nulluser , 5 hours ago

I’d like to remind everyone that 8 years ago, the polls showed Hillary was going to trounce Trump pretty handedly. There was tons of discussion after the election about how the polls could be so wrong.

I think Fivethityeight’s explanation went something like…

If a candidate is only polling 40% to their opponents’s 60%, and you were to run the election 10 times with a different sampling of voters each time, it doesn’t mean that the candidate will lose by 60% every time. It means they’re going to win four times out of ten.

Don’t let polls lull you into either complacency or despair. The only thing polls are really good for is giving pundits something to talk about in the 24 hour news cycle. Polls don’t decide the election. Only actual votes on actual ballots that are actually submitted in time decide the election.