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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ม.ค. 2025
- And why they sometimes surprise us in presidential elections.
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Polls seem to be dominating the news cycle this US election season, and they’re giving people cause to celebrate or despair depending on how their preferred candidate is faring in them. But if you understand what polls are actually capable of telling you, it might dispel any desire you have for them to predict whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will be the next president.
We interviewed pollsters about their processes and explained the basics of how they turn small surveys into a way to measure the entirety of a voting population. No matter what measures pollsters take to make their samples as representative as possible, there’s a limit to how precise they can be. And, sometimes, those same measures can make the poll numbers go awry.
Sources and further reading:
Courtney Kennedy, who we interviewed for this piece and is in the video, co-wrote this helpful primer on how to read election polls:
www.pewresearc...
We interviewed Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts University, who co-wrote this blog post on weighting polls for this election:
goodauthority....
If you want to better understand the polling errors in the 2016 and 2020 elections:
www.nytimes.co...
www.nytimes.co...
fivethirtyeigh...
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In conclusion: The real poll is on November 5th.
Its on january 20th actually
@tauceti8060 i get what you mean but... no.
@@tauceti8060Jan 6th
Whenever trump tries to overthrow our government again
@@tauceti8060 The votes by the actual electors, that determine the winner Constitutionally, are cast on December 17th (this year, it varies along with the election day).
January 6th is the day those ballots are opened and processed by Congress, announcing the final result. January 20th is inauguration day, when the new President actually takes power, specifically at noon.
There are also a few other deadlines and procedures in between, involving the National Archives, who officially record the votes.
It's done this way to allow time for everything to be transferred and processed - originally they would have had to physically carry the ballots from each statehouse to the Capitol by horse.
So...morale of the story: Don't trust the polls and just go out and vote.
What does "trust the polls" even mean
@@biggieb8900 what do you think? It kind of obvious
@@biggieb8900 what do you think they mean
what i got is. dont trust but trust it.
@@biggieb8900 for example if polls say someone you like will win, you might get lazy and not vote since the polls already say they will win, which might lead to them losing in the end.
I did a phone survey (not about candidates, but about a specific issue) and the guy doing the survey was really excited to find out I was in my mid-20s because we never pick up. I was just really bored that day. 😂
Bruh XD
Younger generations don't answer random phone calls or texts.
Yup.
They also vote in fewer numbers, so....
Yes as the video said and explained, that weighting is used to account for that. Of course then comes the question was the weighting done well and based on valid data and arguments.
So weighting reflects that.
Did they account for Covid?
My poll has Kim Jong Un at 120% chance to win the North Korean Presidency.
with a 20% margin of error
Only 120%??? Back when his father was in office he could easily hit triple that! Really goes to show how far their dynasty has fallen.
That's nothing. Putin has a 150% chance of winning in the next election
That seems low. I'm polling him at least 200%.
really? my polls had it kim 51%...
Theres a very accurate poll coming up that ends on Tuesday
Apparently it’s not if you ask the republican candidate
@@llcn829 Well according to him it's only accurate if he wins
@@frenchtoast4491Well apparently he called it inaccurate even when he won
Won't you agree that it's a really clever tactic of manipulation?
@@TheaverageQueerpersons Considering that even his manager, who was in charge of finding flaws in election, came out clean saying it is not rigged.
Vox's editing quality is outstanding.
Ocetober
And yet they take over 6 minutes to give us a simple message: early polls are unreliable, so there is no point in paying attention to them. Wait until after election day to find out the results. Start the video at 6:04
WHO LET TEH FAX SPITTER OUT?!🗣️🗣️🗣️🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Yeah but their journalistic quality has severely deteriorated. Remember when you used to hear from multiple professionals on a video's topic? I can't recall the last time one of their recent videos had more than one contributor.
@@blorpblorpblorp its probably because theyre trying to make the videos in shorter amounts of time since alot of them are time constrained- like this video.
As a pollster, this is a an awesome video. Thank you for explaining this better than I ever could
Polling organizations after spending millions and millions of dollars:
"Yeah, this may or may not happen"
The stock market, marriage, childbirth, jobs, driving... etc. Nothing's guaranteed.
@@AdanSolasNonsense. Marriage is guaranteed. Like I guarantee you that I will never get married.
