Written by Scott Rasmussen
We are now fully in the silly season of the election cycle. Countless polls are released daily and election forecasters attempt to mystically divine whether the odds of one candidate winning moved up or down a point or two.
Using polling data in that manner is about as useful as trying to hammer a nail with a screwdriver. It’s the wrong tool for the job. When a race is very close, and we know this presidential race is close, a poll or polling average with a 3ish point margin of error is the wrong tool to determine who will win.
The proper use of polls is not to predict the winner of tossup races. It’s true that elections are good tests for the reliability of polls. But we should not expect unrealistic precision. Instead, we should expect that good polling will show that tossup races are close.
Four years ago, I explained why it is problematic for public pollsters to release data in the final two weeks of an election. “Public pollsters act like a bartender who keeps pouring whiskey for a drunk customer and is then surprised when the customer wrecks his car on the way home.”
Napolitan News will continue to follow that policy. This Friday, October 18, will be our final election polling release for 2024. Instead, as election day gets closer, we will “offer a voter-centric view of the race, measuring underlying attitudes more than attempting to define likely voters”.
In the final weeks of an election, a proper use of polling data helps us understand the dynamics of the race. For campaigns, quality polling can help them determine where to deploy resources. For analysts, polls can help them understand what to look for. For example, the polls tell us that the winner of Pennsylvania is likely to become our next president. If the Keystone State is called early on election night for either candidate, we can have a fair level of confidence that candidate is going to win.
Ultimately, the real value of quality polls is for listening to the public, especially to people who are not like us. Such listening requires much more than mathematical precision. It requires asking the right questions from a variety of angles and carefully considering the results as they might be seen by others.
Scott Rasmussen is the President of RMG Research, Inc. and founder of the Napolitan Institute.
