by Salena Zito
Long before Thomas Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, Sir Humphry Davy, a British chemist and inventor, created the first incandescent light by passing an electric current through a thin strip of platinum. This produced an incandescent electric light to create the first “electric arc lamp” between charcoal electrodes.
Like many early innovators, Davy is often overlooked for his contributions and innovations. Edison is most often thought to be the inventor of the light bulb. Edison was famous, especially for his gadgets that modernized life, from improving the telephone to the brand-new phonograph. He created the first practical lamp that could be easily manufactured.
These sins of historic omission in American culture are much more common than they should be. This struck me a little over a month ago when the end of FiveThirtyEight, the polling forecaster, was announced. Many journalists cast FiveThirtyEight as the originator of the polling aggregation. It is not. The first polling aggregator is RealClearPolitics. And it’s not like there was the 70-year span that was between Davy and Edison, nor do we lack Google or artificial intelligence as they did.
Even Wikipedia acknowledges RealClearPolitics as the first aggregator of polls, writing, “It began aggregating polls in 2002 for the congressional midterms that year.” It called the 2008 emergence of the now-defunct FiveThirtyEight, created by baseball statistician Nate Silver, a “relative newcomer.”
Silver left two years ago. Its last owner, ABC News, laid off the site’s handful of staffers in March. RealClearPolitics was around six years before Silver’s baby. Despite suggestions that FiveThirtyEight was the OG of aggregating polls, RCP remains the standard-bearer for journalists looking to understand polling trends in big and small election cycles as they report their stories.
Calls to several reporters confirmed their reliance on RealClearPolitics to help them know what to look for when covering a race.
When reporting on elections, a reporter should objectively avoid trying to create a narrative and instead give the readers the best information he or she can find. That earns trust.
Polling voters is a multidimensional task, in many ways no different from anecdotal reporting for a story on politics that comes from various people. RCP was the first to recognize how to harness that science and make it useful in understanding how different attitudes would shape races.
The rap on RCP among legacy institutions began in 2016 when its averages started showing then-candidate Donald Trump ahead, a shocking development to some, which led to accusations that it was using substandard polls. Whatever the criticism, the truth is that its polling showed a race that was closer than other outlets that weren’t using some of these “substandard polls.”
Case in point: On Oct. 27, 2016, FiveThirtyEight’s polls-plus forecast gave former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a 75.2% chance of winning the election, while RCP had Clinton up 3 points, within the margin of error. Anyone following that race using RCP was getting genuinely informed about where that race stood and how close it was. In short, it showed you it could go either way.
Its polling of the Bush-Kerry race was spot on — same with the Obama-Romney race. But for some reason, the whole national media complex was telling the public that Trump had no chance to win when he actually had a better chance to win than either John Kerry or Mitt Romney.
In 2020, RCP showed Trump was trailing then-candidate Joe Biden by more than he was trailing Clinton. So RCP’s maps indicated that Biden was going to win, but they weren’t showing a blowout that most of the legacy media were.
On election morning in 2020, there was jawing among some legacy reporters for RCP’s polling averages — they showed a close race with Biden up by 1.2 points in Pennsylvania. Reporters expected a bigger victory. It turned out that when the final votes were tallied, two weeks later, the final margin was exactly what its average was: 1.2 points.
So people who came to RCP for that cycle saw that Biden was ahead but that Trump had a viable path to win. Then, in the 2024 cycle, this dismissal of RCP among some legacy outlets was repeated, with the same complaint from these outlets that some of its pollsters are not “high quality.”
There is an argument to be made that some polls are better than others based on their track record. Those sitting in boardrooms in Washington, D.C., or New York City may not like that some polls were more accurate about Trump than others. But you are doing your audience a disservice by not telling what the polls said and instead what you wish they said.
In the final stretch of last year’s presidential election, the New York Times took a whack at RCP, suggesting its map showing Trump winning all seven swing states was inferior because it was using subpar polls.
“Overall, Trump has made slight gains in the national polling average over the past two weeks, and the battleground state polling averages have tightened,” the story read. “Still, the race remains uncommonly close.”
Unlike its competitors, RealClearPolitics does not filter out or weigh polls that its critics allege are “low quality.” RCP likes to say that “at RealClearPolitics, high-quality polls are accurate polls.” One of its pages displays a map of the Electoral College with a winner projected for each state, even those the site currently deems to be toss-ups.
The story then said that “influential accounts have been sharing screenshots of RealClearPolitics’ scarlet-dominated Electoral College map,” often pairing it with images of a betting average site showing Trump with a 65% chance of winning.
Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist and constant critic of RCP, said in the story that he believed that Republican-aligned pollsters were “flooding the zone” to shift the polling averages and deflate Democrats’ enthusiasm.
In the end, FiveThirtyEight had then-Vice President Kamala Harris with a 50-in-100 chance of winning the cycle. RCP had Trump winning six of seven battleground states. The New York Times implied that it had gamed to look better for Trump with “low-quality polling.” This isn’t hyperbole; it was in the headline that read: “Why the Right Thinks Trump Is Running Away With the Race.”
Two things appear to be happening here — the sin of omission by skipping over who the true inventor and innovator of the craft was and an effort to dismiss its competency and capability.
The job of a news organization is to attract an audience because its content is consistent in getting it right or pretty darn close. The same is true of polling. It is one thing to question polling firms and say you don’t like their methodology or think they’re rigorous enough.
But when they have a track record of superior performance and you still do not use them, or you weigh them lower, you come across as though you possess an agenda that isn’t about genuinely informing people of where things stand.
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