@j.a.weishaupt1748 1. That's a terrible attempt at an insult.
2. That's not even what I meant.
@@AdanSolas 1. Well I was insulting myself…
2. I was joking.
@j.a.weishaupt1748 Touché
imagine working around the clock spending tons and tons of money only to determine it’s a 50/50 shot that could go either way.
Yes and no. The only reason we know that this election will be a close one is because of polling. If we didn't have poll results, we wouldn't even be privy to that information.
The other thing pollsters do is actually poll by state. That is way more important national polling because only a handful of states each election determine the result. If those polls aren't close, then they can tell us who is leading the election. If those polls are close, then we know we're headed into a true coinflip situation.
Statistics in a nutshell
well.. there's kind of a causal relationship there. if the polls say that a state is close, then that *causes* the candidates to go after that state, which makes it even closer.
That's still important information to know
@@FWtravels it does tell you the race is close. You wouldn't know the race was this close if it wasn't for the polls.
I have worked on polling statistical methods during my PhD days with one of the best pollsters in the country, who sadly passed away in 2019 - there are wayy too many factors to control to use any polling as a predictor - currently pollsters do not account mis-specified strata in the demographics, which is one of the largest sources in error
Which use cases ARE polls good for?
Controlling a narrative and controlling public opinion by trying to sway ideas abour the state of things@@obscurehero
Wow you sound like you're the life of the party 😂
True all science is junk😂😂😂.....I guess you argue with the doctors when you have cancer as to whether or not to try certain types of chemo because they are never 100% accurate cure rate. Polls are as scientific as mathematical theories.
@@pavelow235Dude what
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Polls can tell us what boomers who answer random numbers on their cell phones think
That's not entirely true. People of different background are still being polled, even if less for some backgrounds, and they sort them into representative categories by asking them basic questions like age group and income.
you obviously didn't watch the video...
There is more way in which polls are made than just calling random cellphone number. It's just the easiest and cheapest way to conduct it. But there are different ways in which polls are made, for example you can send Interviewer who goes to every 10th door on the left side of the road on the X, Y and Z Street in This or that town and ask people to write on paper which candidate they supports and then put it in secret box, so interviewers can't see who did you "voted" for. But this kind of poll making is much more expensive.
There's also the tendency that people under 30 are greatly under polled because they don't participate or will ignore or lie on them.
so basically u skipped the part about weighting, or u didnt watch at all which is more likely ngl
" What polls can actually tell us", well nothing... actually
It tells us what people told them at the time. The poll isn't asking you to extrapolate data and find the winner from these numbers. It's just a poll, it can't hurt you bro.
It's supposed to be looked at as a timeline anyway, then politicians look at events relating to the polling trends to see what is and isn't popular.
Don't forget about gerrymandering and in general the awful voting system either, one vote counts more than the other.
This answers my question about why are polls done for only like 500 people for a population of over 300 million. Good video Vox!
Yea, we have around 333 million people but in many cases the election is decided by far fewer. I think somebody said Biden won in the electoral college by around 43,000 votes in three states or some such. Gore lost by 537 votes in Florida. This is why I'm against the electoral college. It would be so much better if it was decided by everybody everywhere.
the uncertainties are so large its basically created for entertainment value
It creates ambiguity and they don't take well for this kind of ambiguity and their efforts to try and find out makes a lot think its a sick joke..
It’s useful to tell which races are massive blowouts and which aren’t (good for outing grifters and detecting blatantly rigged elections), but anything past that is a bit iffy. And for anything as close as this presidential election, they’re not useful to pay attention to.
How is this election even close? What a shame.
" " - Both Parties
This result is inevitable. Each party picks a candidate who is most polarizing, while still having a chance of winning. This maximizes agenda.
It's not.
Who do you want to win?
That's the lovely thing about freedom of choice. Everyone thinks what they want.
@@theBear89451lmfao, Kamala and Biden have mostly centrist policies
Vox editing quality is top notch. Respect for the editors.
Atlas Intel from Brazil is the only one that got the predictions from the swing-states correct
Population, weighting, sample size, representative sample, all things i learned in school and finally seeing a practical of those concepts here.
that's a good video right there
Take the context of the election out and this video still makes a very good analysis of primary research. Thank you, Vox.
