The US presidential election remains on a knife-edge 45 days before voters go to the polls, despite Kamala Harris enjoying one of her most encouraging spells of opinion polling since becoming the Democrats’ nominee nearly two months ago.
During yet another momentous week that began with a suspected second assassination attempt against Donald Trump, the latest Guardian 10-day polling averages survey shows Harris increasing her lead to 2.6 points, 48.5% to 45.9%.
While still within error margins, that is an improvement of the 0.9% edge Harris held last week and a significant shift from the statistical dead heat of a fortnight ago before the candidates held their only scheduled televised debate in Philadelphia on 10 September.
Yeah, they’re entirely meaningless this election cycle. These poll leads have been sitting in margin of error zones the whole damn time, which means you cannot make a useful inference from the data in the poll.
It’s so close you can slightly tweak the conditions and who you ask and WHAT you ask them to push the poll data to support anything you want.
Good for propaganda, bad for anything else.
Also, who answers an unknown number from their phone anymore other than the elderly and the lonely? That’s not exactly a good cross-section of voters.
There was an interesting thing from the NYT where they talked about their phone poll response rate being 2%.
I can’t imagine that they had worse or better response rates annoying people with their shit than anyone else would, so it’s probably a good wager that all the polls see 2% response rates and thus are based off a shockingly small profile of people.
A small dataset can still be statistically significant, depending on how and where the data is obtained and structured.
That being said, everything involving Trump has had bad polling since he first started running. Poor polling isn’t particularly new when he’s involved. Some of it is spot on, others wildly inaccurate.
I’m surprised marketing companies don’t release their stats since they have a better idea of who everyone is going to vote for than anyone else. But then they’d have to admit that they know.
They’d also have to not have a horse race, which is what is in their best interest.
That doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. It means it’s a very close race.