Introducing 538's new 2024 presidential polling averages for Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump.

As of Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern, our average of national polls says Harris has the support of 45.0 percent of voters, while Trump garners 43.5 percent.

That 1.5-percentage-point lead is within our average’s uncertainty interval, which you can think of as a sort of margin of error for our polling averages.

It’s a little weird that they say Harris is “tied” with trump, even though she’s ahead by 1.5%. That seems like a big deal. Margin of error is important, but it’s just factually true that Vice President Harris is up by an average of 1.5%.

I looked back at how 538 treated polls when trump was up by a similar amount:

https://abcnews.go.com/538/polls-after-presidential-debate/story?id=111610497

In 538’s national polling average, Trump now leads by 1.4 percentage points over Biden, while the two candidates were just about tied on June 27, the day of the debate.

So Harris up by 1.5% is actually “tied”, but trump up on Biden by 1.4% is “leads” (and explicitly different from “tied”!). No mention of margin of error in that paragraph.

🤔🤔🤔

  • SteveFromMySpace@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    115·
    2 months ago

    It’s not “a little weird” they clearly explained it. It’s SOP for assessing polling and you clearly got that based on what you wrote. They did the same thing when margins were closer for Biden and Trump. This is always how it has been done. It would be weird to suddenly stop doing that.

    • AmidFuror@fedia.io
      12·
      2 months ago

      Was the post edited in the last 5 minutes? Seems it addressed this and gave an example of how it was different for Trump v Biden.

      • SteveFromMySpace@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        61·
        2 months ago

        I can’t speak to that one individual case but I listen to the podcast pretty regularly and I don’t think I’ve ever listened to a single episode that didn’t mention the margin of error at some point. They almost bring it up too much to the point where it almost feels like they’re hedging their bets. But given what OP wrote I can see why they do now

    • Irremarkable@fedia.io
      113·
      2 months ago

      Yeah calling this weird is simply a complete misunderstanding of basic statistics. If the lead is within the margin of error, it’s absolutely fair to call it tied.