Gallup Poll Claims US Gambling Participation Is Down 30%, But Data Doesn’t Add Up

Another day, another gambling poll that makes you go “hmmmmm.”

This one from Gallup though … it made basically everyone sit up and take notice, mostly because the numbers simply didn’t make sense.

To be clear: I am not about to take down Gallup like I did last week with Betterment and their fugazi “52% of Gen Z has redirected investment money into sports betting” study. After all, this is Gallup. It is about as well-respected a polling company as exists.

But still …

The thrust was that 45% of Americans said they participated in some form of gambling over the past year, down from 64% in 2016. It would mean that despite PASPA being overturned and sports betting becoming legal, despite the rise out of thin air of prediction markets, despite a handful of U.S. states legalizing online casinos, despite sweepstakes sites blossoming, despite there being more actual land-based casinos across the country since 2016, despite everything … there has been a 30% decrease in the number of gamblers?

See what I did there? I ended that paragraph with a question mark instead of a period, because it seems wholly unbelievable.

So.

What gives?

There here

First off, let’s establish that there is a “there” here. According to the Gallup data — and they talked to 1,200 people on the phone for this, which is fine-ish, but still, it’s “1,200 people” and “the phone” — lottery tickets fell from nearly half the country saying they’d bought one to 31%; in-person casino gamblers tumbled from 26% to 14%; and office pool participation was nearly halved, from 15% to 7%. These are all huge drops that obviously contributed to the overall decline.

But looking deeper into the questions … well, Gallup may have missed a few things.

There were 13 questions. Some of those questions asked respondents if they “bet on a horse race,” “bet on a boxing match,” “played a video poker machine,” or “participated in an office pool.”

They may as well have also asked “Did you buy a racing form and a pack of Chesterfields and refer to women as broads?” because while the above are all legitimate ways to gamble money, those questions did a pretty lousy job of capturing the modern gambling ecosystem.

Here’s what wasn’t asked, specifically: Nothing about online casinos. Nothing about online sportsbooks. Yes, they asked if people had placed a bet on sports or gambled on the internet, but those questions lack specificity.

They also didn’t separate lottery tickets from scratch-offs. Didn’t ask about poker. Nothing about sweepstakes. Nothing about “friendly” wagers.

Honestly, the biggest issue was a finding that 4% of Americans say they “gambled for money on the internet.” That number is — and there is no other word for this — wrong. Just fantasy sports alone accounts for some 50 million Americans who “gamble.” And to be clear, yes, they asked specifically about fantasy, and got the same 4%. Just to give some idea of how insane that number is, PrizePicks has 20 million registered accounts.

The idea that only 4% of Americans gambled online, in some form or another, doesn’t hold water.

Please hold

Then there’s the phone thing, which Gallup cops to, noting that in a similar poll it conducted online, the number of Americans who say they have gambled in the past year jumped to 53%, which inches closer to the industry’s own numbers (inching, to be clear, as the American Gaming Association has it at 57%).

Of course, all this back-and-forth about how many people gamble also misses what is probably the real question: What is gambling?

Because this poll didn’t ask about baseball cards. Or meme stocks. Or NFTs. Or loot boxes. Or Pokemon cards. Or crypto. Or Roblox. Or any number of items I can’t think of right now.

I’d love to see a poll that encompasses all of this. Because that poll would melt brains. What would it be … 60%? 70%? More?

Listen, I’m not going to argue with Gallup, but once again — and here I am, preaching to the choir at the bottom of a story — the mainstream media went bonkers with this 45% percent number when A) Gallup itself admits it’s probably higher based on its web poll and B) it doesn’t encompass nearly everything that’s gambling.

So, sure, some forms of gambling are almost certainly down. But that’s not nearly as sexy as the headline.

On to the next poll, I suppose.