What polls can actually tell us
And why they sometimes surprise us in presidential elections.
Support our work. Become a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/memberships
Subscribe to our channel and turn on notifications (?) so you don't miss any videos: http://goo.gl/0bsAjO
Polls seem to be dominating the news cycle this US election season, and they’re giving people cause to celebrate or despair depending on how their preferred candidate is faring in them. But if you understand what polls are actually capable of telling you, it might dispel any desire you have for them to predict whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will be the next president.
We interviewed pollsters about their processes and explained the basics of how they turn small surveys into a way to measure the entirety of a voting population. No matter what measures pollsters take to make their samples as representative as possible, there’s a limit to how precise they can be. And, sometimes, those same measures can make the poll numbers go awry.
Sources and further reading:
Courtney Kennedy, who we interviewed for this piece and is in the video, co-wrote this helpful primer on how to read election polls:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/08/28/key-things-to-know-about-us-election-polling-in-2024/
We interviewed Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts University, who co-wrote this blog post on weighting polls for this election:
https://goodauthority.org/news/pollsters-are-weighting-surveys-differently-in-2024/
If you want to better understand the polling errors in the 2016 and 2020 elections:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/upshot/poll-changes-2024-trump.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/upshot/polls-what-went-wrong.html
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-pollsters-have-changed-since-2016-and-what-still-worries-them-about-2020/
Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com.
Watch our full video catalog: http://goo.gl/IZONyE
Follow Vox on Facebook: http://goo.gl/U2g06o
Or Twitter: http://goo.gl/XFrZ5H
Vox
Vox helps you cut through the noise and understand what's driving events in the headlines and in our lives. Vox video is Joe Posner, Mona Lalwani, Valerie Lapinski, Dion Lee, Ashley Sather, Joss Fong, Estelle Caswell, Adam Freelander, Kim Mas, Coleman Lo...