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This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a margin of error of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. On Sundays, we look at the major themes of the week past and how they will define the week ahead. Sign up for the daily newsletter here. Subscribe to Bloomberg.com for unlimited access to all our coverage. Wrong, Wrong, WrongCould you beat up a grizzly bear? Or a lion or a crocodile or the two-headed fire demon under the bed? Those are silly questions, so they deserve a silly answer: “Yes.” That, in a 2021 survey of 1,200 Americans by YouGov, was the response, respectively, of 6%, 8%, 9% and, well, zero percent because I made up the fire demon.[1] 
Of course, nobody really thinks they could beat up a bear or a lion or a croc — people were just being very clever indeed with the pollsters. Such silliness proves nothing about either the validity of polls in general or the blind confidence of Americans in their counter-ursine pugilistic prowess. However, YouGov provided one overlooked but enlightening statistic: 61% of respondents thought they could take down a goose. Those people have clearly never seen a goose fight a human or read their Jerome K. Jerome.[2] Geese are terrifying — just go to your local pond with some stale bread and misplaced bravado and find out for yourself. But nearly two-thirds of Americans didn’t let a lack of knowledge or experience keep them from blithely overestimating their goose-fighting aptitude. It’s a dynamic of human behavior that plays out in larger and more serious issues from politics to pandemics to colas to other colas: Even the public being polled doesn’t seem to think much of its own opinion. “From the late nineteen-nineties to 2012, twelve hundred polling organizations conducted nearly thirty-seven thousand polls by making more than three billion phone calls,” Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker a decade ago. “Most Americans refused to speak to them. A 2013 study—a poll — found that three out of four Americans suspect polls of bias.” Bias or incompetence? I mean, look the consistent failures of surveys that ask the simplest possible question: “Which of these two human beings are you going to vote for?” A standard defense is that many of these polls fall within “margins of error” or involve “tossups.” Then what use are they??? Anybody paying attention could have told you that in the 2024 presidential election Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia were going to be decided by less than 3%. In Arizona, widely rated a tossup, Donald Trump won by more than 5% — not even horseshoes and hand grenades accuracy.[3] That’s what I think of polls, anyway. It’s what I’d tell a pollster. So, is it possibly my own misguided public opinion? “Since the 1990s, assessments of the president’s performance have become the most important factor in midterm elections” writes Ronald Brownstein, and this year the big question is just how many voters disapprove of President Donald Trump (lots and lots and lots) but whether this disapproval will translate in votes for Democrats. The answer so far is not probably enough.” 
“One reason is that Trump-disapprovers now include more Republican-leaning voters, who remain resistant to voting for the other party despite their disappointment in the president,” Ronald writes. But for Dems, there is a hopeful side: “Republicans won’t find it easy to hold onto more Trump-disapprovers than during his first term; some recent Senate polls already show Democrats approaching their first-term numbers with his disapprovers in Georgia, Alaska and Texas. And because Trump’s disapproval is so high, Democrats can win in most places even without attracting as many disenchanted voters as in his first term.” We may find a good case study in the Texas race for Senate, according to Abby McCloskey. “The latest poll by Texas Public Opinion Research has Democrat James Talarico leading Republican Ken Paxton by five points. It’s a smaller lead than in late summer, but it’s a lead — and it’s outside the margin of error,” she writes. Her anecdotal take on Talarico’s support may surprise you: “Interestingly, it’s the women I know — the mothers — who are switching from Republican to vote Democratic, some down the ballot. This is everyone from suburban moms to wealthy grandmothers. I must say, they seem positively giddy at the prospect.” Texas isn’t the only place Republicans may regret their choice of candidate. “Mike Rogers is a promising Senate candidate with a sterling resume who could upset Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in swing-state Michigan during an otherwise discouraging midterm election cycle for the Republican Party. His potentially fatal mistake? A cautious, outdated campaign strategy that minimizes contact with voters and his opponent,” writes David M. Drucker. “Rogers is executing a campaign better suited to 1996 or 2006, rather than 2026, particularly compared to his media-omnipresent opponent.” What’s a nervous Republican Party to do? Dip into its deep pockets, as usual. 
