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I'm not super trusting of polls anymore, especially because they're usually done by telephone. However-
This makes me a little more trusting despite that whopping MoE. It sounds like bad news for Trump overall.
I have a related degree. The reason people distrust polls, is because the media frequently misreports or misrepresents them.
Eg. aggregated polling from the 2016 suggested Trump had a 1/3 chance of winning. If you believed some media coverage every poll said Clinton was certain to win. That was how the media reported on the polling, not the polling itself. Invariably Trump winning in 2016 was within the margin of error.
Not a large margin of error. You're extrapolating from 1000 people to 300 million. It's astonishing it's that low if you think about it.
Not that common anymore. Often they'll do a a telephone poll then supplement it with online or other methods. Here's IPSOS's article about this poll:
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/politico-indictment-august-2023
My biggest issue with polls is that the media tout them as predictions, ignoring the fact that even if the data is 100% valid, circumstances can change dramatically in just a couple of days.
I maintain that polls are not actionable data for voters. They can help campaigns see trends and gauge the effectiveness of messaging, but they are useless to voters.
They can and do change in just a couple of days, but the real issue is that the media invariably fails to mention the margin of error or confidence interval.
It's always Candidate A 51%, candidate B 49%. When in reality it's inevitably something like "There's 19/20 chance that candidate gets between 48.5-53.5% of the vote, and that candidate gets between 46.5-51.5% of the vote."
And then when candidate B wins, the media will go "Why did the polls get it wrong?" when the election was always to close to call definitively.
Oh, and this is obviously ignoring the far more sinister use of misrepresented polling data, micro-demographically targetted thanks to big data harvested from social media. Think Cambridge Analytica algorithms which have determined that women in village X with one child and dog, being more likely to vote party Y, and then targetting them on social media with stories about the polls showing the result is a foreglone conclusion and that there's no point voting.