A new poll shows President Joe Biden leading Trump 44% to 37%, with Kennedy notching 16%.
Released by Marist in partnership with NPR and PBS Newshour on Tuesday, the poll shows a five-point drop among Democrats for Biden with Kennedy in the race. Meanwhile, the survey indicates a 10-point drop among Republicans for Trump with RFK Jr. on the ticket.
That’s not how polling works.
Small sample size national polls are always the first line of polling.
They are not meaningless, even if they don’t have the same precision as exit polling.
What I mean is, thanks to the electoral college, running a national poll as though it means anything is pointless.
We saw this in 2016 with Clinton. National polling showed her winning, and as far as the popular vote was concerned, she won.
Which means jack all in the electoral college.
I understand that, but you are just too black and white.
There is a middle ground of indicative truth between being 100% precise or totally wrong.
Polling showed Clinton as being most likely to win. The fact that she didn’t win doesn’t mean the polling is necessarily meaningless. Even if someone has a 90% chance of winning, it means they can not only lose, but 1 in 10 times you expect them to lose.
Exactly. The polls showed that Trump had a small chance of winning and he did. It’s just like with the weather. When there’s a 90% chance of rain and it doesn’t rain, people say the weather person knows nothing, but that’s not how it works.
Seems to me that your mistake is that you believe the purpose of polls is to predict an outcome, and/or tell you who is “winning” or “losing” at a given point in time. That is not their purpose.
Their purpose is to gauge the relative effectiveness of different campaign messaging strategies, and to give a rough order of magnitude of a campaign’s trajectory.
Here’s the most important part: polls contain no actionable data for voters. They shouldn’t influence whether or how much you volunteer or donate, and they absolutely must not influence how you vote.