Summary
Polls give Vice President Kamala Harris a roughly 2 percentage-point advantage in the national popular vote. But in the battleground states, polls show essentially even contests in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
According to David Byler, a longtime data analyst and pollster for Noble Predictive Insights, trust is the crux of the issue. But if trusting the polls means trusting that the polls are telling us something useful, then every pollster I talked to agrees: These tools are measuring something real.
The national polls were right in 2016, but the battleground picture was not. In 2016, pollsters missed that state-level surveys were overrepresenting college graduates. Voters who made their minds up in the final days of the 2016 election also ended up breaking for Trump.
Don’t stress too much about any one poll; take them in aggregate, like through the polling averages at FiveThirtyEight, RealClearPolitics, Silver Bulletin, and Split Ticket. Check the sample sizes and methodologies.
There are a number of reasons to think this bias still applies today, despite pollsters’ attempts to account for it. Trump voters tend to be less trusting of institutional figures like pollsters and journalists, and so may be less willing to answer these surveys.
After Biden’s exit from the race and Harris’S ascension, voter registrations and energy from younger people, people of color, and women voters have all surged.
With all these caveats, it can be tempting to just reject polling outright. But polling is still the most useful tool we have to gauge where the electorate is. Polling’s usefulness starts with understanding what it can tell us.
Electoral College outcomes at a state level have been far tighter, though. Pollsters are constantly watching changes in voter registration, taking into account how the likely electorate might be changing.
The good news for polling addicts is that the quality and frequency of polling will likely improve later in the election cycle. Post-Labor Day, polls tend to be a lot less noisy.
Multi-modal polling tends to be more accurate than any single method. Check for partisan affiliations. Third, make sure not to miss the margin of error.
“We’re in an incredibly polarized moment, and [polling] is just not a precision tool that can provide certainty,” says Swati Sharma, Editor-in-Chief of Vox. “You can get odds, you can get probabilities, you Can get sort of levels of certainty, but we’s in an incredible polarized moment.”
