Joel Benenson Quotes

If you believe these polls, you're making a mistake.

I've learned a long time ago not to take polls too seriously.

I'm a believer in the polls, by the way. Rarely do you see a poll that's very far off.

One should be weary of drawing too many inferences from a single poll. You can find wildly disparate results with two different polls. There is no question that American Muslims remain one of the most marginalized and demonized groups in United States. There has been a sustained propaganda campaign against Muslims for over a decade and it doesn't disappear over night. Those attitudes are hardened. But one of the things that polling often doesn't measure is the intensity of opinions.

Early polls mean nothing.

I don't put a lot of stock into polls.

Let me tell you the polls that count, and those are the polls a couple of weeks before the election. That's when the pollsters worry about holding onto their credibility. Those are the polls that everybody remembers.

I don't put too much stock in polls.

We still write too many stories that are "state of the race" stories that are informed almost solely by what the polling shows and by what we're then deducing about who's up, who's down, and I'm just not sure that's very helpful to readers, it certainly doesn't elevate the debate and, and the problem is if you, if you cover these things, and I don't think the Times is particularly culpable, I think other news organizations are worse, if you cover them in an entirely "who's up, who's down" horse race way.

I believe that the polling data that shows people give Obama 53% approval, I happen to think the polls are right. I just think people are not being honest with the pollster.

Surveys have shown going back as far as you and I can remember that people have perceived a leftward tilt in the basic coverage that they get on TV news.

Polls are only good for dogs.

I have been a close observer of campaign trends.

Every time I think that political analysts and writers will finally recognize that most of them don't understand much about political polls, they prove me wrong. They don't know how to read them; they don't understand the importance of cross tabs within a given poll, and they don't know how to analyze them.

It's the media who love statistics.

Sometimes you will hear me say right on the air, 'You just cited a poll that is not even part of Real Clear Politics,' which is an average, an aggregate. Yours is seeming to be an outlier. Give me the name of that poll and the date that it was taken. I will say it right on the air.

Political analysts tend to overinterpret the results of isolated elections.

When you see me up on a breaking-news story, it is not good news. I'm not about to give you the secret to my mom's sweet potato pie.

Banning pre-poll surveys is certainly no answer in today's world. Sensitising the public and the media as to the good, bad, and desirable aspects of survey research is more sensible than that.

I know that a lot of people love to say that polls are wrong or don't matter, and from time to time they are - it depends on who they are polling.

When you are a journalist and there is a big story like Dominic Cummings, it's great to be at the heart of it. What I love, and it sounds a bit cheesy, is you feel connected to other people.

Being a skeptical and thoughtful consumer of polls is essential.

Popularity has always been the key currency in choosing a president.

Just ask my boss - any time a major story breaks, I'm banging on his door to send me.

I have never analyzed a presidential election as much as I did the Trump-Clinton race of 2016.