Name: US Election 2020: Can you trust the polls? - BBC News
Uploaded: 2020-10-25T18:25:12.000Z
Duration: 3 min 20 s
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Adverbs of degree

Those polls were wrong in just about everything.

Election polls got it all wrong, didn't they?

The national polls were actually pretty accurate.

They showed Hillary Clinton ahead by around 3% on average, and she did win the popular vote by a margin of just over 2%.

But in America, that's not what wins you.

Donald Trump won in MAWR key States and ultimately walked into the White House.

So can we trust the polls to predict the winner in 2020?

If you want to trust them to predict the winner in a razor thin election, that's a mistake.

Pulls even the best ones are really not up to.

That task pulls our snapshot in time about what the public is thinking or feeling at a particular moment when we collect the data.

So how does polling work specialist polling groups, news organizations and some universities carry out polls over the phone online or a combination of these methods?

Election polls ask people a variety of questions, but the main one is if the election was held today, who would you vote for?

The number of people taking part varies from pole to pole, but for election polls to be accurate, they need to survey a representative sample of likely voters.

But that could be hard to dio to do polling in the US Well, you have to recognize that some groups are more likely to take polls than others, older folks, whites and college graduates.

And so you have to statistically weight down the college graduates, so they're proportional to what they are in the population.

Under representing people without college degrees is what some state polls did in 2016 which meant there were some surprise wins for Trump.

It's Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, where the states that were the shockers they used to be known as the Blue Wall for Democratic candidates because they were just consistently cycle after cycle would would support the Democrat for president.

Using polling data to predict the final result doesn't account for voters being influenced by the candidates campaigns.

There was a really late swing in Donald Trump's favor among the 10 to 15% of voters who waited until the last days to make up their mind.

Getting it right means people accurately predicting their own future behavior about whether they're going to vote in whom they're going to vote for.

And even if the pollster does everything perfectly, they can change their minds especially, you know, in the long campaigns that we have in the U.

More voters than normal say they've made up their minds.

But there's still uncertainty due to the pandemic and a big increase in postal voting.

 So while Poles can be trusted to provide a good guide to the public mood at a given time, they shouldn't be relied on to predict the final outcome. 