Profs and Pints DC presents: “Your Prep for the 2024 Election Results,” a look at the power and limitations of political polls as voting results come in, with Michael Bailey, professor of American government at Georgetown University and author of Polling at a Crossroads: Rethinking Modern Survey Research.
Profs and Pints is staging the perfect talk to help you brace yourself for whatever Election Day may bring: A look at the role that polling played in the campaigns and where and how it might have missed the mark in predicting the day’s outcomes.
The speaker, Michael Bailey, is a chaired professor at Georgetown’s Department of Government and McCourt School of Public Policy who has written extensively on American politics and the challenges of polling.
Dr. Bailey will walk us through what we can expect from polls and how much we should have trusted them. He’ll otherwise coach us on how to prepare ourselves for a long evening of vote counting.
You’ll learn how in all election cycles politics revolves around polls, which campaigns, the media, and election watchers follow religiously. Polls tell campaigns what voters care about and tell us how campaigns are doing. A change in polls can leave us either elated or deflated, and it can send tens of millions of dollars flowing to the airwaves in a highly contested state.
But to really understand what we can and cannot learn from polls, we need to think critically about the polling process—something conventional pollsters do not always encourage.
The hard truth is that our polls are in trouble. Gone is the golden age of surveys before cell phones, when pollsters called randomly selected land lines and generally heard them answered. Now, it’s almost unfathomable to imagine answering a call from an unknown number, so pollsters either struggle to squeeze as much information as they can from the (to be frank) weird people who answer their calls or troll around the internet looking for people willing to pick up their phones.
For his part, Professor Bailey won’t be shy about answering questions. Talk attendees are welcome to stick around for Penn Social’s election night party. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: Official White House portraits of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.