In 1964, I cast my first presidential ballot for Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. I preferred Goldwater’s more aggressive solution to end the Vietnam War, at the time heating up and poised to get much hotter. Goldwater promised “a choice, not an echo.” Voters will never know how successful Goldwater’s plan might have been. But the documented facts are that although Johnson positioned himself as more moderate than Goldwater, he became the quintessential warmonger. After Johnson’s landslide victory, LBJ greatly escalated President John F. Kennedy’s commitment from fewer than 20,000 U.S. troops to more than a half million. The war lingered for more than a decade after the 1964 election, more than 58,000 U.S. service members, and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotians were killed.
Since the 1964 election, 15-four-year cycles, I’ve been a registered Republican, a registered Democrat, and a registered Independent. I’ve lived in New York, California, Washington, and Pennsylvania. At no time did I ever miss in-person voting which, I assume, qualifies me among pollsters, as a “likely voter.” Yet during the last six decades, I have never received a telephone call from a pollster asking me who I planned to vote for. Moreover, after I inquired, I learned that no family member, friend, neighbor or work colleague has been polled. Who, then, is polled? Given my long-standing and vast experience as a confirmed but unpolled voter, I wonder what the non-stop fuss in print media and television is all about: “Harris is up two points in Wisconsin, but down two points in Michigan!” or “Trump is up four in North Carolina and gaining in Arizona.” Comparable stories not only lede but consume most of the print ink or broadcast air with one talking head after another babbling predictable talking points that depend on their political leaning.
Since the 2016 and 2020 polls were far off the mark, no one should put any credibility in the 2024 election predictions. In 2016, Donald J. Trump’s victory shocked many Americans, especially pollsters who showed his opponent, Hillary Clinton, leading the race up right up to Election Day. Clinton campaign had the victory party planned and was confident she would win. All data they were looking at seemed to predict her victory. But Trump, who disdained data gathering, carried several key battleground states, including states Democrats thought were secure. By early Wednesday, November 4, 2016, Trump had won 289 electoral votes, compared to Clinton’s 218, securing him the presidency. The pollsters offered weak excuses for their embarrassing failures including a claim that the results were skewed by whether a male or female picked up the phone.
The 2016 misfire was supposed to serve as a wake-up call for pollsters, but it did not. The 2020 election would be, according to polling, an easy Joe Biden victory. But Biden won by only three versus his projected margin of eight points—another humbling for the touted polling industry. Pollsters have spent the years since 2020 experimenting with ways to induce hard-to-reach voters to participate in surveys and testing statistical techniques to improve accuracy. But expert opinion is mixed on whether polling is in for a repeat of 2020, which the professional association of pollsters called the most inaccurate performance in 40 years. New developments, such as the shift of black and Latino voters away from Democrats and toward Republicans and the increase of online surveys that use unproven sampling methods create additional error sources. Referring to 2024’s polling reliability, Stanford University political scientist Jon Kronick said, “We are headed for more disaster.”
Pollsters do a better job of identifying the core issues that concern voters. The numbers one and two are the economy and immigration. But neither the polling organizations nor the candidates have linked the two. Immigration directly impacts federal, state, and local economies. In March 2023, three years into a four-year invasion, the Federation for American Immigration Reform published its study, “The Total Fiscal Cost of Illegal Immigration.” FAIR estimated that, at the time of its report, 15.5 million illegal immigrants resided in the U.S. In 2023’s beginning, the net cost of illegal immigration to the U.S. including K-12 education, emergency medical care, and other affirmative benefits the aggregate cost is at least $150.7 billion. Subtracting the tax revenue that illegal aliens pay, just under $32 billion, from the gross negative economic effect of illegal immigration, $182 billion, FAIR arrived at its $150 billion total. Eighteen months have passed since FAIR’s report, and millions more illegal aliens have entered; taxpayers fund every step they take once inside the U.S.
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