Politics Podcast: Why Polls Were Off In 2020, And Why They Weren’t That Bad

Listen to the latest episode of the FiveThirtyEight politics podcast.

The presidential polls were off by somewhere in the range of 4 percentage points, which is notably larger than the recent average error of 2.3 points. In this installment of Model Talk on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, editor-in-chief Nate Silver and Galen Druke explain why a polling error of even 4 points isn’t that unexpected, offer reasons why the error occurred, and discuss the usefulness of polling and modeling going forward.

Related: The Polls Weren’t Great. But That’s Pretty Normal.