The first thing Millersville University political science professor G. Terry Madonna admits he does every morning (sometimes before he even leaves his bed) is to check the averages on RealClearPolitics to see where the races stand — not just in his home state of Pennsylvania, but also across the country.
“When I tell people that in speeches, some people laugh,” he said, but for those who don’t, he suspects they are doing the same thing.
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“Of all of the places measuring where races stand, they have proven to be the most accurate and reliable. It is really how I find out where the state is going,” said the longtime dean of Pennsylvania politics who has been using them as a barometer for nearly two decades.
Founded in Chicago 20 years ago by John McIntyre, a former stock market trader, and Tom Bevan, an advertising executive, the two former college classmates created something that at the time that was new and innovative: a polling average. People use the polling average as a handicapping tool that monitors where U.S. Senate, House, and presidential races stand.
It was a tool that essentially allowed readers, political scientists such as Madonna, and even the campaigns themselves to see where the races were. By averaging the publicly available polls, its system became a better marker of where the races stood and how they were tracking over time.
In 2004, it became a national brand when then-Fox News anchor Brit Hume led his broadcasts with the presidential election RCP average. By the close of that election, both the George W. Bush and John Kerry campaigns acknowledged to reporters it was the best metric of where the race actually stood.
Four years later, there were some imitators, such as Pollster and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, but RCP has remained the standard-bearer. Co-founder McIntyre, however, said now it is time to adjust to the forces that are changing the industry.
Twenty years ago, Facebook and Twitter did not exist, nor did the iPhone. The landline, once a reliable connector for pollsters, has disappeared from the majority of homes. Less than 40% of homes have one now. Conversely, cellphone ownership is now at a whopping 97%. Combine those developments with the changes each party is going through, particularly in the Trump era, and the polling industry is going through some challenges.
For example, in 2020, ABC News put out a poll on Oct. 28 that had Joe Biden up by 17 percentage points in Wisconsin over Donald Trump. The idea that Biden was up 17 points was preposterous. But the outlet published the pull anyway. Biden ended up winning the state by a single point.
McIntyre said that despite some examples of numbers being way off, polling is not always broken. “There’s a lot of good firms and good pollsters doing a lot of good polling, but unfortunately, there’s some firms and some polling outlets and some news organizations that aren’t doing as good polling,” he said.
The RCP founders decided what polling needed was accountability, so they started a project that is rolling out at RealClearPolitics in a beta version that ranks polling organizations based on their performance in recent elections.
McIntyre said for any institution, company, or government, the relationship between what you do and who relies on you to get it right is trust. “The genesis behind this project is to try to bring some accountability to polling in the hopes that it’s going to work to improve the product. So by shining a light on the firms and pollsters that are doing a really good job, hopefully the techniques and the way that they’re adapting to how polling has changed over the last 20 years, other pollsters start to learn from them,” he said.
Which is a good thing. Voters want to be able to rely on that one tool, polling, through which their sentiments can be distinguished. However, that is hard to do when, days before an election, a pollster declares it is a 17-point race favoring one candidate and then said candidate wins by less than 1% the following week.
It is the kind of thing that causes the public to become skeptical and cynical about polling.
McIntyre hopes through this, RCP can start the process of restoring public trust and faith in political polling.
“Accountability is an important thing,” he said, adding, “Whether it’s business, sports, life, government, accountability’s important, and that is our goal with this project.”
