Everything You Wanted to Know About Polling But Were Afraid to Ask

“Nobody wants to play Russian roulette.”

Early voters in Georgia.Jessica McGowan/Getty

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In this week’s episode of The Mother Jones Podcast, host Jamilah King talks with some of today’s best interpreters of polling about the shortcomings of the dark art and what it can actually tell us about what’s going to happen in the upcoming midterm elections.

While most election forecasters predict Democrats will win the House while Republicans hold the Senate, after President Trump’s surprise win in 2016, many journalists, citizens and even organizations involved in polling wonder how much we can trust polls, and how much assurance they can provide nervous voters about the outcome.

“We show Republicans with a one in six chance of winning the House,” Micah Cohen, manager editor of FiveThirtyEight explains. “If you’re playing Russian Roulette that’s the chances that you get killed. Right? And nobody wants to play Russian roulette.”

Polls are just snapshots, not predictions, explains HuffPost polling editor Ariel Edwards-Levy: “We have a lot of snapshots, and you can look at what all of those things say and… sort of try to add them up. You still don’t have the actual picture.”

“Polling error is a thing,” warns Edwards-Levy, “and it doesn’t take that much of a polling error in either direction to go over to either Republicans have a much better night than expected and manage to hold on to the House and maybe pick up a Senate seat or two or…Democrats have a much bigger win than expected.”

Get to the bottom of the numbers by listening to this week’s episode of The Mother Jones Podcast. Subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts:

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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