More evidence that polls are pretty good, actually — maybe even better than you've been told

Polls have tracked very close to the CDC's official record of how many people are vaccinated for covid-19, Pew says

The Pew Research Center published another useful defense of the polls yesterday afternoon, this time showing that self-reported covid-19 vaccination rates in surveys from 19 different polling organizations have strayed very little from the official rate from the Center for Disease Control since December last year. “Polling estimates of the adult vaccination rate have been within about 2.8 percentage points, on average, of the rate calculated by the CDC”, Pew reports. “Around a quarter (22%) of the polls differed from the CDC estimate by less than 1 percentage point.”

They include this excellent graph:

And while the average self-reported vaccination rate is closer to the CDC benchmark than polls were to the results of the election — aka lower bias in the aggregate, especially compared to state polls — the average absolute deviation nationally is not so different! So by way of digressing, I’d say the tracking of covid-19 vaccinations via surveys is a fantastic example of how polls can be…