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Consistently Wrong Pollsters Try Again in 2024

By Joe Guzzardi

In 1964, I cast my first presidential ballot for Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. I preferred Goldwater’s more aggressive solution to end the Vietnam War, at the time heating up and poised to get even hotter. Goldwater promised “a choice, not an echo.” Voters will never know how successful Goldwater’s plan might have been. But the documented facts are that although Johnson positioned himself as more moderate than Goldwater, he became the quintessential warmonger. After Johnson’s landslide victory, LBJ escalated President John F. Kennedy’s commitment from fewer than 20,000 U.S. troops to more than a half million. Following the election, the war waged on for longer than a decade as more than 58,000 U.S. service members and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotians were killed.

Since the 1964 election, 15-four-year cycles, I’ve been a registered Republican, a registered Democrat, and a registered Independent. I have lived in New York, California, Washington, and Pennsylvania. At no time did I ever miss in-person voting which must, I assume, qualify me among pollsters as “a likely voter.” Yet during the last six decades, I have never received a telephone call from a pollster asking me for whom I planned to vote. Moreover, after I inquired, I learned that no family member, friend, neighbor, or work colleague has been polled. Who, then, is polled? Given my long-standing experience as a confirmed but never polled voter, I wonder what the non-stop fuss in print media and television is all about: “Harris is up two points in Wisconsin, but down two points in Michigan!” or “Trump is up four in North Carolina and gaining in Arizona.” Comparable stories not only have headlined but consumed most of the print ink or broadcast air with one talking head after another chattering predictable points that depend on their political leaning.

Since the 2016 and 2020 polls were dramatically off the mark, no one should put any credibility in the 2024 election predictions. In 2016, Donald J. Trump’s victory shocked many Americans, especially pollsters who showed his opponent, Hillary Clinton, leading the race up right up to Election Day. All data they were looking at seemed to predict her victory. Clinton’s campaign, confident she would win, had the champagne ready to pop. But Trump, who disdained data gathering, carried swing states Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania which Democrats thought were in the bag. After the ballots were counted, Trump had won 306 electoral votes, compared to Clinton’s 232, securing him the presidency. The pollsters offered weak excuses for their embarrassing failures including a farfetched claim that the results were skewed by whether a male or female picked up the phone.

The 2016 misfire was supposed to serve as a wake-up call for pollsters, but it did not. The 2020 election would be, according to the polling, an easy Joe Biden victory. But Biden won by only three points versus his projected margin of eight—another humbling for the touted polling industry. Pollsters have spent the years since 2020 experimenting with ways to induce hard-to-reach voters to participate in surveys and testing statistical techniques to improve accuracy. But expert opinion is mixed on whether polling outcomes are due for a repeat of 2020, which a professional association of pollsters called the most inaccurate in 40 years. New developments, such as the shift of black and Latino voters away from Democrats and toward Republicans and the increase of online surveys that use unproven sampling methods create additional potential for error. Referring to 2024’s polling reliability, Stanford University political scientist Jon Krosnick said, “We are headed for more disaster.”

Pollsters do a better job of identifying the core issues that worry voters. The numbers one and two are the economy and immigration. But neither the polling organizations nor the candidates have comprehensively linked the two. Immigration directly impacts federal, state, and local economies. In March 2023, three years into the ongoing four-year invasion, the Federation for American Immigration Reform published its study, “The Total Fiscal Cost of Illegal Immigration.” FAIR estimated that, at the time of its report, 15.5 million illegal immigrants resided in the U.S. Beginning in 2023, the net cost of illegal immigration to the U.S. including K-12 education, emergency medical care, and other affirmative benefits is at least $150 billion. Subtracting the tax revenue that illegal aliens pay, just under $32 billion, from the gross negative cost of illegal immigration, $182 billion, FAIR arrived at its $150 billion total. Eighteen months have passed since FAIR’s report, and millions more illegal aliens have entered with taxpayers funding every step they take once inside the U.S.

