pollThink: How Counts and Crosstabs Messed Up Messaging
There’s an old saying: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. For Democratic politics, polling has become that hammer. It’s a powerful tool - essential for campaigns, messaging, and strategy - but it’s also led us into a trap.
The problem isn’t polling itself. The problem is how we’ve let it shape our reality and how we think about voters. We’ve mistaken our ability to break down voter sentiment into demographic groups as proof that those divisions are what matter most.
What's more, the messaging we put out based on this has reinforced the idea that we are fundamentally different from one another - that we are not one nation. While often well-intentioned - and sometimes done with a focus towards inclusivity - the actual result seems to be an increase rather than a decrease in tribalism in America.
The more we slice up the electorate into discrete categories - Black voters, Latino voters, suburban women, young progressives - the more we reinforce the idea that these groups are fundamentally separate, that their differences are greater than their shared struggles and aspirations.
But the truth is, people are far more alike than they are different. And pollThink - the overreliance on polling crosstabs to determine messaging, strategy, and media narratives - has warped how we see politics and how we talk to voters.
The Crosstab Trap
Polling can tell us many things. It can show us how people feel about an issue. It can break those results down by age, race, gender, and other demographic factors. But what it can’t do - what it was never designed to do - is define the actual reality people live in. And yet, that’s exactly what we’ve let it do.
We’ve come to believe that just because polling allows us to identify demographic subgroups, those groups must be the defining force in political identity. That the way a 40-year-old Latina mom in Texas sees the world must be fundamentally different from the way a 40-year-old white mom in Michigan does. That a Black voter in Atlanta and a white factory worker in Wisconsin have little in common politically.
But what if that’s wrong?
What if the things that unite those groups - economic class, life experiences, personal values - matter more than the things that divide them?
SNL and the Reality of Class
A famous Saturday Night Live skit featuring Tom Hanks - Black Jeopardy - perfectly illustrates the absurdity of our current political thinking. In the sketch, Hanks plays a working-class white Trump supporter competing in a game of “Black Jeopardy” against two Black contestants. And, surprisingly, he keeps getting the answers right.
Why? Because the experiences of working-class Black Americans and working-class white Americans aren’t as different as political pundits and crosstabs make them out to be. They both struggle with job security. They both don’t trust big institutions to have their best interests at heart. They both roll their eyes at the same tone-deaf advice from out-of-touch elites. The skit’s genius lies in pointing out something simple but radical: people living in the same economic reality tend to have a lot in common, no matter what box a pollster puts them in.
But if you only looked at polling crosstabs, you’d never see that. Instead, you’d see division - Black voters feel this way, rural whites feel that way - without recognizing that, at a deeper level, many of them are responding to the same economic conditions.
How pollThink Warped Political Messaging
This crosstab-first thinking has had real consequences for Democratic political strategy. Instead of crafting messages based on what unites people, campaigns now too often tailor messaging to demographic slices, assuming those divisions define voter behavior.
Talking to "Black Voters" as a Monolith → Instead of addressing working-class struggles that many Black voters share with others, campaigns craft “Black messaging” based on assumptions about racial identity.
Chasing the "Latino Vote" as a Single Bloc → Instead of recognizing that Cuban-Americans in Miami and Mexican-Americans in Arizona have vastly different political histories, campaigns try to lump them all together.
Ignoring Class as a Common Denominator → Polling rarely highlights class because it’s not an easy demographic box. Instead, it reinforces racial and cultural divides, even when working-class people across backgrounds share economic struggles.
This mistake has created a fragmented, hyper-demographic-driven approach to politics that feels unnatural, forced, and often misses the mark. Instead of speaking to voters as people - workers, parents, community members - Democrats have ended up crafting hyper-targeted, siloed messaging that reinforces the idea that these divisions matter more than the unifying struggles so many Americans face.
Media’s Horse Race Obsession
pollThink has done more than just mess up campaign messaging - it’s also changed how the media covers politics. Instead of focusing on how policies impact people’s lives, the media focuses on how policies play in the crosstabs.
Take something like healthcare reform. Instead of talking about what universal healthcare would actually do for people, we get endless headlines like:
“Biden’s Healthcare Plan Struggles With Latino Voters in Arizona”
“Will Young Progressives Abandon Democrats Over Public Option?”
“Suburban Women Shift Away From Medicare Expansion”
None of these headlines tell us anything about the actual impact of healthcare policy on families, workers, or the economy. But they do tell us how the issue is polling in certain demographic subgroups - because that’s the lens through which modern political coverage is framed.
This horse-race approach makes politics feel like a statistical game instead of a real fight over the direction of the country. It’s easy. It sounds empirical and impressive. But it ultimately tells us nothing meaningful about what matters to people or how to fight for real change.
Breaking Out of pollThink
So how do we fix this?
- Prioritize What Unites, Not Just What Divides
- Campaigns should focus more on common experiences - economic struggles, healthcare access, job security - rather than just demographic segmentation.
- Use Polling as a Tool, Not a Crutch
- Polling is valuable, but it should inform strategy, not dictate reality. Just because something polls well in one demographic slice doesn’t mean it should define a campaign’s entire approach.
- Bring Class Back Into the Conversation
- Democrats need to recognize that class - not just race, gender, or age - shapes political views in ways polling often overlooks.
- Push Back on the Horse Race Narrative
Candidates and activists should challenge media coverage that treats policy like a popularity contest instead of focusing on what policies actually do for people.
The Bottom Line
The more we let pollThink dominate our messaging, the more we reinforce the idea that Americans are fundamentally divided when, in reality, they’re not. The biggest challenges people face - economic insecurity, housing costs, healthcare access - are universal across demographics.
We have the tools to bring people together. But only if we stop seeing the world through the narrow lens of crosstabs and start speaking to the bigger, shared struggles that unite us all.
