Rumbling And A-Tumbling On Campaign Trail 2020-The Mysteries The Preference Polls Unfurled-Maybe

By Sam Lowell

Recently in a quick sketch after reading a crime novel by the late Robert B. Parker which was a fictionalized account of legendary black baseball player Jackie Robinson’s 1940s breaking in the Major Leagues I noted that as a kid I was crazy to crunch numbers, and still am. That despite the fact, unlike Parker apparently and Lowell’s own Beat maven Jack Kerouac, that I did not wile away my hours pouring over baseball stats like RBIs, averages, ERAs. I even admitted to the cardinal sin of 1950s childhood of not going deeply overboard in charting the amazing Mickey Mantle of the New Yrok Yankees. Still I liked the number crunches.       

Fast forward to 2019. I along with a coterie of my old political comrades have taken a very big leap forward in attempting to stem the rot of the age of Trump by supporting a candidate, in this case Senator Sanders from Vermont, for the Democratic Party nomination against Trump next year. Once we had made our decision back in January it was natural for me to be assigned the number crunching task extraordinaire of following and analyzing the preference polls. I will have to say I was amazed at the number of polls that are out there as if each news agency or polling outfit could not trust any other source but their own to give their spin on the numbers. In the old days a few organizations such as Gallup and Harris would do the bulk of the work and that would be that. Now there is literally a whole cottage industry doing this kind of work. Nate Silver over at “538” actually ranks poll reliability among his other chores.     

Here is the funny part, the part where old-time polling meets new technology. Almost every poll contains a caveat warning that their numbers only reflect “a moment in time” during the campaign season. Nice, right. The beauty of having had a large field for the Democratic Party nomination is that a whole layer of candidates are bunched together within, get this, the margin of error, meaning something like a four to five point swing which could mean anything for any candidate.

Here something equally as funny the gaps between the numbers of the two dozen or so authoritative polls is unbelievable wide and frankly baffling considering they all are assumed to use some scientific random processing to get results. Frank Jackman made me laugh one day when he mentioned that based on some of the polling numbers whether maybe the pollers just went out on the street and ask opinions of passers-by. Or use an old dodge like land lines as the source. In any case for now at least I take these beautiful numbers as “moments in time” and we shall see what flushes out as the process goes forward. Enough for now.