As US election polls show tight race, ‘take a breath,’ experts say – National
Opinion polls in the US presidential election show an extremely close race between the US vice president Kamala Harris And Donald Trump – but polling experts say those numbers don’t always tell the whole story. While pollsters do everything they can to present accurate pictures of how voters feel or intend to vote, new methodologies adapting to modern technology and changing behaviors make the job more difficult in recent years. Additionally, “polls were not designed to predict the future,” said Samara Klar, a political science professor at the University of Arizona who studies political opinion and polling. It is therefore more important that people pay less attention to individual polls, which can sometimes be outliers, and more to poll averages – and even rely less on polls to determine which could happen on November 5. Story continues below advertisement “Breathe,” Klar said. “People are completely obsessed with the vote right now, trying to figure out what’s going to happen. But we won’t know until (Election Day).” 2h10 US election 2024: Trump and Harris practically tied in the polls For decades, surveys consisted of interviewing people over the phone and collecting their opinions. Story continues below advertisement Pollsters would use census data to target specific households and ensure that the sample size they collect represents the demographics of the overall population, including age, race, income and other factors. “Getting an election wrong (at the time) was like falling off a boat and missing the water: You would have had to do something really fundamentally wrong,” said Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, a large polling company that conducts polls. for Global News and other media. Today, however, most people don’t answer their phones for surveys and other marketing calls, which are often considered spam. A Pew Research survey found that response rates to telephone surveys fell from 36 percent in 1997 to just 6 percent in 2018. Get the latest national news For news impacting Canada and around the world, sign up to receive breaking news alerts sent directly to you as they happen. This forces pollsters to rely on large online panels. To entice people to sign up, many companies offer potential respondents perks such as gift cards and other prizes. Despite pollsters’ best efforts, this method makes it more difficult to accurately represent public opinion. Companies will then use what is called “sample weighting” to correct any imbalance between the survey sample and the broader population. For example, because women are statistically more likely to respond to surveys than menpollsters will weigh down female respondents to increase male representation.
