Polls, President Trump, And The Scarcity Of Certainty - The New Yorker Interviews Sean Trende, Elections Editor of RCP (1 Viewer)

[rockaction]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-to-make-sense-of-the-polls

I had originally posted this in the 2020 Election Polls thread, but thought it deserved its own space here.

Excerpt:

So, then, what would need to change for Trump to win? What, in addition to the polls being wrong, are we going to look back at in a month and say, “Boy, we were sure wrong when we talked in October”?

The story I have mentally pre-written is that job-approval thing. He had gotten up to like forty-six per cent [among likely voters], which means that a lot of these undecideds are probably going to break for him, because they ultimately approve of the job he’s doing.

If what we’re seeing right now is just differential response, which is a well-established phenomenon. When there’s a big blowup in the news cycles, one party won’t answer polls. That could be what we’re seeing right now. And so if, in a couple of weeks, this has gone back to him being at forty-five or forty-six per cent, and he’s leading Biden on the economy by eight, nine points, that’s the story for why he wins if he does.

 

[Juxtatarot]

Rock, I’m not sure where you want this thread to go. However, for me, the most important sentence is the last one:

And just remember, even at an aggregated level, polls are off, and when FiveThirtyEight tells you there’s a twenty-per-cent chance of something happening, you don’t get to round that down to zero.

Trump could certainly win. It just doesn’t seem to be likely.

 

[rockaction]

Rock, I’m not sure where you want this thread to go. However, for me, the most important sentence is the last one:

Trump could certainly win. It just doesn’t seem to be likely.

I'm not looking for it to go anywhere, GB.

I thought it was important to look at the article because all of the polling issues that are argued about endlessly here were addressed and not given short shrift by the Elections Editor at RCP. I figured after reading one of the million Trump/Anti-Trump poll dialogues that it would help that Trende acknowledges that there may be a shy voter and then worries about the larger issue of people just flat hanging up on or lying to pollsters. I won't disclose how, but I know he's usually a lot more assured than this, and just reading the article gave me pause.

But I missed that quote you put into your text. I wonder how.