The Biden/Harris administration has given the green light to millions of unvetted illegal aliens who have unlawfully crossed or, unprecedented, been flown into the interior via the unconstitutional CHNV program that admits 30,000 foreign nationals monthly. Voters who consider the economy their main concern should realize that unchecked immigration contributes to high living costs including the tax hikes necessary to pay billions for illegal aliens’ resettlement.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org

Consistently Wrong Pollsters Try Again in 2024

Consistently Wrong Pollsters Try Again in 2024

Illegals Swamping US School System

By Joe Guzzardi

The news agency Reuters published a story about how the border surge has crushed, from coast-to-coast, the public school system. Titled “An American Education: Classrooms Reshaped by Migrant Students,” Reuters sent a survey to more than 10,000 school districts to gauge immigration’s impact on public schools nationwide. Of the responding 75 school districts that serve 2.3 million children, 33% said the increase in illegal aliens has a “significant” effect. In the real academic world, significant translates to negative.

The Reuters story did a respectable job of outlining the challenges schools face—the problems of integrating foreign-born students into traditional American education. Since 2022, more than half a million school-age migrant children have arrived in the U.S., according to immigration court records that Syracuse University collected, exacerbating overcrowding in some classrooms; compounding teacher and budget shortfalls; forcing teachers to grapple with language barriers and escalating social tensions in some communities.

Andrew R. Arthur, the Center for Immigration Studies Resident Fellow in Law and Policy and who held several important Capitol Hill positions advising on immigration legislation, estimates that the actual total of migrant children enrolled is closer to one million. Arthur searched Syracuse’s TRAC website but could not find the cited statistics. Then, Arthur turned to the Office of Homeland Security Statistics. He concluded that counting unaccompanied alien children plus the released family units’ minors who crossed with their parents and are now in school, the more probable enrollment total is between 700,000 and more than one million school-aged migrant children.

Reuters pointed out the obvious—that teachers across the nation face the nearly-insurmountable task of educating non-English speaking students, a challenge that will intensify since foreign-born nationals from more than 150 countries speaking dozens of languages have either crossed the border or have been flowing into the interior via Biden’s unlawful CBP-One app. Districts will have to hire more budget-draining English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers, assuming they can be found.  In Charleroi, the district will have to recruit Haitian Creole speakers, no doubt in short supply in Western Pennsylvania. But tiny Charleroi, population about 4,200, will have to find the instructors since in a little over a year, as many as 3,000 Haitians have moved into town, almost doubling its population. In 2021-22, the number of Charleroi’s non-English speaking students in area schools was 12; now it’s 220, an increase of more than 1,700 per cent. Finding suitable ESL teachers is made more difficult because, ideally, the job’s candidates will not only speak Haitian Creole but also have a teaching background. Very few who fit the bill can be found locally.

As a former ESL instructor during the Southeast Asian refugee resettlement into California’s immigrant-heavy San Joaquin Valley, I have some from-the-front observations about how the unanticipated arrivals put a school district and its long-time teachers into a state of controlled chaos. Much like the U.S. cities that are coping with huge arriving migrant totals, Chicago, Boston, Denver, etc., my district had to accommodate legally present refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand as well as itinerant laborers from Mexico and Guatemala. For teachers who had no trained background in international student instruction, the burden of managing so many kids from so many non-English speaking countries was overwhelming. One unsuccessful method of coping was called “pull outs.” A translator fluent in, for example Cambodian, would enter the classroom, take the Cambodian students to a corner, and instruct them in the lesson given to him by the teacher. Multiple problems arose—did the Cambodian aide fully understand the assignment? Did the aide convey the lesson in an effective manner? The teacher doesn’t speak Cambodian so he wouldn’t know. All of this took time away from the teacher’s responsibility to educate his traditional students. Multiple other language-related problems were ongoing—the often-transient migrant students enrolled after the school year started and left abruptly before it ended. Office personnel could not communicate with parents about important school issues. Finding and paying for appropriate language textbooks was a lengthy and expensive process.

The existing system harms everyone. The international students learn little and miss out on building a solid educational foundation. Teachers and other administrative cannot keep up. U.S. kids miss out on important classroom time. And taxpayers foot the hefty education bill, an estimated $800 billion in 2021 pre-invasion costs.  As long as the border remains open, citizens and international students will continue to fall behind and taxpayers will fund every open border consequence.

Illegals Swamping US School System