There’s a new poll out of what Duval County residents think of the Jacksonville Jaguars stadium renovation plan, and while I hesitate to outright call it a dumb poll, the way it’s being presented in the media is at least 90% dumb:
Our first look at how Jacksonville voters feels about taxpayer-supported stadium renovations shows mixed emotions about funding.
A poll by the University of North Florida Public Opinion Research Lab finds a little over half of voters say they’re opposed to taxpayer money going to the stadium, but an overwhelming 81 percent favor the 150 million dollar part of the deal going towards community support.
The headline that WOKV-FM chose for this story was “UNF poll: Duval voters hesitant but willing to fund billion-dollar stadium deal,” which isn’t actually what “a little over half of voters say they’re opposed” means. (It’s also not really a billion-dollar stadium deal: It’s a $1.4 billion stadium renovation with $775 million paid by the city, plus about $227 million worth of additional spending on “community benefits,” about two-thirds of that paid for by taxpayers. But I digress.) Yes, people like the idea of spending money on affordable housing and other social goods, especially when part of that money would come from Jags owner Shad Khan, but they dislike the part where the city would give three times that much money to Khan so he can have a snazzier place to put on football games.
And over at the Florida Times-Union, they report that the poll actually asked whether locals would support stadium spending without the community benefits spending, and the survey says:
Combining the community benefits agreement with the renovation costs caused overall support of the deal to jump [from 41%] to 56%.
Still, 72% of respondents said they would prefer to vote on the spending in a referendum, which Deegan has repeatedly spoken against.
No, neither 41% nor 56% in favor is “a little over half opposed.” It’s all convoluted enough that I’m tempted to give News4Jax a pass for its headline “UNF Poll: Majority support stadium changes but oppose amount of public spending on construction,” except no, that’s completely wrong, there’s no excuse there.
The poll also asked what Duval County residents’ spending priorities were, and the answer was not at all positive for Khan:
In an open-ended question, respondents were asked their top priority for the investment of tax dollars in the City of Jacksonville.
The most popular response with 23% was infrastructure and roads which was followed by education and schools with 19%, and public safety and police with 13%. Four percent of respondents said downtown revitalization, and 3% said the stadium and the Jaguars, with 10% who didn’t know or refused to answer.
They are definitely not making “hesitant but willing” like they used to.
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., a Washington Post poll of area residents from both within and near the city found that:
A 51 percent majority says the stadium should be built in D.C., while 17 percent say it belongs in Maryland and 15 percent say Virginia. The remainder did not specify a preference.
Among Commanders fans, the preference for D.C. grows to 63 percent, and among District residents it is 76 percent. City residents are now more open to public funding of a stadium. In 2022, two-thirds of D.C. residents opposed using city funds to help finance a new stadium in the District; now residents are split on the issue.
It’s no surprise that football fans in D.C. would rather get to watch football games in D.C., or even that many suburbanites would prefer a central location, since for many it’ll be easier to get to downtown D.C. than from one suburb to another. As for residents being “split” on using “city funds,” what were the actual results, and did the question specify how much in public money?
So now that Daniel Snyder has been replaced by a somewhat less odious Commanders owner, more D.C. residents are indeed okay with spending city money on a new stadium, though no actual price tag was included, so we don’t know whether they’re okay with spending $100 million or $500 million or two bits or what. And suburbanites still absolutely hate the idea of ponying up anything at all for an NFL stadium, which may be why they’re happy to let D.C. take the hit of hosting the Commanders.
The accurate way of reporting on polls like these is to lay out what people actually say they would support and what they wouldn’t — but when that runs afoul of what elected officials and team owners want, news outlets generally try to crowbar the findings into the terms of generally accepted horse race journalism. Polls are generally garbage at this point in history, but when they’re weaponized into not gauging the public’s priorities but rather finding ways to get a deal done, they become worse than useless.
