Can You Trust the Polls?

Nate Cohn: “You can trust them to a degree. You can trust the polls to usually be in the ballpark, but you can’t trust them to be exactly ‘right.’ Polls are inherently imprecise and subject to many sources of error.”

“So if by ‘trust’ you mean ‘assume that the leading candidate will win,’ then the answer is ‘no.’ The polls have been wrong by this standard before and they will be wrong again. But if trust means ‘rely on the polls as the best source of information on the electorate, even if an inexact one,’ then the answer is yes.”