The FiveThirtyEight Team Goes To Iowa

Throughout the week in Iowa (and beyond!) we’re keeping our eye on when and how polling gets cited by candidates, media and voters. At Fusion’s Brown and Black Forum at Drake University, two Fusion anchors opened their intro analysis by citing today’s NBC/Marist polls showing Clinton and Sanders surprisingly close in Iowa and New Hampshire. Neat. They cited a poll! But I cringed a tad when they quickly used that poll as a hook to ask whether tonight’s debate would end up being a “game-changer” in the race — one of our peccadillos of election-speak. They did do a decent job of couching the poll and the margin for error, but is it too much to ask that a poll be analyzed on its own terms? Probably, yeah. That’s why we don’t work in television.