Well I guess it doesn’t matter anymore 😅
the answer: nothing
Polls don’t matter, but vote as if you’re losing.
either way. this is gonna be hype. We will either have our first woman president OR first convicted felon president. THIS ONE IS FOR THE HISTORY BOOKS !!!
This is absolutely inspiring to me, and to others like me. This could be a game changer for convicted felons everywhere.
@@mankytoes Just kinda funny how a felon can't vote but they can be the president lol
@@mankytoesThey were already allowed to run for office, though.
real, definitely hype
We already had a convicted felon president 😢
Omg THANK YOU for this, you answered many of my unasked questions about polls!! 👌🏻
I work in survey research. Fantastic job of explaining this in under 10 minutes
. Going to show it to my colleagues and students (I also have taught a class in marketing research)
I'm currently taking methods of research, I'll be taking this to class 😂
I have never been asked to take a pole in over twenty years. But I've been asked to donate for all parties Day after Day.
Yeah i answered ONE call for a poll survey. I was on a long shift and wanted anything to not do work. The guy was surprised I answered given i'm in my 20's. Then i continued ignoring spam
Elect Hatsune Miku for President
SEKA
I'm thinking Miku Miku oo ee oo
@@NahnomachinesSon blue hair blue tie, hiding in your wifi
I'm writing in the Rock.
I remember people were unironically wasting their 2016 vote on Harambe
2016 and 2024 elections made me lose confidence in election polls 😂
Honestly the polls this time weren't as bad as 2016 or 2020
Lol media made it sound like it was close..... Even showing Kamala having a slight lead... Wasn't even close! As an amateur statistician I am really fascinated about things like this. I see two major possibilities:
(1) Democrats are more likely to respond to the poll
(2) The media making it sound like Kamala is likely to win drove more Republicans to go vote that was on the fence to just be lazy.
and news talking about trump everyday probably helped in someway?
@Kryptictails yeah that goes with my (2) theory.... Them saying it's close with Kamala lead while also trashing Trump constantly. I really am curious if that caused millions of extra voters to show up in Trump's favor that were probably going to just skip voting.
@@ZenithWest169 I'm sure that happened
@@Kryptictails Exactly. In their 2016 soul-searching they already admitted that negative publicity was still publicity, which I guess tend to make people get familiar and used to once intolerable things. Yet, eight years later it turned out that media and campaigns totally learned nothing and still made everything about Trump🤣
Can wait for my TH-cam to move on from this election next year
ikr, it’s just stressing me out and i can’t even vote yet. so excited for when this is no longer relevant 🙏
It's good to knopw you aren't impatient.
It's a 50/50. If Trump wins, that's all you'll hear about the next 4 years. Remember 2016-2020?
Actually, now that I think of it, it likely doesn't matter. 100% chance you'll see nothing but either party on YT and other media outlets, constantly, for the next 4 years
"What polls can actually tell us" - Nothing. Polls are worthless. They have as much value as the TP I just wiped my backside with.
What the video said
Nice explanation.
Polling is a complete waste of everyone's time, there is only one poll that counts on election day.
but the new needs something to talk about
Interesting video! I never thought about some of these things
*Poll #1:* Who's tired of hearing about polling? 😅
99% say no!
Well, it’s time to get ready to sit on your phone for a week refreshing your browser every ten seconds to see every vote count update.
Polls also assume even turnout, which is not likely the case
Harvard Kennedy School article: "Our major systemic failure [of using AI models] happened on a question about US intervention in the Ukraine war. In our experiments, the AI agents conditioned to be liberal were predominantly opposed to US intervention in Ukraine and likened it to the Iraq war. Conservative AI agents gave hawkish responses supportive of US intervention. This is pretty much what most political experts would have expected of the political equilibrium in US foreign policy at the start of the decade but was exactly wrong in the politics of today."
so AI is not only ruining art, it's also ruining polling
The basic issues that are involved in performing an accurate poll are well known in statistics. For some reason, the pollsters do not adhere to the principles. One is the possibility that people will lie or not wish to respond when contacted. This can be mitigated by offering a serious sum of money up front. This not only vastly increases the probability that the selected person will consent to respond, but also that they will be honest in their responses (people feel obligated to be fair when they are being paid). But they don't pay people, and the only people they get answers from are those that want to have their voices heard, for whatever reason.
