The Bigfoot/Stolen Election Phenomenon
What bad pollsters and pundits don’t understand about human error and human nature.
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Pollsters at Fairleigh Dickinson University say that 7% of Americans believe in Bigfoot. Incredibly, because we live in an era when politics infects everything, they found a way to make this about politics:
You see this move all the time — pundits lamenting the fact that small fragments of the population believe something crazy (like 10% believing that childhood vaccines cause autism, 5% thinking that the earth is flat, 12% saying the moon landing was faked) and then finding a way to tie these results back to politics. Oftentimes, these claims are flimsy at best, but because polls give the impression of being precise and conclusive, editors and readers are usually way too credulous of anything that can be backed up with a data point from a poll.
Polling is, of course, a valuable tool for understanding what Americans think and who they are planning to vote for. But polls are also imperfect. And so anytime you see someone make an argument based solely on polling data, you should be incredibly skeptical.
Let’s start with this: people will say things to pollsters that they don’t actually believe. Sometimes people misunderstand questions, and sometimes people just think it’s funny to mess with pollsters. Because of this, anything, no matter how ridiculous, will always get some level of support in a poll. Even the most ridiculous things that nobody actually believes would probably reach the low or mid single digits.
This becomes a problem when pundits extrapolate polling data out to big populations. For example, if 3% of people in a poll say they think their dog is Jesus, then you could extrapolate that out to the entire nation and…boom! 10 million Americans believe their dog is Jesus. This is precisely the structure of the argument that Washington Post columnist Philip Bump made when he wrote in 2021 that “only a small fraction of Americans say they most trust far-right networks like Newsmax and One America, according to PRRI: that block constituted 3 percent of respondents. Which, again, is about 10 million people.”
A related and more general problem with polling is that there's a gap between the question that pollsters think they are asking and the one that respondents think they are answering. Because pollsters take a lot of time to craft their surveys, they believe that they have a precise understanding of what those questions are testing. But people are not automatons, and when they’re answering survey questions, they are not just answering discrete questions — they’re also exhibiting their political affiliation, indicating their general worldview, and trying to give a good impression to the person on the other end of the telephone.
Take as an example the question of whether someone believes the 2020 election was stolen. Someone who answers yes to that question might, of course, genuinely believe that the 2020 election was stolen. But they could also be signaling their support for Donald Trump, indicating their political affiliation, or just noting that they think the 2020 election was mismanaged.
When pundits ignore this kind of complexity inherent to polling, they are being naive at best and deceptive at worst. Unfortunately, the latter is often true, which is why it’s so common to see people online manipulating polling data to score political points or point out the crazy beliefs of their political adversaries. That’s well and good if your project is to dunk on your opponents, but it’s less helpful for those of us who want to use polls to better understand the world.
Given their political utility, I know that people aren’t going to stop using polls to score cheap political points. It’s just too tempting to draw conclusions off of the definitive-looking data that polls provide, which is how we end up with ostensibly serious pollsters touting the results of a survey about Bigfoot and stolen elections as if it is reflective of a major trend in American politics.
That said, I do think it’s possible for journalists, editors, pundits, and the public to develop a more nuanced understanding of polling data. It might take a while given how entrenched our poor understanding of polling already is, but trying to change that is a worthwhile endeavor. As they say: the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
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Agree. And still, I know 2 people who believe in Bigfoot. Not sure how that extrapolates.
Good points made and have a good retreat...you will need that for 2024! Dorsey