What polls can actually tell us

For anyone closely watching the 2024 election, scrutinizing the daily drop of polls has become the norm. Each new data point gives people cause to celebrate or despair depending on how their candidate is faring. But if you understand what polls are actually capable of telling you, it might dispel any desire you have for them to predict whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will be the next president.

For this video, we interviewed pollsters about their processes and explained the basics of how they turn small surveys into a way to measure the opinions and intentions of the American voting population. No matter what measures pollsters take to make their samples as representative as possible, there’s a limit to how precise they can be. And, sometimes, those same measures can make the poll numbers go awry.