Who Are Polls For?
Writing for the people who completely seize up every time polls show up in email subjects and headlines
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If you pay attention to politics and have been anywhere near the news or the internet recently, you may have noticed that the polls aren’t great. I’m not going to reference any specific ones, because they make me crazy, but a lot of them have Donald Trump winning the 2024 Presidential election. This newsletter, however, is not about the polls, not really. As with everything I try to write, it’s about us, instead.
Polls make me crazy for the same reason my phone makes me crazy. I want to know what everyone else knows. I want to triangulate my feelings and calibrate my expectations in the futile pursuit of getting an A in being a human. I’m an anxiety-researcher. If you have told me about a health condition you have at any point in the past ten years, I’m currently an expert in it. I want someone to tell me what’s going to happen, something that will make me feel better.
But here’s the thing - polls never make me feel better. Even good polls make me crazy because I can’t trust them and I worry they make people complacent about the work we need to do to win. (Is this based in some lingering self-recrimination about my complacency in 2016? That’s between me and my therapist!) But no one knows what’s going to happen. Even the polling doesn’t know what’s going to happen. Polling can tell you some things about what’s going on right now. It can’t tell you much about what’s going to happen later. And if you need a proof point, at this time in 2020 there was still one out of state trip between me and the COVID shut down.
Polls are good for some stuff. Campaigns can use them to figure out how to most effectively direct resources. They can tell campaigns what communities care most about and target their advertising more effectively. They can help campaigns figure out how to change course when things aren’t working like they should. They can also help determine the right messaging - how to show voters how their policies and plans will help them in a way that’s easy to understand and easy to spread. Polls can also help folks in government figure out policy priorities and pain points for their constituents.
It’s possible that news organizations have a good reason to run polls besides making us crazy to generate clicks, but I haven’t actually figured out what it is yet.
I’m not a campaign professional, and I don’t work in politics or the news. I write this newsletter for people like me - people who care a lot and are just trying to get through the day and leave the world a little better than they found it. And I don’t know that the polls are really for us. It usually takes me until after Labor Day to say this, but times they are a changin’, so here it is: ignore the polls and get back to work.
Okay, it’s a little more nuanced than that. If the polls help you stay motivated, if they feed your work, keep reading them. But if, like me, the anxiety starts to paralyze you, or the doomerism starts to whisper insidiously that nothing matters, it’s time to go outside, touch grass, kiss a baby, pet a dog, get a little treat, and then get back to work.
What does that look like? I’m so glad you asked.
Whenever I see information going around about polls, good or bad, I close down whatever social media platform I’m looking at. In about 99.9% of cases, I find that the social media discourse of something is worse than the thing itself, so if you need more information I suggest finding some longform writing about it from commentators you trust. A not insignificant number of you found this newsletter via @/danpfeiffer so I know a lot of you are already Message Box readers, but if you’re not, I highly suggest subscribing for important poll context and messaging guidance. I also follow Anat Shenker-Osorio for more guidance on how to talk about politics like a real, thinking, feeling person, since mostly what we receive from political commentary is…not that.
But I’m not a pollster and I don’t interpret data. So I also follow organizations that are great at telling you how to direct your resources. Swing Left puts together high impact funds where they’ve done all the work for you to figure out in which races your money will have the most impact. Vote Save America also has an Anxiety Relief Fund which I highly recommend because they distribute your money to grassroots organizations doing important work on the ground and in their own communities and in places where that money will make a huge difference. Set up a recurring donation and then go to a museum or something.
When you get back, however, it’s time to sign up for some volunteer shifts. As my own election year quip goes, I’m sorry, but some of you are going to have to make phone calls.
It may only be March, and a lot can change between now and November, but there’s plenty of work to do right now.
Vote Forward has a letter campaign for Virginia about gun safety legislation.
Field Team 6 is registering Democratic voters across the country
NextGen America is calling and texting young voters
Vote Save America has an Action Finder on their website tailored to your state, with plenty of options from calling and canvassing to postcard writing.
It’s going to be a long year, and we have a lot to do, so there’s no reason to go crazy just yet. But if you sign up for a shift now, start brushing out the cobwebs and shaking out the nerves, it’ll make it that much easier to ramp up as we get closer and closer to Election Day.
Across the country we have the opportunity to elect people to every level of government who will fight for us, for our friends and family, our neighbors and our community. We can elect people who will fund free lunch programs instead of making it a priority to take food from hungry kids. We can keep book banners off our school boards, and transphobic legislators out of our state houses. We can expand our majority in the Senate and take back the House and protect abortion rights, fight climate change, ban assault weapons, and more. And we can keep the guy facing 91 felony counts, who engineered the overturning of Roe v. Wade and was found guilty of rape by a jury of every day Americans, who plans to use the military to attack protests, and so much more out of the White House.
So, yeah - let’s ignore the polls and get back to work, shall we? I’ll see you out there.
Yes, I have decided not to pay attention to polls because they cause my anxiety to spike, and the information isn't going to change how I feel about this election or what I plan to do between now and November to get Joe Biden re-elected.