I don't get this and really wonder if it works as designed. Personally, if my preferred candidate is behind or appears to be, it motivates me more to get to the voting booth.

On the other hand, with lukewarm voters if your preferred candidate seems to have it in the bag why vote when the Game Box is calling you to play?

Please explain it to me like a five year old if this really works and how this helps a candidate to be "ahead."

sam callahan said:

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A lot of people's vote is no deeper than wanting to be on the winning side.

A lot.

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I've wondered the OP's question also and this is the conclusion I come to as well.

It might have an impact, but I think it's overplayed to feel better about your guy being down in the polls.

There is the case where polls create an expectation of result. So if the polls show candidate A win then people think that will happen. If the counting office stops until midnight and "finds" votes for candidate A it is an easier sell that everything was above board because people already thought that was the outcome.

When you think of it as far as money goes, then you'll understand more. No one donates to a losing cause and few people donate to a for sure winner. It's a proven fact that the majority of polls have been wrong in one direction for the past 10 years. Is it because conservatives are less likely to answer the phone and give their opinion? That probably explains some of it, but it's my opinion that when people need money, and lots of it, they'll lie and manipulate to get it. How many New York and LA fundraisers can you turn out if the polls show Talarico 5 points behind?

Big Data Poll and Trafalgar are not manipulating polls. These are solid pollsters and their results are alarming to me.

Polls are idiotic, non-scientific gobbledyguk.

Every pollster skews "data", knowingly, with their differing variables.

The only "poll" that matters is on election day.

But, to the OP, yes.... simple-minded tards can be swayed by polls.

It also impacts campaign donations.

And it "normalizes" weird ass candidates. 2 years ago, most people would have looked at Talarico and correctly identified him as a loon. But people think "well, if that many people are supporting him, he can't be that bad."

Candidates release polls to manipulate donors and voters. Money to the suspected winner or money to the one trailing but within reach.

Media releases polls to show the races are close to get ad revenue.

sam callahan said:

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A lot of people's vote is no deeper than wanting to be on the winning side.

A lot.

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You certainly see it around here.

who pays for said polls?

Yup, I know people who are not voting because Paxton is a sleeze and Talarico is a freak. Sad state of the situation

yup

so many of them are just made for manipulation

sometimes donors, sometimes voters, sometime public opinion

The models fall apart when they cant hit enthusiasm and makeup percentages

Pollsters have missed cruz/beto, trump/hillary and others in Texas by wide margins

campaigns have their own internal polls where they are polling specifics criteria, usually not made public

The problem is if you keep manipulating and playing with the polls you are going to have a mess on your hands.

Rapier108 said:

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As Rush Limbaugh said about polls, "polling is now about making news, not reporting the public's opinion on it."

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Pretty myopic considering that are the national level, the party largely determines what happens, not the talking head in the seat. The staffers and party machinery. The seat is what gets counted to determine majority and minority status of each party and therefore chairmanship and majority in all of the committees which is where the real action takes place.

Translation: Frequent and reliably Democratic voters (voted D in 4 of 4 elections) are answering polls much more often than frequent Republican voters.

Some pollsters have compensated for this since 2016, but many still haven’t — and that will inevitably skew polling averages. https://t.co/CQ7yYaTi1i

— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) October 13, 2026

Who in the hell answers their phone when they see the number come up? 25 years ago, maybe some. Now, you have to be a true political maniac or demented. I believe it is garbage in, garbage out so they are purely used to tell whatever story the pollster wants.

Seriously, show of hands who has answered a polling call within the last 5 years and how many times?

Dan Scott said:

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It might have an impact, but I think it's overplayed to feel better about your guy being down in the polls.

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1. Trump outperformed polls by 3% for three consecutive elections.
2. In September 2024 Rasmussen began predicting that the polls predicting a Harris win would shift to the right throughout October so that they were predicting a Trump win by the end of the month. And of course they did.

At this point we have 10 years of dishonest polling to suggest they are trying to engineer a result. That nobody believes them is their own fault.

Rapier108 said:

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As Rush Limbaugh said about polls, "polling is now about making news, not reporting the public's opinion on it."

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Bill Clinton was the first to use "polling as 'news' " that I can remember. But Democrats are masters of it.

Especially since now they have no compunction about blatantly lying.

And who can forget that lying ***** Iowa in 2024?

She just flat made that **** up, which anyone who spends any time in Iowa would know. They depend on ignorance.

polls have diminishing usefulness. It appears to me (anecdotal observation only) that more and more polls does not mean improved aggregate accuracy. But they keep generating news and headlines so we keep them up.


Also, while we're at it, the term "internal polling" doesn't make sense to me. Why would candidates perform internal polling (on election outcome) when public polls are legion?

According to Gemini, actual election results fall within the "margin of error" around 60% of the time. By definition, this should be 95% of the time.

Ellis Wyatt said:

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And who can forget that lying ***** Iowa in 2024?

She just flat made that **** up, which anyone who spends any time in Iowa would know. They depend on ignorance.

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Ann Setzer was one of the best regarded pollsters in operation for many years and had made a number of counterintuitive predictions that had proven correct (most famously, calling Obama's victory over Hillary in the 2008 Iowa caucuses).

The "official" explanation for her disastrous claim that Harris was going to win IOWA was that she was essentially the last pollster left doing the "gold standard" version of polling by random digit dialing, and that after the election she concluded that her **** simply didn't work anymore, and so retired. The reason being, just about nobody answers the phone for a number they don't know nowadays, and that the tiny percentage of people who do are a hopelessly non-representative sample.

