How to read the polls like a nerd | #205 - October 2, 2022
Four tips from me for getting smarter about the polls. Plus, a brief history of survey methodology and October Q&A announcement!
Happy Sunday everyone,
Philip Bump, who writes chart-forward articles about US politics for The Washington Post, recently asked me to send him three tips for how to read the polls like an expert — “or, at least, not like a newbie.” Here is what I told him:
Take the “margin of error” and double it. Remember that a poll is a sample of a larger population. Every pollster reports (or should report — if they don’t this is a red flag) a staitstic called the “margin of error” that tells you how wrong their poll could be based on the chance they talked to an unrepresentative sample of that larger group.
But research has shown that a single election poll is subject to much more error than just this “sampling error” alone. For example, there is the chance that members of one party are less likely to take their polls than another (which is what happened in 2020 and 2016), and there is error in predicting who is actually likely to turn out to vote. So historically, the distribution of errors in elec…
