Prepare to get nerdy today.
Any responsible election watcher knows that when it comes to parsing through polling crosstabs, it’s important to tread carefully. Don’t put too much stock in what individual polls tell you about how one group of the electorate feels, like young voters or Latino voters or people with an income under $50,000. If the margin of error for the top line numbers of a poll is three or four percentage points, the margin of error for those individual groups will be significantly larger.
It’s too easy to get carried away with narratives that are based on just a fraction of the 500 or a thousand people polled or, alternatively, narratives like: “There’s no way young voters are shifting that much. This whole poll must be wrong.” (Sound familiar?)
Well dear listener, today we are throwing caution to the wind. Or maybe I should say we have enough data that caution is no longer wise.
Seven months after Election Day 2024, much of the high quality data about what happened is in.…
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