JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It’s time to retire the laziest cliché in election polling.

Opinion polling has no lazier cliché than “snapshot in time.”

The aphorism is intended to suggest impermanence — that polls taken weeks or months before an election have limited predictive value. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked as the 2024 presidential election race has unfolded. It will be heard many times before the campaign ends.

All too often, “snapshot in time” is a convenient tactic for commentators and politicians to scoff at or dismiss poll results that contradict their partisan preferences.

More commonly, the phrase is a refuge or metaphoric shield for pollsters when their pre-election surveys misfire. In such cases, “snapshot in time” is cited in attempting to defend or rationalize polls that careen well off-target, as many of them did in the 2020 presidential election.

Joe Biden was elected to the presidency four years ago by margins well short of the double-digit blowout suggested by the polls of CNN, Quinnipiac University, Economist/YouGuv and NBC/Wall Street Journal.  Those polls estimated Biden’s end-of-campaign lead at 10 to 12 percentage points over then-President Donald Trump.

Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points.

The discrepancy in 2020 between election results and polls overall was the most pronounced in 40 years, and prompted characterizations that the outcome was a “train wreck” and “a disaster for the polling industry,” as David A. Graham wrote in the Atlantic.

But if the goal was demoralize potential Trump voters to believe there was no use in even going out to the voting booth, then 2020’s wonky polls certainly their job as far as the DNC-MSM is concerned! Read the whole thing.