The Polls Weren’t Great. But That’s Pretty Normal

FiveThirtyEight

I’m not a pollster, although I’m often misidentified as one on TV. I wanted to get that out of the way because while, in practice, our lives probably get easier in a year where the polls are spot-on, FiveThirtyEight’s mission is really to take the polls as they are — for better or worse — and understand the sources of error and uncertainty behind them. This is true for both the probabilistic forecasts that we build and the reporting that we do. We’re also interested in how polls are perceived by the media and the public and how that sometimes conflicts with the way we think polls should be viewed.

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