Presidential Election Margin Of Error
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Tank - Our Lives in Numbers September 8, 2016 5 key things to know about the margin of error in election polls By Andrew Mercer8 comments In presidential elections, even the
Margin Of Error In Polls Definition
smallest changes in horse-race poll results seem to become imbued with deep polls with margin of error and sample size meaning. But they are often overstated. Pollsters disclose a margin of error so that consumers can have an margin of error political definition understanding of how much precision they can reasonably expect. But cool-headed reporting on polls is harder than it looks, because some of the better-known statistical rules of thumb that a
Presidential Poll Margin Of Error
smart consumer might think apply are more nuanced than they seem. In other words, as is so often true in life, it’s complicated. Here are some tips on how to think about a poll’s margin of error and what it means for the different kinds of things we often try to learn from survey data. 1What is the margin of
Margin Of Error Polls
error anyway? Because surveys only talk to a sample of the population, we know that the result probably won’t exactly match the “true” result that we would get if we interviewed everyone in the population. The margin of sampling error describes how close we can reasonably expect a survey result to fall relative to the true population value. A margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level means that if we fielded the same survey 100 times, we would expect the result to be within 3 percentage points of the true population value 95 of those times. The margin of error that pollsters customarily report describes the amount of variability we can expect around an individual candidate’s level of support. For example, in the accompanying graphic, a hypothetical Poll A shows the Republican candidate with 48% support. A plus or minus 3 percentage point margin of error would mean that 48% Republican support is within the range of what we would expect if the true level of support in the full
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it is possible in a very close election that a candidate might narrowly win the popular vote yet lose the election in the Electoral College. (See Wikipedia: Electoral College.) The observations that follow pertain only to the ability of candidate preference polls to forecast the national popular vote in an election. The main point of these observations is that the results of such polls, especially in a close election, must be taken with a grain of salt. The following table shows the results of polls conducted by three major polling organizations during the week just prior to the US presidential election of2000. Ineach case, the percentage of the national popular vote predicted by the poll for each candidate is displayed next to the percentage that was actually observed in the election. The final column shows the difference between the two, calculated as Predicted minus Observed. PollingOrganization Candidate PercentPredictedby Poll PercentObservedin Election Difference Zogby Gore 48% 48.4% -0.4% Bush 46% 47.9% -1.9% Other 6% 3.7% +2.3% Harris Gore 47% 48.4% -1.4% Bush 47% 47.9% -0.9% Other 6% 3.7% +2.3% Gallup Gore 45% 48.4% -3.4% Bush 47% 47.9% -0.9% Other 8% 3.7% +4.3% The Zogby poll correctly predicted that Mr.Gore would win the popular vote, though its projected 2% margin of victory was much greater than the 0.5% margin that actually occurred. At the other extreme, the Gallup poll predicted that Mr.Bush would win the popular vote by an equally comfortable 2% margin, which would have amounted to a margin of about two million votes, whereas he actually drew about half a million votes fewer than Mr.Gore. Inthe middle was the Harris poll, which correctly projected that candidates Gore and Bush would each receive about the same percentages of the popular vote, though in both cases it underestimated