Dead-heat poll results are improbable [View all]

Robert Tait in Washington
Sat 2 Nov 2024 06.00 EDT

... The latest polling has come against a backdrop of unprecedented levels of early voting in multiple states ...

It is notoriously difficult to predict anything about future results from early voting, though some 58% of early voters in Pennsylvania aged 65 or over were registered Democrats ...

Writing on NBC’s website, Josh Clinton, a politics professor at Vanderbilt University, and John Lapinski, the network’s director of elections, pondered whether the tied race reflected not the sentiments of the voters, but rather risk-averse decision-making by pollsters. Some, they suggested, may be wary of findings indicating unusually large leads for one candidate and introduce corrective weighting ...

Large numbers of surveys would be expected to show a wider variety of opinion, even in a close election, due to the randomness inherent in polling ...

“Some of the tools pollsters are using in 2024 to address the polling problems of 2020, such as weighting by partisanship, past vote or other factors, may be flattening out the differences and reducing the variation in reported poll results” ...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/02/what-polls-mean-so-far-trump-harris-election-voters