By Abdul-Hakim Shabazz
IndyPolitics.org
October 1, 2026
Every election cycle, someone emails me a poll with a subject line in ALL CAPS. The poll always shows their candidate winning. It’s always “brand new.” And, purely by coincidence, it’s almost always paid for by the candidate it shows winning.
Funny how that works.
So let’s talk about polls: what they are, what they aren’t, and why you should treat them like a weather forecast, not a prophecy carved into stone tablets.
Done right, polling is real math. A properly constructed random sample of several hundred people can tell you quite a bit about what millions are thinking.
That’s where the margin of error comes in, possibly the most ignored number in American politics. If Candidate A leads Candidate B 47-44 and the margin of error is plus or minus three points, Candidate A isn’t necessarily winning. It’s basically a tie wearing a nice suit.
And a bigger sample doesn’t fix a bad one. In 1936, the Literary Digest surveyed more than two million people and predicted Alf Landon would beat Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt carried 46 states.
Oops.
A gigantic sample of the wrong people is still wrong. You just have more of them.
Then there’s the art.
Hardly anyone answers the phone anymore, so pollsters make judgment calls. How many young voters? Rural voters? Black voters? Who qualifies as a “likely voter”? And how many people swear they’re absolutely voting Tuesday but end up watching Netflix?
Weight the results one way and your candidate is up three. Change the assumptions and suddenly he’s down two and somebody at campaign headquarters is yelling at the pollster.
That isn’t necessarily fraud. It’s craft. But it’s why internal polls deserve extra salt.
Campaigns release internal polls the way people post vacation pictures. You see the beach. You don’t see the delayed flight, the $19 airport cheeseburger or the argument over who forgot the sunscreen.
I’m not saying this from the cheap seats. Indy Politics has commissioned polls over the years.
In 2018, we paid for a live-interviewer survey of 600 likely voters that showed a close U.S. Senate race between Joe Donnelly and Mike Braun. In 2019, our numbers had Joe Hogsett well ahead of Jim Merritt.
In March 2024, working with ARW Strategies and Crossroads Public Affairs, we surveyed 500 likely Republican primary voters for governor. We had Braun at 33 percent with about 30 percent undecided. He eventually won with about 40 percent.
The poll got the leader right. But the real story was the 30 percent who hadn’t decided.
Political people hate undecided voters because they refuse to cooperate with the narrative.
Then voters show up and spoil everything.
Polls had notable misses in the Midwest in 2016 and again in 2020. In 2024, respected Iowa pollster Ann Selzer had Kamala Harris ahead by three. Donald Trump won Iowa by roughly 13.
That’s not a margin-of-error problem. That’s a “somebody check the batteries in the calculator” problem.
Polls measure opinion. Elections measure turnout. Those aren’t the same thing.
Which brings us to Indiana’s four-way race for secretary of state.
There is almost no public polling. However, we hear there is private polling showing just a one-point difference between the two front-runners.
Notice what I didn’t tell you: who’s ahead, who conducted the poll, the sample size, margin of error or who paid for it. Until we know those things, it’s interesting information, not the Gospel according to Gallup.
And if it really is a one-point race, nobody is “winning.” That’s a statistical tie with campaign signs.
Of course, that won’t stop consultants, operatives and assorted political geniuses from telling you exactly who’s ahead, who’s surging, who’s the spoiler and whose vote is being “wasted.”
Apparently, half the Indiana political class has developed psychic powers.
When you see a poll, ask: Who paid for it? Who did they talk to? How many people? What’s the margin of error? And one more: Why am I seeing it?
Polls are useful. I read them. I commission them. I write about them.
But they’re snapshots, not verdicts.
The only poll that counts is the one where they lock the doors at 6 p.m.
Everything before that is math, educated guessing and political people desperately trying to convince you they know what’s going to happen.
Sometimes they even do.
Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of IndyPolitics.org and an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illinois. He finished second in the 2023 Republican mayoral primary, so he knows exactly what a poll is worth on Election Day.
