How to interpret political polls

Think from KERA

KERA

Kera, 071003, Think, Society & Culture, Krysboyd

4.7 • 911 Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2024

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Every day it seems there’s a headline about which candidate is surging in the polls — but how accurate are those assessments? Philip Elliott, senior correspondent for Time magazine, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss how the layman can look at polls and glean the most relevant information, how polls gather their data and why that margin of error is super important. His article is “How to Read Political Polls Like a Pro.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	If there's one thing political campaigns tend to have in common, it's the way they talk about polls.
0:15.7	They're eager to tout the ones that show them to be ahead and dismiss the ones that don't.
0:20.5	They may claim to not even
0:21.5	pay attention to public polling, but they are obsessively interested in the results of so-called
0:26.3	internals, polls whose data are not released publicly, but may have a lot of influence over campaign
0:31.3	strategy. So what can pre-election surveys tell us about the only poll that really counts for
0:37.3	anything, which is the one
0:38.4	that happens at the ballot box. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd. We don't have to
0:45.5	track polls as obsessively as candidates and their staffs, but the truth is, many of us who have
0:50.9	clear preferences on how elections might turn out are interested in these possible glimpses into the minds of fellow citizens.
0:57.9	But it can be frustrating because in a closely divided country, presidential polling doesn't necessarily point early toward a clear winner.
1:06.1	My guest is Philip Elliott.
1:07.7	He has spent a lot of time parsing poll data in his job as senior correspondent at time, where he shares some very useful insights in his article, How to Read Political Polls Like a Pro.
1:19.2	Philip, welcome to think. Great to be with you, Chris. You remind us here something that we don't want to hear, which is that polls don't actually predict the future.
1:28.6	How should we think about what they actually can measure? Well, the polling right now is merely a
1:34.2	snapshot of what the race was like when the people were being asked it. And there's usually a day
1:39.3	or three or five or seven, frustratingly, between when the pollsters were asking the questions,
1:45.5	and when they actually broke it down, because it's not just raw data they're looking at.
1:49.2	They're looking at, they can't just release the raw data because that would just be garbage,
1:54.3	because we all know, I know I don't answer phone calls from people, I don't, from numbers,
1:58.4	I don't get senior citizens who are at home watching
2:01.2	Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune disproportionately answer. You take a look at some of the racial
	...

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