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Are Presidential Polls Bullshit?
The Problems with Political Polling
Almost four years ago, the election of Donald Trump took most by surprise. Even the pessimistic prognosticators gave Trump just a 28% chance of winning. This along with the earlier Brexit vote caused a lot of teeth-gnashing among pundits. Why didn’t we see these results coming? Why were the polls so off?
Now in 2020 we’re looking at a new election with brand new polls. Any sane person should wonder, can we trust the pollsters this time around? After 2016 the most famous poll analyzer of them all, Nate Silver, concluded that the polls were as accurate as they had ever been. The problem he said, was in people’s expectations of their accuracy. Personally, I think this is passing the buck, but I do agree that polls have always been far from perfect. Moreover, there are reasons to think they are even less accurate in 2020 than they were in 2016. In this article, I’d like to present some reasons for why election polling isn’t a great way to predict the future president.
How Polling Works
First let’s take a short detour to talk about how polling works. We can imagine all Americans fit on some spectrum of political preference. Most people imagine this preference looks like a normal distribution, or the classic bell curve. To them it might look…