I think the explanation is plausible, although the result was so bad that my original suspicion that she was smoking hopium still seems credible. And I can't really blame anyone for having more conspiratorial thoughts, although the idea that a random ass poll of Iowa on the eve of the election would swing the whole contest is so loony that I have trouble believing someone would pay for it.

YokelRidesAgain said:

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Ellis Wyatt said:

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And who can forget that lying ***** Iowa in 2024?

She just flat made that **** up, which anyone who spends any time in Iowa would know. They depend on ignorance.

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Ann Setzer was one of the best regarded pollsters in operation for many years and had made a number of counterintuitive predictions that had proven correct (most famously, calling Obama's victory over Hillary in the 2008 Iowa caucuses).

The "official" explanation for her disastrous claim that Harris was going to win IOWA was that she was essentially the last pollster left doing the "gold standard" version of polling by random digit dialing, and that after the election she concluded that her **** simply didn't work anymore, and so retired. The reason being, just about nobody answers the phone for a number they don't know nowadays, and that the tiny percentage of people who do are a hopelessly non-representative sample.

I think the explanation is plausible, although the results was so bad that my original suspicion that she was smoking hopium still seems credible. And I can't really blame anyone for having more conspiratorial thoughts, although the idea that a random ass poll of Iowa on the eve of the election would swing the whole contest is so loony that I have trouble believing someone would pay for it.

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Or she took a parachute payment from the Harris campaign in hopea of swinging the election knowing she was retiring

The only accurate polls are the ones that show republicans in the lead.

Omperlodge said:

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Or she took a parachute payment from the Harris campaign in hopea of swinging the election knowing she was retiring

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My point is that I don't see the motivation, when you look beyond the superficial level. The 2024 Selzer poll in Iowa came out at the 11th and-a-half hour, in the evening on the Friday before Election Day-after millions of people had already voted.

If you have any idea who the **** Ann Selzer is, you're already a political junkie, and a well informed one, at that. There may have been a few tuned-in Republican voters who looked at her as the Oracle of Delphi or something and went to play golf instead of voting, but I doubt that amounted to more than 1,000 people in the entire country.

In that context, who would pay more than a pittance for a poll suggesting a Dem victory in Iowa, and would the dollar amount possibly be enough for Selzer to set fire to her professional reputation at the end of a long and distinguished career?

Maybe, if she was in a bad enough spot financially for some reason, but I would really have to see the figurative receipts to buy that.

She sold out. Her poll was fraudulent and everyone in Iowa I talked to in 2024 was screaming bull***** My in-laws live in Iowa and I am there several times a year. The ***** lied.

Ellis Wyatt said:

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She sold out. Her poll was fraudulent and everyone in Iowa I talked to in 2024 was screaming bull***** My in-laws live in Iowa and I am there several times a year. The ***** lied.

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Yeah, man, I go to Iowa like 30 times a year, too. The poll result didn't pass the 'WTF" test.

My question is, who would pay her and why would they do that, given the very limited implications? You don't pay someone a million dollars to produce a poll result that will almost certainly have no impact whatsoever on the election, and if you're Ann Selzer you don't cast a pall over your entire career at the end of it for $10,000 or some such nonsense.

I think that she was dealing with a severely flawed sample, and twiddled the proverbial knobs (perhaps even subconsciously) to produce the result that she wanted to be true.

What is important to understand here is that ALL pollsters for 20+ years have understood implicitly that some people are much easier to reach than others, and that you have to adjust your sample for those propensities or your results will be useless. It's easier to fool yourself than you might think.

Tony Franklins Other Shoe said:

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Who in the hell answers their phone when they see the number come up? 25 years ago, maybe some. Now, you have to be a true political maniac or demented. I believe it is garbage in, garbage out so they are purely used to tell whatever story the pollster wants.

Seriously, show of hands who has answered a polling call within the last 5 years and how many times?

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Bingo… no way am I answering any of those calls I don't care who they are. I could care less if I talk to either side. This stuff gets so stupid in October.. I'll be happy when these elections are over, no more ridiculous calls or text about politics…. Please just let me eat my hamburger and fries in peace

BQ78 said:

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I don't get this and really wonder if it works as designed. Personally, if my preferred candidate is behind or appears to be, it motivates me more to get to the voting booth.

On the other hand, with lukewarm voters if your preferred candidate seems to have it in the bag why vote when the Game Box is calling you to play?

Please explain it to me like a five year old if this really works and how this helps a candidate to be "ahead."

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Part of the whole game is to make Republicans feel like there's no momentum and no hope. It's to get them to be disillusioned because when Republicans are disillusioned they stay home.

Billys Cesspool Enjoyer said:

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The only accurate polls are the ones that show republicans in the lead.

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Nice attempt at deflection. The only accurate poll is the one that accurately predicts the results of the election. That seems so incredibly obvious that it's sad it has to be said. Now, by definition that means we don't know how accurate the polls are right now but my money is on "not very" based on how poor they have been in recent elections. That lack of confidence in their product reflects a lack of confidence in their integrity and that's their problem, not mine.

Like I already said Trump outperformed the polls by 3% for three consecutive elections such that I posted on this forum about this time in 2024 that he would win the popular vote by about 1.5%. A couple of the board's lefties laughed and said it was impossible for a Republican to win the popular vote but I was right. How did I make such a prediction? I simply looked at the polls and added 3% to account for the bias built into those them.

This phenomenon has played out across all elections in the Trump era, it's not limited to him. Conservative candidates outperform the polls nearly universally at this point. It is what it is. I don't know what's causing it. Is it bias from a group of people willing to sell their soul to influence the election? Is it cultural because people don't answer unknown numbers anymore? I don't know and the cause isn't mine to figure out. I just know it happens enough that conservatives have learned polls aren't trustworthy. It is what it is.