Has Polling Broken Politics?

Election Day is just three weeks away — and that means it’s peak polling season. For political hobbyists, polling is the new sports betting: gamifying elections to predict outcomes that haven’t always proven accurate. If the 2016 election revealed anything, it’s that polls are sometimes off — very off. So as America faces another high-stakes election, how much faith should we put in them?

On today’s episode, Jane Coaston brings together two experts to diagnose what we’re getting wrong in both how we conduct polls, and how we interpret the data they give us. Margie Omero is a longtime Democratic pollster and focus group moderator. Nate Silver, who prefers to call himself a “forecaster” rather than a pollster, is the founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight. Together, the two tackle how polling both reflects and affects the national political mood, and whether our appetite for election predictions is doing democracy more harm than good.

(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)