For anyone watching the 2024 election closely, checking the daily vote drop has become a norm. Each new data point gives people reason to celebrate or despair depending on how their candidate is doing. But if you understand what polls are actually able to tell you, it can eliminate any desire you have to predict whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will be the next president.
For this video, we interviewed pollsters about their process and explained the basics of how they turn short surveys into a way to gauge the opinions and intentions of the American voting population. No matter what measures pollsters take to make their samples as representative as possible, there is a limit to how precise they can be. And, sometimes, those same measures can skew poll numbers.
