Stephen Colbert calls out just how broken 2024 polling is
While polling has its problems in general these days, one poll in particular – from the New York Times – continues to stand out as being completely absurd. The NYT poll inexplicably shows Donald Trump doing well with women voters and youth voters, which is… not possible.
Even as major media outlets continue to quote this NYT poll as if it were legitimate (and often as if it were the only poll), it’s taken Stephen Colbert of all people to mathematically dismantle the poll. Colbert pointed out during his late night show that while Biden defeated Trump with women voters by 11 points in 2020, this new NYT poll has Trump ahead of Biden with women voters in 2024. Given that nothing in the real world has happened to cause such a shift, it’s obvious that the poll is simply getting its sampling wrong.
This New York Times poll has been wildly wrong like this for months. Each time it’s conducted again, the New York Times has a new opportunity to fix its fatally flawed methodology, yet it refuses to do so. Instead it keeps putting out poll numbers that are so laughably inaccurate, late night hosts are making fun of how obviously broken the poll is.
So why is the New York Times unwilling to fix its broken poll? The answer may be in just how much media attention this broken poll keeps getting. “Trump is ahead of Biden” is a more ratings friendly narrative than “Biden is ahead of Trump,” and so every time the New York Times puts out a new version of its flawed poll, the New York Times gets a new round of media attention.
As I’ve said many times, the polls have their problems, but the real problem is that the media keeps misrepresenting what the polls are even saying. There can be ten polls showing Biden ahead of Trump or a tied race, but if there’s one poll that week showing Trump ahead of Biden, the entire media will pretend like that one poll is the only poll. If the media would stop rewarding the most obviously wrong polls, pollsters would stop having motivation to get their numbers so wrong. Let’s stop blaming the polls, and start blaming the media for lying to us about what the polls are even saying.
