I said I would keep you updated in these final days leading to the election, so here’s a quick follow-up to yesterday’s post. This is in response to Politico getting hold of a poll showing Mamdani surging in the polls, which caused a shift in the prediction markets to roughly 40%.
If a soda company commissioned a study that said “sugar is healthy,” would you believe it? No, you probably wouldn’t.
Why not? You know the soda company has ulterior motives.
If a candidate sponsored poll gets released publicly, should you pay attention to it? No.
Why not? There are ulterior motives. As Nate Silver wrote, “they add more noise than signals.”
So what should I think about this poll? Ignore it. It was sponsored by comptroller candidate Justin Brannan, a close candidate to Mamdani. It might be wrong, it might be biased, or it might be right. I do not know, and there is no way of knowing until after the election. The same goes for the recent Cuomo released poll where he is up quite a bit. Ignore them. Do not let them become part of your priors. They are noise.
So is there a chance Mamdani is surging? There is a chance, but there is also a chance he isn’t. I said ignore internal or candidate sponsored polls.
Should Cuomo be worried? Sure, all candidates should be worried. My latest model had Mamdani with a 28% chance of winning the primary. Although Cuomo is still the favorite, 28% is still a scary high unsafe number for him. I will say it again: we, as the public, should ignore this and all other candidate sponsored polls.
So is there anything I can learn for the mayoral race? Not in the numbers. But… as I wrote yesterday, multiple candidates running on the progressive platform has hurt Mamdani’s chances. Releasing these numbers to Politico is actually a really smart marketing play to try and make this a true two-horse race. It might be too late — there is only so much money which can be earned and spent in these fleeting days — but at the very least it is a headline grabber. The release of this poll has the potential to have the impact to cause the numbers to shift after the fact by good public relation marketing.
So there really is nothing in the numbers? This poll was essentially taken a week or so before polls open for a comptroller candidate, and it is still reporting 44% undecided in the comptroller race. This is an interesting topic warranting its own post. Although I don’t trust that number — as I said I am ignoring this poll — we saw similar high undecided polling late in 2021 for comptroller. Why is there so little attention given to a person of great power and great proximity to power? Are voters making analytical decisions or random selections?
What lessons can I learn? The number one lesson of polling is to look at the source. In this case, the funding source is Justin Brannan. Zohran Mamdani has been an active supporter of Brannan’s campaign. Although PPP is a highly rated polling company (grade A- by Nate Silver), it still no different than Harvard doing a study sponsored by a soda company on the health benefits of sugar.
Fans of Mamdani can scream “!!!”. Fans of Cuomo can yell back “hmph.” Fans of Lander and Adams can say whatever they want. Like this poll, they would be creating a lot of noise.
Now for an AI generated picture of a dog and their family voting for an election in NYC.
