Polling is “90% bullshit.” In fact, all political data is “garbage.” The Democratic consultants who traffic in such numbers are perpetrating a “scam” against their own party and are largely responsible for President Donald Trump’s victories. Instead of trying to gauge public opinion through pseudo-scientific surveys, Democrats should mostly just read history and the classics.

This is the gist of John Ganz’s recent column, “Against Polling” — a widely-shared polemic that actually earned plaudits from some Democratic pollsters.

Both this piece and its reception are puzzling. Ganz is a brilliant writer with many insightful things to say about history and political philosophy. (I recommend subscribing to his newsletter and buying his book.) Yet his diatribe against “data” is unfair and unpersuasive. He patently mischaracterizes the positions he’s arguing against and provides little evidence for his own. He does not acknowledge some obvious objections to his anti-empiricism, let alone rebut them. His piece’s valid assertions are uncontested while its contentious ones are unvalidated.

Nevertheless, it was warmly received, even by some whose vocations it disparaged.

I’m not certain why this is. But I fear that Ganz’s argument is appealing for the very reason it undermines clear-eyed thinking about electoral politics: it offers an elaborate rationalization for dismissing any data one does not like.

This story was first featured in The Rebuild.

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Ganz makes some valid points (that no one actually disputes)

Ganz’s critique is aimed at both political data in general, and a specific set of ideas about Democratic electoral strategy: Principally, the notion that Democratic candidates should seek to increase the salience of their popular positions, avoid talking much about their unpopular ones, and give greater deference to public opinion than the party presently does. This basic outlook is often described as “popularism” (a hideous but useful neologism). And it is championed by, among others, the Democratic data scientist David Shor, the commentator Matt Yglesias, and less prominently (and more equivocally) myself.

In prosecuting his case against popularism, Ganz says many things that are inarguably true. For example — after spending the bulk of his column arguing that public opinion data is “garbage” and “90% bullshit” — he retreats to the claim that polling is “part of getting a picture of the world,” just “not the entirety of it.”

Needless to say, the idea that polling shouldn’t be your only tool for discerning reality and the idea that polling is almost entirely fraudulent are pretty different. The first claim is indisputable; the trouble is that no one disputes it.

This is the problem with virtually all of Ganz’s valid assertions. He correctly observes that polling is flawed, that public opinion isn’t fixed, that not all useful knowledge about politics is quantifiable, and that there is more to good campaigning than mirroring the public’s policy preferences. But he does not quote a single Democratic consultant or commentator who rejects these truisms, likely because none do.

Instead of refuting the popularists’ actual ideas, Ganz rebuts an absurd ideology of his own invention. He writes that “the worldview of the data guys is based on a giant mistake” — namely, that “there’s an objective world out there, and it doesn’t change.”

Yet no serious person has ever claimed that public opinion doesn’t change. It obviously does. And this is not lost on the “data guys.” David Shor, to take one example, has argued that Democratic politicians have the power to reshape many of their base voters’ views, that the Dobbs decision made Americans more liberal on abortion, and that “what people care about and trust [the Democrats] on really is responsive to concrete events that happen in the world.”

On this point, the actual dispute between Ganz and the popularists is not about whether public opinion can change, but about how much scope Democratic politicians have to reshape the views of swing voters — which is to say, voters who do not particularly trust Democratic politicians.

Everyone recognizes that this scope is limited. Most progressives would doubtlessly agree that Democrats can’t persuade swing voters to support large new taxes on meat. There may be a strong moral case for making steak more expensive, given the

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