Political strategists tell us that after Labor Day it’s a sprint to Election Day in the U.S., and in this high-stakes election, we’re heading into the super bowl of polling. Nerves are jangling, headlines and conspiracy theories are raging like wildfires, and the pollsters are crunching numbers as fast as they can. We all want to know how voters are going to vote and who’s going to win.

Sure, polls cover the issues voters find most important. But polling doesn’t tell us why those issues are important, why voters plan to vote the way they say they will, or where we are or aren’t aligned on issues.

The lack of polling accuracy has been getting lots of press in recent years, and pollsters have been defending their practices with more transparency and complicated metrics, but without values and emotions defining the results, numbers don’t tell the whole story.

Consider a sampling of recent diverse approaches and predictions:

• The New York Times/Siena College Poll, a more traditional approach, has Trump ahead by one percentage point.
• 538, which “uses polling, economic, and demographic data to explore likely election outcomes,” reports that “Harris wins 53 times out of 100 in our simulations of the 2024 presidential election. Trump wins 46 times out of 100.”
• Professor Allan Lichtman, “who has correctly predicted almost every presidential election since 1984” with his 13 keys methodology, predicts Kamala Harris will win.

Even with super smart people and new techniques, we still won’t know what people think or believe, nor if we really are as divided as the media tells us we are.

In December 2020, my text analytic platform published another reminder of this gap in polling design and analysis and the opportunities for deeper understanding. If surveys included room for citizens to respond with their thoughts and ideas (open ends or verbatims), we would learn much more about their true intent. It just takes another step of research and analysis.

These insights from the values and emotions driving votes would specifically help the campaigns in their messaging and policy development and would also help marketers in their understanding of the general public.

The only way to truly understand what voters want is to let them answer in their own words. Otherwise, the pollsters are just stabbing in the dark.