Coop Scoop: Video -- Cooper on Polls, Polsters and Journalism

A panel for the Foreign Press Association

By Marc Cooper

August 14, 2024

Link to video convo is lower down in this post.

With only a handful of days before the DNC, Kamala Harris has opened up a small lead in national and swing state polling — 2 to 4 points but all within the margin of error.

The trend lines however tell a compelling story. We are living in a political world that is completely different than a month ago, The race has been re-structured. The narratives are shifting or are adrift.

So how does a voter make sense of where the race is really at? It’s not easy. And good or bad, a lot of predictions come from vibes. But most fixate on polls and that can be good…or it can be bad. As, frankly, most voters really don’t know how to intepret them. The same with reporters.

Reporters, in facr, often abuse polls just to squeeze out an article. Think of many reporters not as hyper truth-seekers but as simple carpenters. The job of many is to come into work and produce a table — or in the case a 750 word article with a lead, a nut graph, and some background.

Give a reporter a poll that shows Smith leading Jones by 3 points nationally in July and and an hour later you will see a story headlined “Smith Opens Up National Lead on Jones. You still know nothing.

Here’s the most striking example of the mirage of some polling. — not all.

In the third week of July 1988, Michael Dukakis was ahead of Poppy Bush by 17 points in the national poll. Five months later, Bush beat him by 10 points.

Make no mistake, I am not downplaying the rise of the Harris ticket and it sure feels like she has the Big Mo while The Other Guy is having a public nervous breakdown while being coached by the likes of another insane person, Elon Musk.

Anyway, the Foreign Press Association in DC. and its prez, my old pal, Ian Williams organized a panel discussion last week between me and California-based pollster Adam Probolsky who I really liked. It’s a good informative discussion and it does offer some insight on why pollsters do what they do and how we journalists try to interpret them for the electorate. Tune in!

Hope you can watch at least part of it.

I’ll be back later in the week with a piece on The Unbearable Blindness of Voting Third Party. Get ready to unsubscribe! +++

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