“The cavalry has arrived for a panicking GOP in the form of hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign ads. The GOP is set to spend at least $888 million on advertising compared to $666 million by Democrats,” writes Nia-Malika Henderson. “It’s President Donald Trump’s unpopularity that has put the GOP in a defensive posture, focusing their ad deluge on red states and districts in their quest to keep their slim majorities in Congress. But never one to be left out, Trump has countered by using taxpayer money to blanket the airwaves with campaign ads featuring himself, including one during this weekend’s NFL games.” According to Axios, Republicans ran about 5,500 ads during NFL and college football programming in a single September weekend. Which leads Adam Minter to bring a little historical context — and point out a paradox. “Republican politicians have repeatedly tried to pick fights with the National Football League. In just the past two years, Speaker Mike Johnson and others derided the choice of Bad Bunny as a Super Bowl halftime entertainer, while Senator Tommy Tuberville targeted the Minnesota Vikings’ male cheerleaders — accusing the league of wanting ’to put gender in sports,’” Adam writes. “But Republicans look to be suspending their culture wars with football … at least for this fall. Instead, they’re betting on the very cultural power that has made the sport resilient to the party’s political attacks in the first place.” 
But cultural power depends on ... public opinion. The chart above may indicate that the return on investment in the NFL is thinning, and perhaps the Dems might want to target MLS viewers. That’s if they believe the polls, anyway. Bonus Wrong Reading:
What’s the World Got in Store?
Rage Against the MachineWho says bipartisanship is dead? Not this poll anyway: 
Americans’ bipartisan dislike of data centers strikes me as odd: There are roughly 3,300 of them across the country, or pretty much the same as there are Arby’s franchises, which I find equally threatening to mankind. But public opinion is public opinion, hypocrites are gonna be hypocritical, and demagogues are gonna demagogue: What the elite want is to hoard all of the resources for themselves as the world gets more and more physically unstable. And in an environment of AI, they want to wipe out all of our livelihoods. They want to make sure none of us have jobs and they want to keep all the spoils of those riches for themselves while consuming and burning energy at a pace that is completely unsustainable. That was Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a “Students vs. Billionaires” town hall meeting in Ithaca, New York, last month. David Drucker finds it “quite a dystopian doozy, even by the standards of 21st-century populism.” Which, in Trump’s America, is quite a statement. “Without a doubt, there are real concerns about AI and the impact this rapidly developing technology could have on economic opportunity and social cohesion, in the US and globally,” he writes. “But exactly how are the wealthy elite supposed to exist absent a functioning economy that produces goods and services for them to purchase and energy to power their expensive toys? To be crass about it, financiers like Peter Thiel and George Soros aren’t going to build their own yachts or cook their own beef bourguignon. Even pointing that out makes me feel like I’m having an argument about whether the world is flat.” In case you think the world’s roundness is incontestable, I have a poll for you: 
Note: Please send a Christmas goose and feedback to Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net. Sign up here and find us on Bluesky, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn and Threads. We’re improving your newsletter experience and we’d love your feedback. If something looks off, help us fine-tune your experience by reporting it here. [1] I'm teraphobic and just looking for someone brave enough to peer under my bed. [2] See chapter 14. [3] Despite all these shortcomings, we can’t get enough of them. Look at the audiences of main polling and aggregation sites. According to Similarweb estimates, RealClearPolitics is now drawing nearly 7 million monthly hits; Pew Research Center nearly 3 million; fivethiryeight around 200,000; Gallup 1.7 million — Nate Silver, the former New York Times polling guru, has 333,000 subscribers to his Substack. Follow Us
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Sunday, October 4, 2026
Republican self-sabotage may not help Democrats enough
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