By
Ed Kilgore,
political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015
One of the things about politics that people love to hate is polling. To a certain extent, this antipathy is entirely understandable. As critics often say, political journalists sometimes overreport polling at the expense of candidate and party-issue positions, policy debates, or elected-official conduct. Polling resources tend to be concentrated on horse-race measurements rather than gathering data on citizen preferences that inform elected officials and the public. Unprincipled politicians are tempted to promise whatever makes their polling numbers rise rather than what they actually think — or even know — is right. And polling contributes to the reduction of political strategy to micro-appeals to narrow swing-voter groups rather than the development of broad sustainable coalitions.
All of these complaints can be addressed, mostly by avoiding overreliance on polls and keeping some perspective about what they can or cannot tell you. But there’s one complaint that’s less compelling, and we are hearing it a lot in 2026: The polls aren’t accurate enough.
