3 potential sources of polling error in the 2024 election | 538 Politics Podcast

Published: Sep 06, 2024 Duration: 00:02:40 Category: News & Politics

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so another thing that's going to happen over the next two months is a lot of talk about polling error Ruth what sources of error in this election keep you up at night oo all sources of error keep me up at night um but I will no right yeah I have small kids I'm never sleeping um there are three things for me that I think I'm paying a lot of attention to and one is maybe resolved I think I was very worried earlier in the cycle about the error that was associated with a fairly um sort of more popular Third Party candidate just because polling it's very challenging to measure Third Party candidate support if you name them you historically overstate their support if you don't name them you obviously understate their support and so how polls were handling that was really um inconsistent and I worried a lot about that leading to error that is arguably less important now with Kennedy dropping out though I still think some of that is a little bit murky um the other two sources of error are kind of interrelated one is I'm concerned about error in accurately measuring Latino voters that's been a fairly swingy group this cycle um and I think we and others have been paying a lot of attention to that and making sure that we're very accurate in making sure we get the right types of Latino voters College educated Latino voters non- colge educated um you know voters that speak English voters that primarily speak Spanish so just making sure that we are accurately measuring and have the right balance of those voters and interrelated sort of states that have higher than average polling error and some of that is states where we have a higher share of Latino voters but also just other states where there's a higher than average polling error right like Wisconsin is a source of anxiety for all of us the biggest polling error in Wisconsin recently was nine percentage points in 2020 if we're looking at Wisconsin right now and a lot of Democrats are looking at Wisconsin and saying that looks like an okay state for Harris a 9 percentage Point polling average yeah or polling error could really change the conversation around that state so I think don't trust a Wisconsin poll folks exactly so I think state level polling error is really the thing that keeps me up at night is these states where we have this higher than average polling error um yeah scan this QR code to go to the apple and Spotify podcast apps to download the full 538 politics podcast

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