Making Daily Headlines · Page 7
Voters Ask Whether Polls Are Reliable, Denying Charts Their Usual Air of Certainty
· New York time
Ahead of the midterms, listeners asked NPR whether polls are reliable for election coverage, whether debates are dead and how President Trump might work with Democrats if they win control of Congress. The questions capture uncertainty about both the campaign and what might follow it. A poll is an assessment based on a survey, not an election result. Its findings can help describe opinion, but they do not remove uncertainty about turnout or the outcome. That distinction becomes especially important when a close contest is compressed into a single number on a screen. The listeners' questions also reach beyond polling. Debates concern how candidates make their cases, while the question about a possible Democratic Congress concerns the work of governing after voters choose. Together, they ask how much of the election can be understood before the ballots are counted. Campaign coverage has a strong appetite for a tidy chart. Voters appear to have noticed that the chart cannot personally guarantee the future. The numbers can inform the discussion, but they cannot relieve anyone of the rather old-fashioned requirement to hold the election and count the votes.
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