POLL POSITION
DUMMY OF THE WEEK
It’s Wednesday, which means it’s time for Dummy of the Week. Usually this is where we pick out one politician, one crank, one local loudmouth, pin a tail on ’em, and call it a day. But this week, the prize hog is too big for one pen.
Pollsters, step forward.
The professionals who promise to read the tea leaves, then trip over their own charts. The ones who take our money, dial our phones, and churn out numbers that vanish the second real votes are counted. This week, instead of pointing the finger at a single candidate, we’re looking at the whole industry that keeps telling us the future and then getting it spectacularly wrong.
Let’s start with the “serious” ones. In 2024, Nate Silver, America’s favorite numbers guy, spent the final stretch of the campaign insisting the Harris–Trump race was a coin flip. His exact words: “50–50 is the only responsible prediction.” Sounds sober, sounds scientific. Then Election Night came back with Trump 312, Harris 226. That wasn’t a coin toss — that was a rout. If that’s the gold standard, imagine what happens when you head down to the bargain aisle.
Enter Spry Strategies, a Knoxville outfit proud of its “hybrid methodology” — live calls, robo calls, online panels, peer-to-peer texting. If it plugs in, Spry will call it data. On paper, it sounds futuristic. In practice, it’s been one pratfall after another.
Take South Carolina, where Spry polling with the South Carolina Policy Council claimed voters were “no longer sold on Trump,” putting Ron DeSantis ahead by nineteen points. NBC News reported another Spry survey showing DeSantis up twenty. Those numbers didn’t just miss; they collapsed once Trump flattened the state. Even Trump seemed to know better.
In Tennessee’s 1st Congressional District in 2020, Spry described the Crowe–Harshbarger race as “within the margin of error.” That was Spry’s Ryan Burrell’s own language. Election Day told a different story: Harshbarger didn’t squeak it out; she steamrolled the field by nearly twenty points. Again, two years later in Hamilton County, Spry polled voters on the Lookouts stadium proposal. Mayor Jim Coppinger dismissed it as “misleading” and, in his words, a “push poll.”
When the mayor calls your survey propaganda, you’ve got problems.
And now Spry is back in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District, courtesy of Americans for Prosperity. Their newest poll declares the race “wide open,” with Jody Barrett, Gino Bulso, Lee Reeves, and Matt Van Epps clumped together and nearly sixty percent of voters supposedly undecided. After all the flashy hybrid bells and whistles, the conclusion boiled down to: a shrug… “We don’t know.”
Campaigns didn’t take it quietly. The Reeve’s campaign blasted the survey as “laughable” and with “less credibility than the Mueller Report and the Steele Dossier,” pointing straight back to the DeSantis-over-Trump fiasco. Then McLaughlin himself waded in, accusing rivals of “trying to fake” with robocalls and touting his own poll that had his candidate up six.
What do we have? One pollster branding another as fake while selling his own as gospel — the entire industry distilled into a single week.
And hovering at the edges is Cade Cothren, Former State Rep. Glenn Casada’s disgraced ex-aide who popped onto X to call Rep. Reeves a “true DUMBASS” for doubting the Spry poll. Classy. But according to The Tennessean, this is the same Cade Cothren who, back in 2016, texted operatives about campaign money tagged with “with kickback lol” and handed out envelopes of cash stamped with the House Republican Caucus return address.
The vendor involved? Revily Inc., where Burrell — now the CEO of Spry — was a senior strategist. So when Spry drops another shaky poll and Cothren rushes to defend it, you’re not just seeing noise on social media. You’re seeing pollsters and political operatives, hand-in-hand, doing what they’ve always done: spin numbers and cash checks.
So here’s the scoreboard:
Nate Silver called the 2024 election a coin flip; Trump ran away with it.
Spry’s South Carolina polling had Ron DeSantis up double digits; Trump dominated the field.
The “dead heat” in Tennessee’s 1st District ended in a Harshbarger blowout.
Chattanooga’s Mayor Jim Coppinger branded a Spry poll “misleading” and a “push poll.”
And now Spry’s newest CD7 poll is being hyped as “wide open,” while Trump’s pollster John McLaughlin calls it “fake.”
Different polls, different cycles, different states. Same result: confusion.
And that’s why the award lands where it does. But Dummy of the Week isn’t Spry. It isn’t McLaughlin. It isn’t Silver. It’s pollsters — the whole species. Because when you look at the body of work, none of it holds much merit. Polls exist for plenty of reasons: to activate a base, to shake money from donors, to feed headlines. But one thing they’ve proven, time and again, they’re terrible at? Predicting the future.
They all dress it up with decimals and charts, but when the lights come up, the record is the same: they’re bad at the one thing they’re supposed to be good at.
And friends, we’re not going to tell you who to vote for. Vote your conscience, whatever that may be. But if there’s any wisdom to draw from all this, it’s this: don’t let a poll adjust how you vote. Don’t let one of these charts push you in or out.
They’re as worthless as angry comments on X.