Are the Polls Right?

Use the ABC-538 interactive election map here.
Click to enlarge this screen shot.

The Guardian raises a question that's been in the back of your Head Trucker's mind:  how can it be possible that the American public is so evenly divided between supporters Harris and Trump, and the numbers haven't changed for the last 3 months?

The Guardian writes:  

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. The absence of such variation suggests that either pollsters are adjusting “weird” margins of 5% or more, Clinton and Lapinski argued – or the following second possibility, which they deemed more likely.

“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,” they write.

Either explanation “raises the possibility that the results of the election could be unexpectedly different than the razor-close narrative the cluster of state polls and the polling averages suggest”, they added.

We can't know whether the polls are accurate until all the results are in.  Meanwhile, here are the latest forcasts from ABC/538:

Look how steady their popular vote numbers are - I never recall seeing any poll in any election that looked like this for months at a time.

And here's their probability forecast - more variation but still awfully damn close.

Here's the poll tracking chart from the Guardian itself:

And here's the chart from Wikipedia, which looks very different from the others:

The only vote I'm sure of is the one I cast on Tuesday.  The rest is up to you, my fellow Americans.

P. S. - Of course you know, a president can't get much done without majorities of the same party in the House and Senate.  Look at how often Congress stonewalled Obama when he was in the White House.  But I can't spare the energy to worry about all that just now.

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