Do the Polls Tell Us Anything?

In the olden days, which means before the internet and even before cable news or any kind of cable television, the Presidential poll was done by Gallup, Roper and maybe a couple of other polling outfits whose names I don’t recall.

That was then, this is now. And now political polling seems to be going on all over the place, with at least a dozen different national polls being published every couple of weeks.

So, what now happens is that there are web-based outfits like RCP and 270T0Win who take all the polls, average them together and give you what they call an ‘aggregate’ or average score for all the polls put together which is supposed to give you an accurate, pre-election picture of voters’ attitudes and how these attitudes change over time.

Right now, RCP is aggregating 9 national polls and has Kamala ahead of Trump by 48.7% to 47.2%, a margin she has been maintaining for about a month. 270ToWin does it slightly differently, they have Kamala with 226 electoral votes versus Trump with 219 EV’s, with the remaining 93 EV’s in states that are too close to call.

The difference between what the Democrats will win versus what the GOP will win in states where the polls can already predict the winner is .015%, not much different from the margin in RCP.