The Most Viral Polls Are the Least Representative

Viral Polls Are Not Representative Polls

Political scientist Kevin Reuning scraped 90 days of polling posts from the @usapolling Bluesky account and used an LLM to extract each race's margin. The pattern is clear: the more a poll flatters Democrats relative to the average poll in that race, the more reposts it gets. The actual margin has little effect on virality. For passive news consumers, that means the polls they see are skewed toward the most favorable outliers.