John Rogers, pollster and director of the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, raised concerns about the reliability of public polling during a recent appearance on Newsmax, criticizing the increased use of online panel polling for diminishing accuracy.
In an interview on “America Right Now” on Saturday, Rogers, a co-founder of Torchlight Strategies, discussed the pitfalls of current public polling methods, specifically highlighting how the use of online panels can reduce survey accuracy.
“A lot of the public polling right now is going out on what's called an online panel,” Rogers explained. “They have people who participate in panels and in surveys about toothpaste or politics or whatever, and they get paid to be on those panels.” According to Rogers, this method has become popular due to its cost-effectiveness, allowing pollsters to conduct numerous surveys quickly. However, he argued, this approach can undermine the reliability of results.
“What’s happening in return from that is you’re reducing your accuracy because … you’ve talked about the presidential race or a Senate race,” he said, noting that frequent panel participants develop what he calls “panel bias.” Over time, these individuals may start to view races differently than typical voters, affecting the integrity of the data. “They don’t look like regular voters anymore,” he concluded.
Responding to questions on voter demographics, Rogers challenged recent narratives of record-breaking female voter turnout, suggesting that some of these reports were exaggerated.
“Even when they were pushing this nonsense out, I think it was just psyops,” he said, referring to reports claiming historic turnout among women voters.
“The reality was there were actually fewer females that had voted at the time they were pushing this out than had voted in 2020,” he asserted, adding that Republican women outnumbered Democratic women in early voting during the period in question.
When asked if media outlets and polling operations should shift their focus from the “horse race” to more issue-oriented polling, Rogers agreed that prioritizing issues like the economy could offer more valuable insights.
“When people can’t afford groceries, the economy is number one,” he said, underscoring the importance of substantive, issue-based polling.
Rogers concluded by offering solutions to improve polling accuracy, suggesting that a move away from panel-based polling and toward methods such as texting or live calls could yield more reliable results.
“If they just budgeted to do fewer surveys but do more quality surveys, I think that would go a long way,” he advised.
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