You Don't Have To Read Every Single Poll, I Promise

The VP debate was held last night and it was…what you’d expect, to be honest. JD Vance attempted to bring some kind of measure to his party’s chaotic outlook, something that will be immediately undone the next time Trump gets on stage and exasperatedly rants about how unfair it is that he has to live in a world with immigrants, windmills, a lack of Joe Biden as an opponent, etc. Meanwhile, Tim Walz, a media fixation in the last few months for the way he combines a smattering of solid policy positions with a “knows the right aisle in the Home Depot” attitude, barely mustered the cadence of a Dad telling his bored teenage kid why they need to call home if they’re going to be out after 10.

Walz did the typical Democrat thing where they try to cover too much in one answer and thus don’t really answer anything in any memorable way. Vance kept looking at the camera like he was Jim from The Office, giving us “Get a load of THIS GUY” glances as if he didn’t just try to make the idea of mass deportation palatable.

Anyway, if you didn’t watch it, I don’t blame you. Especially because you would probably be even more confused by the barrage of polling results that occurred after, full of things like “VANCE - FAVORABILITY 14% +12 / 14%/27%. WALZ - FAVORABILITY 33% +10% / 62%/48%.” Look, I’m in favor of math. Math is great. But I’m often confused by the weight given to polls, especially when those polls contain little in the way of context. Who was polled here? How many people were asked and are they the same people that were asked before? Who was taking them and what formula do they prescribe to when it comes to assigning validity to these things? How do these numbers compare to elections in the past and how correct were they in their predictions at that time?

It would take hours to figure this out on a poll-by-poll basis, hours we don’t have when we’re scrolling through social media and are greeted to 2024’s parade of Numbers About Something. Yesterday, Trump was up +1 in Pennsylvania when some other group had him -6 in the state! Last week, Harris was down by 5 in North Carolina, but this new one says she’s going to flip the state! Follow enough political voices and you’ll watch these cycles play out, flip and cancel out one another multiple times per day. The quick high of seeing that your preferred candidate is going to win is followed by the immediate low that, oops, some other organization says they’re not and they have the single number to prove it. If you don’t end the day feeling defeated, you’re definitely a little exhausted. But come back tomorrow and spin the wheel again!

I’m not arguing the all polls are hogwash and there are much better political writers than me that have disseminated the ones that are worth paying attention to and the ones that are simply built to reassure you that your party is all good and will win forever. I am saying, though, that in the next month before election day, you don’t have to read every single one. You don’t have to! For your mental well-being, I’d argue that it’s better not to! In the same way that I don’t quite believe that our brains are well-equipped to handle the manner in which social media screams information, true or false, at us all day, I don’t think we’re meant to take into account every single offered set of numbers that hopes to predict who runs the country. There is just too much of it, and that’s not an insult to your ability to decipher multiple polls. That’s a wish that you don’t put yourself through the emotional rollercoaster of trying to make sense of numbers that are devised separately, under different methods and circumstances, by people who potentially lean heavier in one political direction that they’d ever admit.

Before November 5th, it’s only going to get worse. You’re going to see various media outlets latch onto certain ones with a steel trap grip (usually the ones that make the election race look as fittingly dramatic as possible) and you’re going to see others that are pure dopamine fuel. You’re going to see some that whisper doom into your ears and others that tell you “Eh, don’t even both voting. It’s a wash either way.” And if you try to process each and every one together, you will absolutely make yourself not only paranoid but unhappy. Donate, phone bank, protest, and reach out to your friends and neighbors instead. With the recent devastation in Appalachia thanks to Hurricane Helene, there has rarely been a better time to prove that the most important thing is how you work as a community and as a country, not as numbers in a poll. The key to feeling better is not not seek out the percentage that most aligns with how you want to feel. Instead, seek out others than need help and do just that.