Speaking of polls, Philip Bump has a good bit of fun with Trump’s hilariously misleading charts like the one above ostensibly showing his crushing Biden in the latest Bloomberg poll in his newsletter this weekend. It doesn’t matter what the numbers are, Trump is always “crushing” it. He added this bit which I thought was interesting.
If the bottom of the red shaded area is not higher than the top of the shaded blue area, it’s best to describe the race as a dead heat or statistically tied. After all, consider those Pennsylvania results, with the margin of error of 3 points. That means support for Biden probably lands between 43 and 49 percent and support for Trump between 44 and 50 percent. So maybe the “real” support for Biden is 47 percent while Trump’s is 46. The crusher has become the crushee!
I put “real” in quotes because there’s squishiness all over the place here. Margins of error don’t capture all of the uncertainty, nor do April polls predict November results.
Indeed. Remember this as you look at polling over the next few months. And recall that in 2016 the race was always within the margin of error and yet we assumed that Clinton had to win because … well, it’s the only thing that made sense. We know how that turned out.