Harris’s Ghosts from Polling Past
Instead of focusing solely on today's polls, compare polling data from today, 4 years ago, and 8 years ago. Specifically, data from the same pollsters. Here's what I found.
Harris’s Ghosts from Polling Past
In Charles Dickens’s classic “A Christmas Carol,” curmudgeon Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by Christmas past, present, and future ghosts, transforming him into a kinder and more generous soul.
Political polling also creates grouches, especially when we see our favored candidate losing in the polls, or our disliked candidate given a false boost due to the polling sample composition.
What do the polls of elections past tell us about the current presidential race? We know the present as there is no shortage of polls these days. We wish we knew the future as many of us would sleep better at night, or else make sure our passports are renewed, ready to move to a less dystopian country, if any still exist.
As a simple exercise, let’s look at presidential polls from 2016 (Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton), 2020 (Trump versus Joe Biden), and 2024 (Trump versus Kamala Harris).
We can review popular polling organizations that were active in all three elections and also look at the same point in time, late September, just over a month until the election.
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