting my fingers in my ear and refusing to listen, because I don’t want to hear it. If the worst happens, I will of course deal with it as best I can, and move on. But I seen no purpose personally in anticipating the worst.
Since I don’t read the threads, I don’t post the kinds of objections that OP has listed. But sometimes I feel them anyway, just from the titles.
An early literary citing of “killing the messenger” is in Plutarch’s Lives : "The first messenger, that gave notice of Lucullus’ coming was so far from pleasing Tigranes that, he had his head cut off for his pains; and no man dared to bring further information.
Plutarch’s cite comes from one of the battles between Armenia and Rome, circa 69-67 BCE. The sentiment is not unique to politics, modern times, or even the Western Hemisphere.
Part of it might be a desire to avoid cognitive dissonance. If you support a candidate it may be obvious to you that they are the better choice and have difficulty understanding how anyone could think differently. The idea that not only do some people think differently but the majority of people think differently is hard to accept and so is discounted.
Another thing that comes up is that often reporting that said candidate is losing, is followed up with a set of radical solutions that need to be implemented to solve the problem. If the current situation is indeed hopeless then the only choice is to try to radically change things in the hopes you get lucky and the new state of affairs is better. But if it is a minor setback taking radical action might make things worse.
To use the sports analogy in the OP, saying that the Yankees are trailing by 2 runs at the top of the 4th doesn’t mean you need to change your pitcher.