As U.S. election polls show tight race, ‘take a breath,’ experts say

While pollsters do everything they can to present accurate pictures of an election and predict a result, the job has gotten more difficult in recent years.

Opinion polls in the U.S. presidential election are showing an extremely close race between U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump — but polling experts say those numbers don’t always tell the whole story.

While pollsters do everything they can to present accurate pictures of how voters are feeling or intend to vote, new methodologies to adapt to modern technology and changing behaviour means the job has gotten more difficult in recent years.

Plus, “polls were not designed to predict the future,” said Samara Klar, a political science professor at the University of Arizona who studies political opinion and polling.

That makes it more important for people to pay less attention to individual polls, which can sometimes be outliers, and more on polling averages — and even to put less reliance on polls to determine what could happen on Nov. 5.

“Take a breath,” Klar said.

“People are completely fixated on the polling right now trying to figure out what is going to happen. But we just won’t know until (Election Day).”

For decades, polling involved surveying people over the phone and collecting their opinions.

Pollsters would use census data to target specific households and ensure the sample size they collect represents the demographics of the overall population, including age, race, income and other factors.