Take it from someone with a background in academic and corporate market research – if you think polls were bad now, they’re gonna get even worse. The panel industry (vendors tasked with supplying actual humans who are qualified to take these surveys) is an over-consolidated mess that has collectively gutted their frontline project managers responsible for ensuring data quality. The largest and worst offender of that sad-sack lineup, who also probably single-handedly fucked up countless polls in the 2020 election, just declared bankruptcy. Oh, and while official research out there is still sketchy, industry experts in my professional network have estimated that survey fraud has increased anywhere from 15-30% since the proliferation of easily programmable generative AI tools like ChatGPT in late 2022.
https://www.research-live.com/article/news/dynata-applies-for-chapter-11-in-us-bankruptcy-court/id/5126273
Tldr; unless the surveyor is spending good money on a panel broker like Qualtrics, or has their own curated panel like NORC or Harris, and is fastidiously combing their dataset for bullshit respondents, take polls with a massive grain of salt. Even if they have, never treat them like Biblical truth the way the media does.
That’s good (and depressing) to know, thanks. That New Yorker article I linked to is from 2015, and there were lots of reasons to disbelieve polls then — if matters get even worse, then they’re truly just PR documents, and the power of PR belongs to those with PR departments…
Yeah, it’s not great. Althougg, I wouldn’t go so far as to call them glorified PR documents – at least not all of the time. Partisan news outlets and any of those bullshit “public interest” polls that firms like YouGov or Morning Consult use to drum up interest in their business should be thrown in the dumpster. But for outlets and firms that have a monetary interest in getting it right…of that segment are some who have devoted the resources and bandwidth to addressing the fuckshit going down on the logistical ends of surveys and can be taken seriously. No offense to schools like North Florida, but I tend to be skeptical of universities that don’t poll often and are simultaneously using grad students to handle a lot of the operational side. Maybe they’ve got a great process hammered out, but usually that’s a recipe for a lot of inexperienced labor dealing with a complex operation and little oversight.
Now, whether those same firms have updated their polling methodology to deal with a hyper-partisan environment with low overall social trust is a whole ‘nother matter.
Sorry, yeah, didn’t mean to imply that all polling is useless. But in a world where there are a million polls and only a small sliver of them are reasonably valid, and where the media doesn’t have the time or energy to tell the difference, then they become mostly numbers to hit people over the head with — much like “economic impact” studies.
What the world needs is a JC Bradbury type who’s willing to spend half their time calling out publicly which polls are worth a damn and which aren’t. Any volunteers?
Can you see what Nate Silver is up to? After leaving 538, he may want to transition from political polling to sports subsidy polling.
Yeahhhhh, I used to work with Nate at Baseball Prospectus, and I read a lot of his polling analysis at 538. I’m not sure I would trust his take on which polls are trustworthy.
Is is me, or does it seem that nate has really transitioned to contrarian hot takes?
Are the most useless polls NCAA bracketology surveys? What is the point of weekly seed projections in February for a tournament that won’t be held for another 6 weeks?
[“Composite power rankings” of leagues that are two or three weeks into an 82/162-game regular season have entered the chat]
Why are power rankings even a thing? Even worse? Mock drafts…..
It’s my understanding that the *real* attraction of college sports is betting. So if you are betting on every game or every week, you want the most up to date “analysis” as possible. from that perspective it makes *perfect* sense.
Wow Ian thanks! That’s good (or bad?) to know…..
LOL those headlines are embarrassing (and sad and tragic and all that)…..
I would think that the team’s aversion to letting the public vote on this deal offers some insight into what *their* polling has told them.
First link is a local fluff piece in Jacksonville on the stadium. They called out a heavy hitter (local sports economics expert I think they called her). Her credentials are in the second link, Read it and see if you are as underwhelmed as I am. Amazing that they ride hard on the community benefits angle when if the things they want to do, why didn’t the city fund it before. A remember, Shad K’s money (150 million) goes in at a clip of 5 million per year for 30 years.
https://www.actionnewsjax.com/news/local/affordable-housing-park-redevelopment-eastside-all-benefit-draft-stadium-deal/PRVDREXGJFFOZDJIRB4U3EZFDY/
https://webapps.unf.edu/faculty/bio/N00661857/kristi-sweeney
“Chair of the University of North Florida’s sport management department” = “teaches students how to get hired by teams”