# Polling: Unskewed Polls and comments on polling (moved from Harris Thread) **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [August 13, 2024, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/polling-unskewed-polls-and-comments-on-polling-moved-from-harris-thread/1005665 "2024-08-13T17:10:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 123
**Author:** ![Great\_Antibob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47c2d/32.png) [@Great\_Antibob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Great_Antibob)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2024, 2:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/polling-unskewed-polls-and-comments-on-polling-moved-from-harris-thread/1005665/123 "2024-09-17T14:20:17Z")
I see it as more of an issue with the modeling. A model can give you a 63.2% chance, but what does that mean given the relatively large margins of error on your inputs (the polls themselves) and depends on your model parameters being accurate (even a small error can swing a state or two)? We give weather forecasters a hard time for doing a very hard job but they’ve got vastly superior data and modeling but still try to limit rain forecasts to the nearest 5% or 10% for many of the things we see here - they realize there’s only so much detail they can really offer down to that level but people try to read a lot more into the numbers than is prudent or realistic. Right now, the modeling tells us that Harris probably has a slight edge but it’s far from certain and nowhere close to being comfortable. You can say “there’s a difference between 63% vs 55%” but this is the classic “accuracy vs precision” issue you should learn in school. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/polling-unskewed-polls-and-comments-on-polling-moved-from-harris-thread/1005665)._