Polls are cooked
Ikr
I’ve never been contacted for a poll. Nor would I have the time to answer them 😂
i dont know anyone who has ever been polled
and i have been asking for years
He'll have to earn back my trust after his tantrum in 2020 but if this is what the results say then so be it. For better or for worse let's see what happens
Literally the only people I know who answer random phone calls or respond to mail are old and senile.
Another copy-and-paste response from someone who didn't even bother watching the video before posting. No wonder Trump is so close to winning if this is the quality of the youth we have in the USA
@ lol ok
@@Fatboy_415 i mean he is not wrong on that this point was described in a video dedicated to polling. She explains it quite succinctly
@@breazfreind402 yeah but my comment doesn’t mean I didn’t watch the video or copy paste a response. I personally have never been solicited for political opinions through any means other than phone calls or mail that I am aware of. So for me, even if it’s covered in the video, it’s worth repeating.
this is why I love and subscribe Vox ! Vox is beyond other media
Watching Vox introducing what polls can actually tell us in TH-cam is the biggest political activity I can participate as a Chinese citizen
If I’m polled on the phone, I wouldn’t even be honest about who I support - I’d tell them I support the other candidate in the hope that a bad poll number would motivate more people on my side to eventually vote.
Or you could have them lose hope and not even bother voting because the race is already decided anyway
Childish and idiotic
@@SirSX3 2016 taught me that it is absolutely not the case
I never understood how a few thousand people could possibly represent millions or even hundreds of millions in the case of us elections but this video was very helpful at understanding why they can still be reliable despite the sampling error
What polls actually tell us, NOTHING. GO VOTE
Let's unite to overcome Trump's divisive era on November 5, 2024, driven by our shared love for America. It's time to break free from the toxic cycle of hatred & intolerance that has come to define 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' - a phenomenon where rational thinking gives way to blind disdain!!!!!
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this isnt sarcastic lol i just think it's funny to type that in all caps
I LOVE TEACHING ABOUT THE LIMITATIONS AND PREDICTIVE POWERS OF MATHEMATICAL STATISTIC MODELS RAHHHHH 🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅
Polymarket >>> In this age of technology, normal polls are dinosaurs.
poly market has foreigners on it so like it ain’t accurate
Pollsters have also been “herding”. It’s not this close.
If you're a Democrat: What you want to hear.
If you're a Realist: Not much.
At this point, I just want the winner of the popular vote to also win the electoral college.
I don't think anyone would except it otherwise.
this video, i think, is also very helpful towards literacy in graphs and surveys in general, not just election polls
I fail to recognise any benefits to polling. Unless wasting money, time, and promoting whatever narrative people want to use, collect or twist polling data is the goal
Vox's understanding of the margin of error is wrong. The real number does not have to be in the margin of error. And there is no probability that it falls in the margin of error, it either is in the confidence interval or it is not.
Nice video💯
i dont get polled i just get slammed with a dozen automated campaign texts daily
I work at a call center that does political surveys. The average calls per hour can be anywhere from 0.5-1.5 depending on the state. It's a lot of sitting and waiting, and I feel like the people who pick up are the people most into politics.
Polls are skewed so badly. Methods of research was the best class I could've taken this semester.
Great work Vox!
Trump Victory!!!!
Excellent explainer. Thank you!
After understanding how low the response rate is, guess you can’t really blame the polls. Thanks Vox, great job
Well… well… well… what do we have here 😅
Another thing is that polls can be deliberately inaccurate to make the numbers closer than they really are, because if it's obvious that a candidate is going to win, there's not much of a demand for polls, unless something major happens
I have never answered a poll myself, but a friend was called, before being asked which way they were planning to vote, the poller asked whether they knew that candidate A was planning to cut funding on issue X. ie. It was a loaded question. Polls don't tell us much.
That wasn't actually a polster calling your friend.
Who are the people picking up the phone
okay the weights portion explains why there were so many headlines about education, they weren't commenting on the polling
excellent video perfect to use in my ap gov't class to teach students.
So anyone smart enough to not answer a text or screen their calls aren't going to be represented. Harris for sure's gonna win.
It doesnt.
Excellent basic statistics 📊 lesson!
Amazing video!
It's odd they just don't have surveyors hit the streets and ask random people in person. Probably would cost too much.
