Ignore the Polls by Ezra Klein

[elleng]

(a 'gift' from me, for OUR sanity)

'Here’s a bit of advice to help maintain your sanity over the next few weeks until Election Day: Just ignore the polls. Unless you’re a campaign professional or a gambler, you’re probably looking at them for the same reason the rest of us are: to know who’ll win. Or at least to feel like you know who’ll win. But they just can’t tell you that.

Back in 2016, Harry Enten, then at FiveThirtyEight, calculated the final polling error in every presidential election between 1968 and 2012. On average, the polls missed by two percentage points. In 2016, an American Association for Public Opinion Research postmortem found that the average error of the national polls was 2.2 points, but the polls of individual states were off by 5.1 points. In 2020, the national polls were off by 4.5 points and the state-level polls missed, again, by 5.1 points.

You could imagine a world in which these errors are random and cancel one another out. Perhaps Donald Trump’s support is undercounted by three points in Michigan but overcounted by three points in Wisconsin. But errors often systematically favor one candidate or the other. In both 2016 and 2020, for instance, state-level polls tended to undercount Trump supporters. The polls overestimated Hillary Clinton’s margin by three points in 2016 and Joe Biden’s margin by 4.3 points in 2020. . .

So give yourself a break. Step off the emotional roller coaster. If you want to do something to affect the election, donate money or time in a swing state — ideally to a state party or down-ballot race, where your efforts will go further — or volunteer in a local race. Call anyone in your life who might actually be undecided or might not be registered to vote or might not make it to the polls. And then let go. There’s nothing more you can do, and nothing more the polls can do for you'

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/13/opinion/polls-harris-trump.html

[Lulu KC]

1. Thank you, Ezra Klein

And thanks for posting, elleng.

[displacedvermoter]

2. How come we couldn't ignore the polls when Biden

was running behind and Ezra Klein and Carville wanted to run their mini primary season?

[Lulu KC]

5. Agreed

Sometimes he's right (meaning he agrees with me) but sometimes he's annoying (when my children agree with him instead of me).

Mixed bag, that Ezra.

[displacedvermoter]

6. I guess

[lees1975]

8. We should have. I honestly don't think Trump could beat Biden. Not on his very best day.

And goodness, what a time of chaos that was.

Trump will get somewhere between 42% and 45% of the vote, nationwide, at his very best. That's not really taking into consideration the number of Republicans who have endorsed Harris, and their constituents, not a huge number, but any subtraction from the top layer of Trump support is enough to cost him a close election if it runs along similar lines of 2020.

Any Democrat on the ticket will get between 47% and 53% of the vote nationwide. That's enough to pull things through the electoral college. I think because it's Harris, and she's brought a top notch campaign to the table, she goes to the higher percentage. Biden might have struggled a bit, but given what is at stake, even voters who weren't so sure about him would support him to keep Trump out.

[displacedvermoter]

9. Thank you

Agreed!

[bucolic_frolic]

3. How could we win 2018, 2020, 2022

and be in a dogfight in 2024 with one of the worst low-lifes in all of history as an opponent?

Seriously. We're gonna fight a civil war over this imbecile?

[-misanthroptimist]

4. He's right, you know.

Polling has gotten much more difficult. It's more difficult to find people to participate. (I won't unless they pay me.) Honesty in America has plummeted, so it's difficult to know if you have a real member of some sub-group or someone trying to skew the polls for political reasons. Some pollsters (and I'm not naming names) make their polls come out the way they want. And there's several other problems with contemporary polling.

I'm old enough to remember when campaign news only rarely included "new poll!" nonsense. Now, it's hard to get anything else.