Election polls may seem cheerless, inscrutable, and wrapped in data and murky terminology. But on close examination, it’s clear they possess and project an unexpected degree of entertainment value—as cartoonists, late-night comedians, and pollsters, themselves, have periodically noted over the years.
This seldom-recognized feature may help explain the enduring popular appeal of election polls, despite a checkered record for accuracy, especially in U.S. presidential elections. In one way or another, polls misfired in the campaigns of 2012, 2016, and 2020. Their collective performance four years ago was their worst since 1980.
And yet election polls remain ubiquitous, setting the storyline for journalists, pundits, and the general public about this year’s extraordinary campaign for the White House. They continue to signal a close race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
The entertainment value of polls tends to be understated, indirect, and sly. In the late 1970s, the would-be biographer of George Gallup, a founding father of survey research who was dubbed the “Babe Ruth of the polling profession,” described the Gallup Poll in general terms as “fun, accessible, and cheap entertainment.”
The entertainment value of election surveys is often derived from a focus on which candidate is leading the field and which candidates are lagging: A competitive and implicitly entertaining “horse race.”
The horse race cliché dates back at least to the 1940s and the early years of modern survey research. At the time, pollsters did not necessarily welcome the epithet. For example, Archibald Crossley wrote to Gallup during the 1948 presidential campaign to say, “I have a distinct impression that polls are still thought of as horse-race predictions, and it seems to me we might do something jointly to prevent such a reputation.”
The cliché has proved too apt to discard—and its usage has long outlived both men. (Crossley died in 1985, almost a year after Gallup.) Gallup even once toyed with the idea of establishing a championship among pollsters, a recognition of sorts of the competitive entertainment inherent in election polling. He shared his idea in a letter in 1940 to Elmo Roper, a rival pollster, saying: “I think it would be a good idea sometime during the next year for the (journal) Public Opinion Quarterly, or those of us who are interested in this job of measuring public opinion, to set up the rules by which we could stake our claims for the championship” of pollster accuracy.
Roper, who was always lukewarm about the value of election polling, wasn’t interested. Even though Gallup’s championship idea went nowhere, it did suggest that election polling results could be presented in a manner akin to the standings or rankings common to competitive sports. In a way, Gallup’s suggestion anticipated the pollster rankings published online these days at 538.com.
From time to time over the years, polls and pollsters have piqued the wit and wry humor of many cartoonists. In 2002, for example, Richard Rice published a cartoon in the weekly financial newspaper Barron’s, showing a grumpy-looking man barking into a telephone, “Who cares what you think?” Rice titled the cartoon, “When good pollsters go bad.” More recently, the Virginian-Pilot newspaper published an amusing cartoon depicting county fair-goers lined up to play “dunk the pollster” in a water tank, at $5 a throw.
While they are not opinion polls, the growth and popularity of betting-prediction markets such as Polymarket also reflect an entertainment component in election prognostication.
And then there is the built-in entertainment value of informal or pseudo-surveys such as the popcorn poll of 1960. Movie theater patrons and supermarket shoppers were invited then to choose popcorn containers or bags bearing the names of that year’s presidential candidates, John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. In all, 53% of the popcorn poll’s participants favored Kennedy, who narrowly won the election with 49.7% of the popular vote.
Polling purists understandably object to such surveys as unrepresentative and unreliable. The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research for example has noted: “Unscientific pseudo-polls are widespread and sometimes entertaining, but they never provide the kind of information that belongs in a serious report.”
Even so, informal polls are lighthearted opportunities for people to participate in something vaguely akin to an election survey, and doing so may promote popular interest in elections. These unscientific attempts are expressions of popular curiosity about “serious” polls—and tell us something about the capacity of election surveys to entertain, titillate, and mildly amuse.
More must-read commentary published by Fortune:
- Former Intel CEO Craig Barrett: Splitting up America’s leading chipmaker is a bad idea
- Here’s why the gap between Americans’ perception of U.S. economic performance and reality has doubled since 2019, according to economists
- How the Democrat-leaning news media is unwittingly aiding Trump
- As activist Starboard engages constructively, here’s a potent prescription for Pfizer’s future success under Dr. Bourla’s watch
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
