Polls used to be unreliable, but now they are almost completely useless, thanks to a proliferation of politically motivated polls, some funded by vested special interests.
PR firms like Democratic consultant Doug Rubin’s Northwind Strategies and organizations like the conservative Mass Fiscal Alliance are conducting polls now as the 2024 Senate race pits Elizabeth Warren against Charlie Baker.
Unsurprisingly, these polls produced very different results, with the Mass Fiscal poll showing Baker ahead and the Northwind poll putting Warren in the lead.
And a recent poll by a super PAC supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis surprisingly showed DeSantis ahead of Donald Trump in Georgia.
So what are voters to believe?
Who sponsors a survey and why it’s so important.
And it’s very easy to manipulate a survey to get results that serve your interests or client. Skewed questions and weighted results can skew the survey in favor of the answers the company or organization wants.
In addition to the Senate Baker-Warren showdown, which was duly reported by the media, the recent Mass Fiscal poll of 750 Massachusetts voters also showed that they supported the Chapter 62F tax credit law, a cause that the organization has been promoting.
“This should send a clear warning to Speaker Ron Mariano, who is leading the effort to change the law, that the majority of voters do not support the president’s attempt,” Mass Fiscal said.
Northwind Strategies funds surveys conducted by Change Research. In April, the Northwind poll found Warren ahead of Baker by five points, indicating she is not as vulnerable as the massive fiscal poll showed.
“It seems that there are fewer and fewer (surveys). We thought there was a void we could fill with this,” Rubin, who consulted for Warren in 2012, told the Herald. “There’s not a lot of hard data on where the voters are.”
Rubin’s firm has conducted polls on rent control and the millionaire tax, as well as pitting the candidates against each other.
“We have a lot of confidence in our results, our data,” said Rubin, who stressed that the surveys are funded by his firm and not by clients.
Paul Craney, spokesman for Mass Fiscal, told the Herald: “The Fiscal Alliance Foundation has regularly conducted surveys on policy and other issues so that decision makers, the media and the public have a good sense of where voters stand on these issues.”
The DeSantis PAC, Never Back Down, showed the Florida governor beating the former president by a 48-38 percent margin in a head-to-head matchup. A few weeks later, another poll, conducted by the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs, had Trump leading DeSantis by more than 20 points.
Imagine.
Public relations firm Seven Letter has also been producing surveys of late for clients such as the US Chamber of Commerce, Protecting Americans Coverage Together and the Boston Business Journal.
Seven Letter Insight’s survey for the pro-employer health insurance organization Protecting Americans Coverage Together (PACT) found, unsurprisingly, that Americans “prefer to get health insurance directly from an employer than by other means,” according to a statement from the US House. of Commerce
“I expected there to be a high level of satisfaction with employer health benefits, but I was surprised by the level of intensity,” said Matt George of Seven Letter Insight.
So believe what you will. But don’t count on polls these days to accurately predict anything. Just ask President Hillary Clinton.
