SPECIAL | What do polls actually tell us?
The Excerpt
USA TODAY
4.1 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 11 September 2024
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
In the wake of the Trump-Harris debate, there's a firehose worth of new polls out, each purporting to show exactly how the event impacted voters. But what do they really mean? David Paleologos, Political Research Center Director at Suffolk University, a USA TODAY partner, joins The Excerpt to talk about the science and strategy of polling.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Wunderry Plus subscribers can listen to USA Today's The Excerpt, ad free right now. |
| 0:05.0 | Join Wunderry Plus in the Wundery app. |
| 0:08.0 | Hello and |
| 0:15.0 | this is a special episode of the excerpt. |
| 0:17.0 | And this is a special episode of the excerpt. Following last night's debate you can be sure there will be a flurry of |
| 0:28.0 | polls released each claiming to define what impact the night had on |
| 0:31.8 | voters. What are they really telling us? |
| 0:34.4 | And which ones can we trust? USA Today partners with Suffolk University on polling. |
| 0:39.3 | I'm joined now by David Paliologos, the director of the Political Research Center at Suffolk University, |
| 0:45.7 | a partner of USA Today, to dive into these questions and to teach us more about polling in America. |
| 0:53.4 | Thanks for being on the excerpt, David. |
| 0:55.2 | Thanks for having me. |
| 0:56.7 | There are just over 50 days to the election now, |
| 0:59.6 | and it feels like there is a fire hose of polling data coming out every day. |
| 1:05.2 | A lot of people think about polls as predictions or forecasts. |
| 1:09.4 | Is that how we should think about them? |
| 1:11.3 | Are they something else? |
| 1:12.7 | No, they're snapshots in time. |
| 1:14.9 | So we're only limited to the time window |
| 1:18.0 | that we reached out to voters and they should not be predictive. |
| 1:22.8 | The only time they really can be somewhat predictive |
| 1:25.9 | is if a survey is taken right before the election |
... |
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