And the Hey, it's Andrew Clavin, and welcome to this week's interview with the great Henry

Olson, a poll watcher extraordinary political commentator and a podcaster.

Whenever people quote the polls as proof of anything I always think of a

character in a novel by the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, a doctor whose name is Dr. Philgrave.

And the idea the trial was, the point that Trollope was trying to make is that the state of

medicine in Victorian England was such that the doctor was just as

likely to kill you as to heal you and yet people still called the doctor anyway

even knowing that he might kill them because people want to believe in experts and

people want to believe that someone and people want to believe that someone

can predict the future.

And that meant the best doctor then and maybe the best doctor now is the one who knew what

he didn't know and knew to do no harm.

And polling nowadays is kind of similar. The state of

polling is in disarray with the invention of the cell phone. It's harder to get

people to answer. People don't pick up. I know I don't answer the phone at all unless I know

who it is who's calling.

So the numbers are less reliable.

And yet, the news media keeps quoting polls

as if either they must absolutely predict the future or else they must be rigged when instead the truth is probably somewhere in between that as Doris Day used to say the future simply isn't ours to see and that is the reason I always like to talk to Henry Olson.

He is a guy who not just, he doesn't just know how to read the numbers, which is important.

He's also a man who knows what he doesn't know and maybe most importantly he's one of the few

commentators I know who never lets his personal preferences get in the way of what he

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