I’ve been reading
’s Political Wire since it launched, and I return to it several times a day. It updates with breaking political news from reputable sources and is curated by a political professional, not an algorithm. Instead of more from me on this topic, I’m passing along what Teagan Goddard has written to his subscribers.Political Wire will always cover the latest election polls. We all love trying to discern the latest trends in the political landscape.
But that doesn’t mean you should take them so seriously.
In a close election, the margin of error for the polls is going to be larger than the actual margin between the candidates.
And if it’s not that close, you’ll probably already know without obsessing over the latest poll.
You’ll see plenty of national polls over the next six months. And for the most part, they’ll tell you little about the presidential election.
That’s because the election will be decided in six or seven swing states.
You’ll see many polls from those states too. But if the past few election cycles are any indicator, there won’t be enough good ones to make up a solid polling average.
And again, because the race is expected to be close in those states — which is why they’re swing states! — the margin of error in these polls is likely to be greater than the actual gap between the candidates.
It’s also good advice to ignore the cross tabs. Anything you pick up there is most likely a random result due to a smaller survey sub-sample.
Over the last 20 years, a lot of people fell in love with the idea that we could somehow predict the outcome of an election with polling and fancy models.
But as many learned in 2016, even if a candidate has a 70% chance of winning it still doesn’t mean they’ll win.
So my advice to readers who fret over the latest poll: It’s fine to ignore them if they make you anxious. You won’t be missing that much.
If you need more reassurance, I quoted some facts here to support my view that“Polling Is Broken,” such as:
A story in National Journal headlined “Horse-Race Polls Are Not Fixable” said,
“The entire concept of polling depends on having a set population from which one can take a random sample and get a generally representative snapshot. Pre-election polls have no existing population—the election hasn’t happened yet, and voting isn’t compulsory in the U.S., so we simply don’t have a population of who voted until all the polls have closed on Election Day.”
“We can’t remedy that. The population of voters will never exist prior to the election. Expecting polls to be able to consistently, accurately predict an election is asking more than is statistically and theoretically possible.”
And,
New York Times columnist Nate Cohn asked the question, “Who in the World Is Still Answering Pollsters’ Phone Calls?” It’s important to understand, Cohn says,
“just how few people are answering. In the poll we have in the field right now, only 0.4 percent of dials have yielded a completed interview. If you were employed as one of our interviewers at a call center, you would have to dial numbers for two hours to get a single completed interview.”
Even the Trump campaign knows that the only states that matter are Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, plus Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina, in order of do-ability. The New York Times reports that at a donor retreat,
The slide show presentation included three different electoral college maps, the attendees said. The first was dismissed as “the media’s version,” which included seven swing states: Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina across the Southwest and the Sun Belt, plus Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in the industrial north.
A second slide described “the actual current reality” as only having three swing states: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
And a third slide described an “expanded reality” in which both Minnesota and Virginia would be in play for Mr. Trump — an ambitious view of states not widely seen as among the most competitive, but in which the Trump team insists the former president has gained ground.
Next time you feel yourself panicking over the election, mute cable news and ask yourself, is Donald Trump really picking up votes in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin? That’s all that matters. And no, Gaza isn’t going to make much of a difference.