Biden vs. Trump: What Do the Polls Mean?

I was a statistics major in graduate school, so I’m a nut on political polls. And while it’s still kind of early to assume that what the polls are showing is to any great degree indicative of how the election will turn out on November 5th, at the very least the polls published after tomorrow night’s debate will give us a benchmark for how the whole campaign is shaping up.

The problem with any political poll which asks respondents to tell you how they are going to vote when they don’t in many cases even know if they’re going to vote means that, by definition, the answers given to the polltaker, whether it’s a live voice or an electronic message, can change again and again.

For all the talk about how we are a country committed to the ‘democratic process,’ we also happen to be the only country with a democratic system which doesn’t give people paid leave in order to go and vote.

You want to vote in any election United States, you do it on your own time.

For that matter, we are also the only democratic country in which voters vote not just by the candidate’s name but also by the candidate’s political party even though we have no party membership requirement at all.

In fact, although many but not all states require that voters register on a party basis in order to vote in that…