Polls, Lies, and Damned Lies

“I think we have to get used to flying blind,” says Cook Political Report editor David Wasserman.

Photo by Simone Secci on Unsplash.

“How does the unreliability of polling, at least in 2020 and 2016, factor into the way you rate and think about races this year?”

The billion-dollar question — on the mind of every campaign manager, pollster and political analyst in the country — was asked of Cook Political Report house editor David Wasserman by Benjamin Hart for the Intelligencer on October 20, 2022.

Wasserman’s answer was illuminating, and not in a good way.

“I tend to weigh the last election results perhaps a bit more heavily than some other colleagues who are a little more poll-based in their models,” Wasserman explained:

“I think we have to get used to flying blind. With response rates as low as they are, it is fairly miraculous that polls can tell us much about the state of politics at all.”

While responsible pollsters and polling companies have made Herculean efforts to count all those impossible-to-poll voters, various methods of weighting answers to compensate have proven unreliable at best over the past few election cycles.