How about a little poll analysis crack? Don’t worry this won’t make you want to throw your phone across the room. It’s actually very interesting.
NBC News took a look at the extremely tight state polling right now and came away thinking maybe there’s a little “adjusting” going on that is giving us all the impression that it’s actually a tie:
Analysis: Even in a close election, random chance means polls should be showing a broader range of results. That raises the question of whether we’re in for another polling surprise.
Recent polls in the seven core swing states show an astonishingly tight presidential race: 124 out of the last 321 polls conducted in those states — almost 39% — show margins of 1 percentage point or less.
In fact, the state polls are showing not just an astonishingly tight race, but also an improbably tight race. Even in a truly tied election, the randomness inherent in polling would generate more varied and less clustered results — unless the state polls and the polling averages are artificially close because of decisions pollsters are making.
The results of a poll depend on the opinions of the voters and the decisions of pollsters. Decisions about how to weight polls to match the expected composition of the electorate can move the results of a poll up to 8 points. This is true even if pollsters are making perfectly reasonable decisions on how to weight their survey data, as survey researchers have been forced to consider new methods and ideas for weighting and addressing falling response rates following polling misses in 2016 and 2020.
But the fact that so many polls are reporting the exact same margins and results raises a troubling possibility: that some pollsters are making adjustments in such similar ways that those choices are causing the results to bunch together, creating a potential illusion of certainty — or that some pollsters are even looking to others’ results to guide their own (i.e., “herding”). If so, the artificial similarity of polls may be creating a false impression that may not play out on Election Day. We could well be in for a very close election. But there’s also a significant chance one candidate or the other could sweep every swing state and win the presidency somewhat comfortably, at least compared to the evenly balanced picture in the polls.
If this issue is of interest to you I urge you to read the whole thing. If this is correct, these super-tight polls are suspicious.
It’s certainly possible that the race is a tight as the polls suggest. What’s unlikely is that all these polls that uniformly show this aren’t herding. There should be more variation in the polling just because of polling randomness.
Anyway, I thought it was quite interesting. We’ve got a huge poll coming up next Tuesday so any poll-gazing at this point is really just a form of masochism. But I know that some of you are interested in this stuff (as, I confess, I am) so I thought I’d share it.
If you’re looking for more of this, I recommend this article on polling. It explains this weighting business clearly and concisely.
There is no end of scrutiny of the 2024 election polls – who is ahead, who is behind, how much the polls will miss the election outcome, etc., etc. These questions have become even more pressing because the presidential race seems to be a toss-up. Every percentage point for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump matters.
But here’s the big problem that no one talks about very much: Simple and defensible decisions by pollsters can drastically change the reported margin between Harris and Trump. I’ll show that the margin can change by as much as eight points. Reasonable decisions produce a margin that ranges from Harris +0.9% to Harris +9%.
This reality highlights that we ask far too much of polls. Ultimately, it’s hard to know how much poll numbers reflect the decisions of voters – or the decisions of pollsters.
At this point I’m all about vibes and I’m feeling cautiously optimistic. But then I’ve felt that way throughout the campaign. As I felt in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 when Democrats have pretty much run the table.
But it’s always too damned close for comfort.