In just two weeks time, the United States will head to the polls on November 6 to choose between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris for the presidency.
With polls showing a razor-thin race, it raises a critical question: can we trust them?
In 2016, polling failed to predict Trump’s stunning victory, so have things changed eight years later? Are polls more accurate now, or should we be sceptical?
Galen Druke joins The Briefing to tell us everything we need to know about the US election polls:
In this episode of The Briefing, Bension Siebert breaks down the state of election polling with US political journalist, polling expert and host and producer of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke.
Druke revealed that interesting enough, there was actually a larging polling error in the 2020 election than there was in 2016.
He said the 2016 polls were off by about three percentage points while in 2020, they were off by five percentage points.
“To put that in perspective, the average error in a presidential election for the polls going back 25 years is four percentage points. So there’s some good news and some bad news,” he said.
“The good news is that polls are not getting all that less accurate. But the bad news is when elections are as close as they are, it’s difficult for polls to tell us precisely who is going to win.
“And in many ways, that’s not exactly what they’re designed to do. Polls are used best to get a sense of what the American public or any public really wants.”