I was doing an online survey and was disqualified as soon as I put i voted 3rd party so I'm assuming biasness goes into these polls too.
Very informative. I was wondering where polling data came from generally and how it was collected. I’m glad I came across this video ✅
I learned a lot of this in stats
Bring Stephanie Janis Stiefel on the show. She changed my life Financially I managed to grow a nest egg of around 120k to over a Million. I'm especially grateful to Stephanie Janis Stiefel, for her expertise and exposure to different areas of the market.
I know this lady you just mentioned. Stephanie Janis Stiefel is a portfolio manager and investment advisor. She gained recognition as a former employee at Goldman Sachs; a renowned investor she is. Stephanie Janis Stiefel has demonstrated expertise in investment strategies and has been involved in managing portfolios and providing guidance to clients.
How can i reach her, if you don't mind me asking?
Well her name is 'STEPHANIE JANIS STIEFEL'. Just research the name. You'd find necessary details to work with a correspondence to set up an appointment.
Been debt free for two years thanks to Stephanie Janis Stiefel. So sad to see my friends in their 40s with car loans, mortgages and credit card debt.
The thing is people often doubt the prospects of financial advisors like Stephanie Janis Stiefel in business/markets today.
Well it gives me more time to get ahead while they stew in their own pity and doubts as they childishly complain about those spreading the word
I live near Siena Collage. I'm low key miffed that they never included me when collecting their sample populations 😋
Omg i've learned more about statistics and survey in this short video compared to my classes in college.
Polls come down to methodology.
Firms can do widely different and inconsistent methodologies which affect the results.
3:18 It's called waiting.
TLDR- We guess a lot and almost never predicts who wins
It's a flawed way to predict election results, for sure, but still 100x better than trying to make educated guesses without polling data.
The problem isn't so much with polling, as with news outlets giving polls more attention than they deserve. Which, to be fair, is because they have little else tangible to report in until actual results start coming in.
@raizin4908 in the end its just a 50/50 chance.
@@danielkjm In this case it is, yeah. But it's not the pollsters' fault that it's a close race.
It's largely also because the US has a two-party system. In my country, which has proportional representation, election polls will often not accurately predict which party will be the largest or by how many seats they will win. However, they _do_ tend to accurately predict which out of two dozen or so parties will win many seats, which only a few, and which would be lucky to win a single seat. So you can narrow it down to a few parties who are likely to provide the head of the country in a given election.
In the US you already know from the start that Republicans and Democrats will each win close to 50%, and third parties will win nothing. So polls are much less useful to begin with.
But still, they don't say nothing.
I got my first poll call about a month ago. The call disconnected me 3 times before connecting the 4th time. It worries me that it took 4 times to get my one poll questions… I almost didn’t answer.
Vox crying woke media 😂😂😂
Statistician here, the conclusion to just ignore everything and wait came out of nowhere. :P
It would be interesting to go into depth on various polls. What was the raw data vs the weighed sample. How do polls today compare to polls in 2016 / 2020 / 2022? Why did those polls not get right? Have things been corrected? Over corrected? Are there other factors we are missing?
It’s a logical fallacy to assume because something has always happened in the past that it will always happen that way.
they did mention how they now weight against college education in polling due to Trump's win with the uneducated in 2016
Nothing apparently. Thanks again pollsters.
For historical analysis: go with Prof. Alan Litchman's method
For on-the-go analysis: use the polls
alan lichtman is very overrated
@@duckvs.chipanddale585im convinced Alan straight up gets hate for being right all the time... calling him overrated for predicting elections to a T is such a short sighted take
@@tim3line Yet there's others who accurately predicted all the way down to the exact Electoral Vote that Biden got in 2020 (306) that predict Trump will win with 312 EC.
Let's also mention that Lichtman, even though his ego will never let him say it, is nervous of his prediction. He just said yesterday that he usually has "butterflies" in his stomach leading up to the election, expressing confidence in his prediction.
However, this time, he says he has a "flock of crows." He ain't too sure.
Why not just have a guy stand outside the polls during early voting and ask "who'd ya vote for, huh?".
Weird thing is I don’t know which party you’re talking about
The polls are fairly accurate, but when the margins are razor-thin they are not accurate enough to predict the outcome.