No. 417 | September 25, 2026
🧭 Sorting the polling signal from the noise
Ben Jacobs spoke with campaign pros who give some useful tips for separating what’s real and what’s fake in the fog of war at the end of a race. His must-read piece explains why more information isn’t always better. And prediction markets can reflect the same public polling and conventional wisdom rather than adding any genuinely new insight.
The useful distinction is between the private polling campaigns use to make decisions and the internals they choose to release. And public polling has never been noisier, with doubts as to whether the polling firms releasing numbers are even real.
Between Democrats and Republicans, there was one clear point of consensus: a frustration with both public polling’s influence on American politics and its flaws. “The reality is that most people who do this for a living take all of that with an absolute grain of salt,” said Steve Schale, a veteran Democratic operative in Florida.
It is…
