In what universe are polls ever anywhere near within half a point?
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2018
Sorry this just isn't so. You can't just observe a range of polls which predict a wide range of outcomes and probabilities after the fact and pick whichever one turned out to be best after the fact and say polling was accurate unless that poll you picked consistently achieves that level of accuracy.
This would be like rolling a box full of 100 sided dice before a game and then picking the 2 closest to the football games final score and then declaring that those dice are accurate to within so many points.
Polling is not nor has it been accurate to half a point. The pollsters themselves claim a larger margin of error.
This wasn’t meant to be a prediction and moreso a hypothetical because of how much discussion of polling error I hear from both sides. Like, what if the Polls are actually really good and accurate this time? This is what we’d get
You do realize that voting trends in non-presidential election years are markedly different than those in presidential election years, right? Not just turnout, but actual voting patterns?
Hence this is meant to be a hypothetical. As I said, if it's a 2022 repeat Harris sweeps the swing states and if it's a 2020 repeat Trump sweeps them.
And that leads into my point - the polls from year to year are never “broken” in the exact same way, especially in the 21st century. It’s not going to be a repeat of 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022 - to assume so, no matter the projected outcome, is an inherently flawed hypothesis out of the gate.
- We’re still in a Terra Incognito of post-pandemic polling and voting behavior.
- We have a candidate who is a convicted felon, and who was involved in an attempt to subvert our democracy after the last election.
- We have another candidate who won no primaries to get their party’s nomination, but who quickly locked up party support after a sitting President abandoned their run for reelection. Oh, and she’s a woman with immigrant parents of differing ethnic backgrounds.
- Unprecedented economic situation where all the economic indicators are showing one reality but a lot of people’s lived experience is exactly contrary.
- Huge campaigns to influence the outcome involving entrenched power structures, foreign governments, and ideological extremists, all made easy by AI and tech bros who have abandoned democracy.
The list goes on. Nothing about this election is normal, and almost all of it is unprecedented. The disparity of the polls from the results will of course exist, but the why of that disparity will greatly influence in what way the numbers are off. Did black non-college educated women show up for Harris. Did white suburban soccer moms still embrace Trump. So it’s not simply a question of “the polls are going to be off by a predictable amount, and so we can guess as to which way the election will turn based off past performance”
This wasn't meant to be a prediction and moreso a hypothetical because of how much discussion of polling error I hear from both sides. Like, what if the Polls are actually really good and accurate this time? This is what we'd get
That maybe could happen, but I say it’s much, much more likely they’re flying blind. Polling has become exponentially more difficult over time and there’s only so much you can do to try and address that with your methodology.
Ironically we’re pretty good at identifying trends in how sentiment is changing or shifting, but absolutely crap at being usefully predictive in terms of results.