Table of Contents
This just in …
Dateline: Ames, Iowa
Advanced Syntactics announces its latest poll of randos who responded to text surveys show Trump's lead over Biden has increased 23.81% over last month's lead of 3.2% to 3.1%, while 18% of respondents added sriracha sauce to their side of fries.
Or, as The Great Oz said "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain."
It's a long way to August yet
Election polls are notoriously poor indicators of what they will be reporting within 90 days of election.
A survey is not a ballot
There is only one poll that counts.
Margin of error is not what you think
There are three parts, and usually only the first is reported
- Simple random sampling error, which depends solely on how many survey responses were received
- Design error, which depends on how survey responses were weighted by demographics, this is sometimes reported, but a good rule of thumb is to add an additional 1.2%
- Other, which can cover a host of reasons to add additional grains of salt.
The last category is the big imponderable. While good pollster can, and do, solicit input by a variety of means to assure that every voter has an equal chance of being reached, there is little to be done to assure that every voter has an equal chance of responding.
Past performance is history
Polling methods have changed a lot in recent years.
We aren't starting from zero knowledge
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. Patrick Henry
Many of the same voters who voted in 2016 and 2020 will be voting again in 2024.
Not every opinion counts
In 2020, only the opinion of 311,257 voters counted. These are voters who voted for Biden instead of Trump in the six swing states in that election out of the 157,234,714 voters to voted for one or the other. That's less than 2%.
So, look at this year's seven swing states
Now in testing, Swing Watch can help by providing poll aggregation for the swing states using a consistent methodology to putting the polls on the same footing. Free and totally non-commercial. Polls conducted in March are now up, and April polls will be reported in early May.
Mascot of the day
