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Every day there’s another poll — or three or four or five polls — that supposedly give you the latest insight on the presidential race, or, here in the D.C. area, even U.S. Senate races.
One day, a poll will say one thing about your favorite candidate, and four days later another poll will say something different, changing your whole mood and feeling about the race.
It can be confusing, among all sorts of other emotions, depending on how invested you are in the election. But are you looking at polls the way you’re actually supposed to be? A D.C.-area pollster has the skinny on how to properly read and interpret them every time a new poll comes out.
“It’s buyer beware,” said Mileah Kromer, director of the University of Maryland Baltimore County Institute of Politics. “Just because somebody releases a poll doesn’t mean you should automatically take their word as gospel.”
“People love polling because they want to know what’s going to happen, but polls really only give us a snapshot in time,” Kromer said. “They also should be considered within the margin of error, so the precision becomes an issue.”
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The margin of error is especially important to consider if you’re nervous because the newest poll shows your favorite candidate winning or losing by one point.
Most surveys have a margin of error of 3.5% — meaning you need to add or subtract 3.5% to the number shown in the poll to see its potential span.
“What it creates is more of a range,” Kromer said. “When you have somebody up by ‘one point,’ in reality, that difference is falling within the margin of error. It’s giving you a general picture, but it’s not as precise, I think, as people would like. And then that’s what makes people frustrated, not being able to deal with the uncertainty.”
Every time you start looking at a poll, you should consider who sponsored it, how it was conducted and when it was conducted, according to Kromer. For example, most of the people Kromer polls are reached by their cellphones now, with respondents texted a link to use. However, some pollsters might still mostly use landlines.
You also want to be aware of who they spoke with and how the questions they asked were worded. Some might come from universities without any agenda, while others might be working on behalf of a candidate or cause, so their motivation for releasing information to the public can also be questioned.
Kromer also advised that just because it’s the newest poll doesn’t necessarily mean you should discount other polls you might have seen in recent weeks.
“If you see several high-quality polls using standard methodology with full disclosure, that tells you exactly how those polls were conducted,” Kromer said.
If polls start to indicate a trend, Kromer said that could signal the state of the race.
“More information, I think, is always better,” Kromer said. “But that information also has to be good.”
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