State of the Race – On Polls
Jay Cost once again points out the rather obvious for RealClearPolitics: although some may pretend that polls tell us a lot about the outcome of the elections in November, the reality is they only tell us one thing. Something we already knew:
The race is tight.
You see, the ones who have already decided whom to vote for are not the ones who will cast the decisive votes. Rather, the decisive votes will be cast by true Independents; people who do not take party affiliation in consideration. The party one of the candidates belongs to simply does not matter to these voters.
But these voters are also the ones who make a choice last. They will not make a choice today – they are probably not even paying that much attention to the race – and they will not make on tomorrow either. Not even next week. Or two weeks from now; they will make a choice at the end of October.
So all the polls that are published in the meantime will give results similar to the ones published today and last week; one candidate will lead – the specific candidate depends on the ‘momentum’ and media coverage – the other will lag a few points behind. Overall, though, every poll until the end of November will show the race to be close.
In other words, polls published in the coming six weeks can be considered nearly useless. They are interesting to read – because they cause a whole lot of people to have their panties up in a bunch – and interesting to write about, most readers seem to enjoy reading poll results, but they are not useful at all in the grand scheme of things. They are mere entertainment.
Keep that in mind when we publish polls in the coming weeks.
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