After Gaslighting America With Election Forecasts, The Media Suggests Election Forecasts Are Worthless

The media spent nearly two years hammering voters with election forecasts and polls, but now there are suggestions that the forecasts aren't helpful.

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The Mainstream Media Changes Its Tune On Election Forecasts

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

How many times over the past year and a half to two years have you gone to a website, turned on cable television, and been bombarded with polls or election forecasts? We have been writing in this space for years that there are serious problems in the polling industry, mostly related to how difficult it is to get people to respond to polls.

The election forecasting industry is relatively new. It doesn’t have decades of experience that modern polling has. 538 was the first widely accepted forecaster, but by 2024, there were ten major forecasters and dozens to hundreds more people taking a stab at it.

It was all too much information that was more confusing than helpful to voters. The New York Times developed its own average of polls and election forecasts, and now the Times published an article suggesting that election forecasting might be worthless.

Via The New York Times:

Justin Grimmer, a professor of public policy at Stanford, was an author of a study published this year that showed that, at best, it would take decades — and at worst, millenniums — to be able to properly evaluate how predictive these forecasts truly are.

“It can take a long time to establish that one method is better than another method at predicting, say, the overall winner or accurately characterizing the probability of a particular candidate winning,” he said. “When forecasting models move the probability of one candidate winning from 52 percent down to 48 percent, we’re just not in a position to know if that’s a meaningful move, if this is reflecting some actual change, or if that’s just statistical noise.”

Other critics of forecasting claim that it hurts democracy and the political process by creating a false sense of security about the results.

All of this points to a bigger problem that stuck out in 2024 like a sore thumb.

Election Forecasts And How The Media Covers Elections