Saturday subscribers-only post: Extras from a lecture on the future of polling and election forecasting

I was in Salt Lake City this week to promote my book — which will soon be available for pre-orders!

I know it's way too early to start thinking about 2024 (or even 2022), but it's never too early to start promoting my book. And so I was very excited to be invited to Salt Lake City this week to give two lectures on polling and forecasting to students at the University of Utah, and to talk more generally with political science graduate students about applied statistics and data science.

And to be totally honest, things were going really well until one of them asked me:

Aren't election forecasts just pointless, then? If polls are subject to so much unpredictable error, are we better off just communicating about them in a different way? Or not doing them altogether?

I was a little caught off guard. For starters, asking someone if the thing they work on is “pointless” is not likely to elicit an immediate and good response! But after I thought for a second, I realized the student's comments teed up all my thinking about polling and forecasting almost too well. And though I was a little bothe…