No cheery time for election pollsters in run-up to US midterms

Filed 45m ago · Via The Conversation · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Fiddles McGinty

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Anthony Parkes · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Pollsters head into the midterms carrying a decade of high-profile misses, from underestimating Trump's 2016 support to the worst collective 2020 performance in 40 years to a third straight underestimate of Trump in 2024. August 2026 brought fresh embarrassment: double-digit polling leads in Michigan and Wisconsin primaries evaporated on election night, and a 21-year-old college graduate was found to have fabricated poll results distributed through a website, some of which got picked up by a mayoral campaign and news outlets before being exposed.

Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi have moved to fill the credibility gap, correctly calling the 2024 presidential race while polls favored Harris. But those markets stumbled too, giving a Wisconsin gubernatorial primary candidate a 95-96% win probability shortly before she lost. Low survey response rates and inconsistent statistical weighting compound pollsters' troubles, while AI-simulated ‘silicon sampling’ adds a new layer of uncertainty to an already shaky trade.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

When a 21-year-old with a laptop can plant a fake poll that ends up on a mayor's own campaign account, the industry's credibility problem isn't really about statistics anymore. The prediction markets crowing about beating the pollsters lost a coin flip of their own in Wisconsin and went quiet about it. Everybody in this business is guessing, they just dress the guess up differently depending on who's selling it.

Source: Read the original at The Conversation → Scored: Fiddles McGinty · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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