The Strange Silver Lining of Bad Polling

Political polls are supposed to tell us who is winning a race before Election Day. But this year, polls have been getting things badly wrong in several states. Some polls missed big, and one so-called polling firm was even caught making up numbers completely. As the 2028 presidential primary season gets closer, experts say all this polling chaos might actually have an unexpected bright side.

This year, primary elections in Michigan and Wisconsin showed how far off polls can be. In Michigan, polls said Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed would win by a large margin. Instead, he barely won by just one point. In Wisconsin, polls showed Francesca Hong leading a Democratic governor's race by double digits, but she ended up losing to David Crowley, the Milwaukee County Executive.

Then things got even stranger. It came out that one fake polling firm had simply invented poll numbers for Michigan, Wisconsin, and California. The firm seemed to be running an experiment to see if false polls could change how people felt about a race. Most news organizations ignored these made-up polls, but a few actually reported on them as if they were real.

So why are polls struggling so much? One big reason is that primary elections are hard to poll accurately. In a primary, candidates from the same party run against each other and often agree on many issues. The winner can depend on which campaign does the best job getting its own supporters to vote, and if a pollster guesses wrong about who will show up, the poll will be off.

The way polls are taken has also changed in recent years. Many polling groups now send emails or text messages with a link to an online survey, instead of having a real person make phone calls. Voters who are very excited about a candidate might eagerly click the link, but older or less enthusiastic voters might skip the survey — even though they still show up on Election Day. That gap can make a poll look very different from the actual results.

There is also a new concern involving betting markets. Some websites let people bet money on who will win an election. Experts worry that someone could release a fake or misleading poll just to shift the betting odds briefly and make money from it. This has not been confirmed to have happened yet, but the risk adds another reason to think carefully before trusting every poll you see.

With all this confusion, news readers need to ask smart questions when they come across a poll. Ask yourself: 'Who ran this poll, and have they been right before?' Finding out if a polling firm has a solid track record is easier than it sounds, and it can help you decide whether to trust the numbers. A little research can go a long way.

The bigger concern is what all this means for the 2028 presidential race, which is just months away. Polls play a huge role in presidential primaries — they help decide which candidates get to appear in debates. Since 2016, candidates have needed to reach a certain polling number just to get on the debate stage, which has ended several campaigns before they really got started.

More than 30 Democrats could run for president in 2028, compared to 23 in the last wide-open race. When that many people are competing, small differences in poll numbers matter a great deal. The gap between 3 percent and 7 percent in a poll can make or break a campaign, so unreliable polls could be very misleading for both candidates and voters.

But here is the silver lining. If voters stop trusting polls, they might start paying more attention to the actual candidates and their real ideas. In past elections, surprise candidates like John McCain, Pete Buttigieg, and Bill Clinton came out of nowhere to become serious contenders. In 2028, there could be a whole group of fresh candidates who get a fair shot simply because voters are no longer dismissing them based on a bad poll number.