A good weekend to you. I’ve wondered this week why so many pre-election polls were so wrong.
Pollsters remind us there is typically a 3% margin of error in their surveys. If a candidate projected to lose by 2% actually wins by 1%, pollsters can still insist they were right — it was within their margin of error.
I’ve tried to imagine a baseball player who strikes out and sulks back to the dugout to tell the manager, "Skip, I was still within the margin of error!"
Actual votes decide elections. But I worry about the ways reporters, myself included, cite polls on every issue as if they were hard, certifiable facts, not just projections of bits and pieces of public opinion distilled from surveys and focus groups which, after all, speak to a relatively small percentage of people.
Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, gamely appeared on CNN this week to acknowledge he had been wrong in his predictions, and said polls may be off because people change their minds.
"About 8, 9% changes," he told CNN. "They come in undecided, and they have to decide what they want to do at that moment ... 8% comes in and they may change their mind."
It was the most reassuring insight I’ve heard from a pollster. What they call the margin of error may just be a learning curve. People think they’re sure of something. But we learn more, live more, and sometimes, we change.
Living and learning are at the heart of our interview this week with the great playwright Tony Kushner, who’s latest collaboration with Stephen Spielberg (know the name?) is The Fabelmans. This week’s essay remembers Michael Gerson, a columnist who also wrote from and for the heart. And didn’t you want to watch a dog listen to a little girl play "Moon River"?
Scott Simon is one of NPR's most renowned news anchors. He is the host of Weekend Edition Saturday and one of the hosts of the morning news podcast Up First. Be sure to listen to him every Saturday on your local NPR station, and follow him on Twitter.
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