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IrelandHank Green and Lakshya Jain on the scam calls that broke polling
A 51-minute essay and interview moves from unanswered phones to nervous pollsters and voters who misremember their own 2024 ballots.
Hank Green
Story of Why this story? 990,002 views so far, and here is what is inside it.
The Scam that Broke Polls
Things we can learn from the video
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- 1:34Green argues phone scams ruined polling because people no longer answer calls from unknown numbers.
- 3:04Anti-scam rules force pollsters in some states into costly manual dialing, while scammers ignore them.
- 9:09Jain says pollsters doubted their own data out of fear of missing Trump voters again.
- 13:58State-by-state results: Democratic overperformance in Texas and North Carolina, Republican resilience in Florida.
- 35:12Jain: about 15% of disapproving Trump voters told pollsters they had not voted for him in 2024.
- 42:24Why Jain trusts his simulation models over his gut and over qualitative ratings like Cook's.
The polls missed this one. Hank Green says so in the first seconds of "The Scam that Broke Polls", then spends the first stretch of the video on a suspect most people meet every day: the phone call from an unknown number.
His argument is simple. Polling's golden age, the years in 2008 and 2012 when Nate Silver's forecasts made election math look almost easy, depended on people picking up. Now, Green says, "more than 50% of the phone calls that I get are from scammers," so nobody answers. The irony he lingers on is legal: anti-scam rules in some states force legitimate pollsters into slow, expensive manual dialing, while the actual scammers simply ignore the law. He also returns to 2016 to remind viewers that a forecast giving one side the better odds was never a promise.
Then election forecaster Lakshya Jain joins by video call, the morning after the midterms, and the essay becomes a long debrief. Jain calls the result "the biggest wave that a party has seen since Watergate," and his explanation for the miss is about psychology as much as phones: after years of undercounting Trump voters, he says, the industry "reputationally cannot take another cycle" of that, so pollsters second-guessed numbers that pointed toward big Democratic gains.
The most striking finding comes past the half-hour mark. Jain says roughly 15% of Trump voters who now disapprove of him told pollsters they had not voted for him in 2024, which means even a question about the past can return a wrong answer. Along the way the two go state by state, through Texas, North Carolina, Florida's Republican resilience and a Montana House race, and Jain describes young voters, especially young men, swinging sharply toward Democrats over pocketbook worries.
The ending circles back to Green himself. Jain mentions that he got through AP U.S. History in high school with help from Crash Course, and Green, doing the arithmetic out loud, marvels that it was 13 years ago.
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- Channel
- Hank Green
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- Video published
- November 4, 2026
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💡 Test your knowledge
Who co-founded the educational channel Crash Course with Hank Green?
Hank Green launched Crash Course in 2012 with his brother, the novelist John Green.