Twenty years ago, on September 27, 2004, the front page of the New York Times featured an article about then-Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and Chinese assault rifles. During an interview with Outdoor Life, Mr. Kelly suggested he also owned one, but the Times reported that Mr. Kelly did not actually own it. Elsewhere in the day’s papers, a preview of the upcoming debate between Kerry and George W. A short check-in was posted. In the primary election, he squandered his early lead in vote share. There were also seven letters to the editor about Stanley Fish’s editorial titled “Candidates from the Classroom.” Fish had surveyed his freshman composition class at the University of Illinois at Chicago about who had won previous debates between Bush and Kerry. An overwhelming majority (13-2) believed that Bush was a more effective communicator. Fish provides a “devastating” analysis, including an assessment of who used topic sentences at the beginning of their answers, and how, at a pivotal moment in the debate, Bush listed countries that included the letter “A.” He provided a “devastating” analysis, including his own asides about the issue. “He and his speechwriters deserve credit for using the coincidence of happiness to give coherence and force to their arguments,” Fish wrote.
There was no talk about polls. By contrast, as I write this column on September 23, 2024, the Times has published articles on polls in Sunbelt states, “racial climate” on Harris’ small debate backlash, and another article titled “What’s Behind President Trump’s Vest?” Voting results will be available within weeks. “I’ve long been very critical of how much space polls take up in political discussions. The reason is very simple. While polls do play a role in assessing the state of elections, polls are a type of practice in which pundits and politicians publish erroneous poll results and treat them as irrefutable evidence. It gave rise to sophistry. the will of the voters. The result is a tower of bad ratings built on a foundation of solid polling and good pollsters. The question is not whether we should “trust the polls.” The question is whether the onslaught of analysis and extrapolation that inevitably follows them actually has any predictive or explanatory power.
We commentators provide these polls because the public wants to read them. You want to read a poll that says your candidate is up 5 points nationally. And when another poll two days later shows your camp trailing in a battleground state, you want to feel a sense of panic that you have to do something to correct the situation. boat. In a moment of fear, we offer possible solutions to make the polls look the same as they did two days ago. An assembly line is being built. One of hundreds of voting organizations generates a number, which is then given to someone who informs the public. The number is then delivered to the finishing department and they are told how they feel about the number. What we don’t really know is whether this line of discourse is better now than it was 20 years ago, when Stanley Fish was writing about every country with an “A” in it. That’s true.
This poll-first approach to political commentary was born, in part, from fantasy sports. If you look at today’s polling gurus, you’d be hard-pressed to find one who doesn’t at least dabble in fantasy sports. Many of them I interviewed last year, including Split Ticket’s Lakshya Jain and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver, got their start as fantasy sports sites. The overlap is obvious. If you can build an argument around one set of numbers, that skill can transfer to another set of numbers. In some ways, this was a positive development, given how closed-off, rigid, and secretive the field of political science is. But the shift to fantasy politics distracts from the real show — the candidates and their promises — and instead promotes the belief that a few tweaks here and there can lead a campaign to the promised land. We encouraged this type of thinking.
Fantasy sports has turned fans into managers. Sports conversations are increasingly focused on deals and contracts. Players were discussed as value-creating machines. Today, thanks to the explosion of sports gambling content and the continued dominance of fantasy leagues, sports media pumps out all sorts of ridiculous numbers, many of which are misleading, at least from a gambling perspective. Either it’s a thing or it’s complete nonsense. Is this worse than the days when bourbon-soaked dilettantes wrote 6,000-word profiles of eccentric country club legends for Sports Illustrated? I don’t have a lot of nostalgia for stuffy, overly lavish prose or sports metaphors, but every time I fire up a game or read a sports website, I’m reminded of the odds, advice on parlays for the same game, I think it’s an almost mindless loyalty to numbers. As I was watching the Florida State vs. UC Berkeley game last Saturday, I noticed that the announcer kept repeating what “analysis” does in certain fourth-down situations. It was impressive to hear that “analysis” is not only monolithic (certainly different analyzes will give different answers), but also anthropomorphic, with no doubts about the conclusions. Whose analysis are we talking about? Are you really sure they are right?
Fantasy political experts similarly think of themselves as management consultants to some political party (usually the Democratic Party). I’d like to provide a list of the perpetrators, but frankly, almost all of the commentators, myself included, have been doing this a lot lately. We look at the polls, peek at undecided voters in battleground states, and should we bench Matthew Stafford and pick Baker Mayfield off the waiver wire in Week 4? says Kamara with the geeky confidence of an NFL quant. Harris should definitely lean to the right on immigration, or argue that Donald Trump is losing the election because he can’t control his erratic impulses. The problem is that while fantasy sports rely on a more or less agreed-upon statistical foundation, fantasy politics typically draws conclusions based on more questionable polling data. At the very least, NFL quants give you a set of actionable instructions that lead to results. If you select Mayfield in fantasy football, he will score more points, fewer points, or the same amount of points than Stafford. This does not apply to fantasy experts. Outside of scattered exit poll data and anecdotes, we don’t really know why elections were won or lost. Even if we can properly identify the issues that voters care about, whether it’s the economy or how honest candidates are, there is no logical connection between political fantasy advice and election results. The connection is still missing. There are plenty of good disclaimers about sample size and poll quality, so you can make educated guesses. But such hopeful, mostly academic stories don’t sell that well, so we confidently shellac everything and hope, perhaps by chance, that the world will prove us right. I hope you will.
The influence of fantasy politics players comes in no small part from an almost realistic anxiety about all the things we don’t actually know. We want to believe that numbers can ease our uncertainties, and we want to believe that a bunch of nerdy wizards have the algorithms to unlock the world’s bounty. But the assembly line of number production and analysis comes at the expense of informing voters about the candidates. We don’t need to abandon polls as a tool. Nor do we need to go back to the days when each candidate’s height or the color of the tie they wore mattered. But so many articles about Trump and Harris’ moves in battleground states don’t actually discuss morality or real-world things when real issues are mostly discussed through their impact on polls. There is little room left. An example of how a candidate’s position on an issue can change a country. Certainly, if one candidate wins over another, different policies will emerge, making the last part of the process (where numbers are used to tell candidates what to do) more predictive. If I had believed it, I might have believed it more. But as Donald Trump ramps up his attacks on the Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, shouting, “We have to get rid of them once and for all,” the game of political fantasy feels less serious and more beside the point. It will be done. ♦
