Beware: Reading polls can be hazardous to your health. Symptoms include cherry-picking, overconfidence, falling for junky numbers and rushing to judgment. Thank…
! For example, if a poll of the 2018 Florida governor race showed former Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum ahead of former Rep. Ron DeSantis 47 percent to 46 percent with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 points, you’d want to keep in mind that. Remember, too, that the margin of error applies to each candidate’s polling number, not to the difference between the candidates. So if both numbers are off by the margin of error, the difference between them could be off by twice as much.
Sample size is important too — a smaller sample means a larger margin of error — but good polling is expensive, so the best pollsters may wind up with smaller samples. And that’s OK. As long as you heed the margin of error, a poll with a sample size of, say, 300 isn’t inherently untrustworthy. That said, don’t dive too much into one poll’s crosstabs — that’s where sample sizesget unacceptably small and margins of error get unacceptably big.
Speaking of which, consider the motive of whoever is sharing the survey. Polls sponsored by a candidate or interest group will probably be. You should be especially suspicious of internal polls that lack details on how they were conducted . If you get your news from a partisan outlet, it may also selectively cover only polls that are good for its side.
Next, beware of polls that have drastically different results from all the others. They often turn out to be outliers — although not always (
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