You could almost hear the cries just after the race was called for David Crowley.
Pollsters botched the Wisconsin race, just like had happened in Michigan a week before. This time, however, the progressive/socialist candidate, Francesca Hong, lost and Crowley, the “establishment” Democrat, won an improbable victory after every single poll had him losing by double digits.
Even the vaunted Marquette University Law School poll, the gold standard, got it wrong. News organizations began posting obligatory “what went wrong” with the polls stories. Most of the same outlets (including the Journal Sentinel) breathlessly report on the release of fresh data as if the pollsters we’re bringing down the tablets from Mount Horeb.
Republican pollster and consultant Frank Luntz offered an especially colorful take on polling, the New York Times dutifully reported in its postmortem, “How the Polls Got It So Wrong in Wisconsin,” writing on X to jokingly call for “a total and complete shutdown of primary polling in the Midwestern United States until we can figure out what the hell is going on.”
Of course, political operatives make their living telling campaigns and voters what they think will happen. Prediction is power, the high-tech hucksters on Kalshi and Polymarket would have you believe. When their power to predict is tested, they invariably lash, or cash, out. Algorithms and AI seem sure they have mastered quantifying and ultimately controlling human nature.
Sometimes humans have to wreck the machines, which they did Aug. 11.
The dark side of the science of polling and prediction markets
Credible and reliable public opinion polling reflects a sincere desire to better understand what the electorate is thinking. This positive impulse has been tested in an era of hourly shouting matches on “news” networks between ideologues, personalities and opportunists on all sides telling us what, and by extension, how we should think.
I was ecstatic the polls were “wrong” not so much for who won or lost, but for what it told us about Wisconsin. Most of the critique of today’s politics is that people are easily classified into vicious tribes or voter blocks who are trapped in their own information bubbles. In this view, people are not capable of independent thought or doing something – gasp! – crazy like taking their time to decide or changing their mind. The pollsters and algorithms have already predetermined, and the prediction markets profited, from it.
But most seem to have missed in the Wisconsin Democratic primary that undecided was in the lead for most of the campaign. The race was loaded with candidates and drama that had hopefuls dropping out and dropping back in. Things changed, sometimes, by the hour.
Marquette pollster Charles Franklin pointed out the most voters weren’t paying attention to the race in the spring and well into the summer. That sort of real-world, summertime detachment is something foreign to political consultants and people like me who follow politics closely.
But as the Wisconsin race moved forward, voters began to pay closer attention as the primary date approached. Even the Marquette poll released just two weeks before the election put “undecided” in second place at 34% just behind Hong at 38%.
The polls got it wrong. Voters seemed to have gotten it right.
What happened in those final two weeks gives me great hope that we might be turning the corner on the corrosive polarization that seems to be cemented in our politics. What Crowley’s improbable victory shows is that a large block of voters researched the candidates and took time to talk to friends and families, before, finally, making up their minds.
Isn’t this what we hope a better politics could be? Where people are open minded and capable of changing their minds? That signals the sort of stubborn independent thinking that strikes fear in political consultants and media figures who think they know everything about us.
The national political straightjacket placed on the race was that Crowley and Hong were locked in a battle between democratic socialists and the party establishment. This was based on what happened in New York House and Michigan Senate races.
Never mind that the New York races included districts in upper Manhattan and Brooklyn, which bear no actual comparison to anything in Wisconsin. Or that Crowley’s record working in local government more closely resembled the legacy of Milwaukee’s sewer socialists who focused on pragmatic, effective solutions.
Did it ever occur to the people wringing their hands that the outcome was more about how voters in the Democratic primary see themselves and their future than what the commentators, consultants and pollsters decreed?
Yes, the pollsters got it wrong. And I feel fine. Maybe you do, too.
Jim Fitzhenry is the Ideas Lab Editor/Director of Community Engagement for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Reach him atjfitzhen@gannett.com or 920-993-7154.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin election results stun as humans wreck the machines | Opinion
Reporting by James N. Fitzhenry, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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By James N. Fitzhenry, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | USA TODAY Network
