A Guide to GQP and Mickey Mouse Pollsters

How to navigate the next month-and-a-half of election data.

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

As practically anyone who commentates on politics will inform you, polls are far from perfect. They will all be prone to error, and they can be next to useless by themselves. As such, aggregators and commentators have long taken extensive efforts to minimize and properly depict these risks. But in recent years, another big problem in polling has emerged. This is a recent trend of new polling firms with extensive ties to the far right (if they even have a track record at all) releasing floods of polls with good results for Republicans right before big elections.

While polling firms associating with or even being historically biased towards one side of the political spectrum is nothing new, it should be safe to call this phenomenon somewhat novel. While past elections usually only saw one or two well-known firms with systemic Republican slants, the Biden era has seen the rise of a huge number of such pollsters, who often put out just as much (if not more) data than nonpartisan firms. It’s been enough to vex political professionals, to say nothing of the laypersons out there who just want to know how the race stands. Usually, this would be the place for polling experts to help make things clear, but for whatever reason, these established figures have done nothing to establish any quality control that could prevent these actors from influencing their averages and forecasts. To the extent they have addressed them, it has been to defend the inclusion of firms named RacismElections, usually with unconvincing excuses that refuse to address the obvious problem at hand.

As such, those without an extensive knowledge as to the background and beliefs of these pollsters are left flying blind, unaware as to how they should interpret their results showing Trump with a lead in every swing state. It is here where I hope to be of some service. A major reason why I stayed confident in my belief that 2022 wouldn’t be a red wave, even as both forecasts and commentators began to believe that it would be, was that I chose to doubt these polls. This was something that practically nobody with a byline was willing to do, and it ended up being the correct call. This year, I believe that it will end up being correct again. Here is the first-ever overview of America’s Mickey Mouse pollsters—or, in other words, your only guide for survival between now and November 5th.

Group One: The Firms Run by Teenagers and/or Right Wing Twitter Accounts