Opinion: It’s time to retire the laziest cliché in election polling

Opinion: It’s time to retire the laziest cliché in election polling

Opinion polling has no lazier cliché than “snapshot in time.”

The aphorism is intended to suggest impermanence — that polls taken weeks or months before an election have limited predictive value. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked as the 2024 presidential election race has unfolded. It will be heard many times before the campaign ends.

All too often, “snapshot in time” is a convenient tactic for commentators and politicians to scoff at or dismiss poll results that contradict their partisan preferences.

More commonly, the phrase is a refuge or metaphoric shield for pollsters when their pre-election surveys misfire. In such cases, “snapshot in time” is cited in attempting to defend or rationalize polls that careen well off-target, as many of them did in the 2020 presidential election.

Joe Biden was elected to the presidency four years ago by margins well short of the double-digit blowout suggested by the polls of CNN, Quinnipiac University, Economist/YouGuv and NBC/Wall Street Journal.  Those polls estimated Biden’s end-of-campaign lead at 10 to 12 percentage points over then-President Donald Trump.

Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points.

The discrepancy in 2020 between election results and polls overall was the most pronounced in 40 years, and prompted characterizations that the outcome was a “train wreck” and “a disaster for the polling industry,” as David A. Graham wrote in the Atlantic.

Graham’s essay anticipated the “snapshot-in-time” defense favored by pollsters, writing: “If their snapshots are so far off, where were they aiming the lens? Why bother?” He noted that “the public uses opinion polls to try to understand what happens [in elections]. If the polls and their analysts don’t offer the service that customers are seeking, they’re doomed.”

Polls surely are not doomed, as their ubiquity in the 2024 election cycle attests.

But the ubiquity of polls does pose a challenge to validity of the “snapshot in time” cliché. The sheer number of polling “snapshots” form a panorama that can offer useful insights about a presidential race. The panorama has, for many months now, signaled that the 2024 race could be close, that no landslide lies ahead, and that decisive battleground states where the election may pivot have been leaning toward Trump.

Such indicators are not irrelevant or unimportant in a democratic society where, after all, elections fundamentally are about who wins and who loses.

Similarly, the late Philip Meyer, a journalism educator who once was president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, observed in a commentary years ago: “It is true, as the purveyors of polls gone sour are fond of telling us, that a poll is only a ‘snapshot in time.’ But that snapshot does have something to do with the future picture.”

Meyer, who wrote the pathbreaking book “Precision Journalism,” noted that attitudes of poll respondents, “while not frozen, are general indicators of future behavior, particularly in the near term when there is little time for intervening events to change those attitudes.” The closer to an election, in other words, the greater the predictive value polls ought to have.

That is not always the case, as the 2020 presidential election demonstrated.

Another, more recent example was offered in March in the Republican primary election for U.S. Senate. What the polls indicated would be a close, three-way race turned out to be a lopsided win for Bernie Moreno, a Trump-endorsed former car dealer.

The surprise outcome prompted Chris Quinn, editor of the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio’s largest-circulation newspaper, to assail pre-election polling as “completely and utterly useless.” He reminded readers that after the 2016 presidential election, which Trump won in shocking fashion over Hillary Clinton, the Plain Dealer no longer published stories based exclusively on poll results.

“The reason we once reported polls is because they gave us all a close idea of how the election would turn out,” Quinn wrote in a letter to readers after the primary election. “If all they amount to are notoriously unreliable snapshots in time, what’s the point of doing them at all?”

Despite their flaws and capacity to mislead, polls have been and will remain prominent features of U.S. election campaigns. But it may be time to retire the “snapshot in time” cliché, which polling analyst G. Elliott Morris has described as “more excuse [for pollsters] than anything else.” It’s been recognized as an irritating phrase, too: Several years ago, Politico ranked “snapshot in time” among the worst of America’s political clichés.

Rightly so.

W. Joseph Campbell, Ph.D., is a professor emeritus of communication at American University. He has written seven solo-authored books including, most recently, Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections (University of California Press). His handle on “X” is @wjosephcampbell.

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