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It has been said that numbers never lie, but statistics do. A political poll is a relative handful of numbers statistically analyzed and adjusted to yield, hopefully, simple results. On their best days, polls are educated guesses. On bad days, polls are outright lies. The Real Clear Politics National Poll Average has both.

For a poll to be reasonably accurate, it needs a relatively large sample size, a good model reflective of the electorate, and it should include only those people likely to vote, AKA likely voters. The voter model is much more important than either of the other two issues. Get this wrong, and you can get a really skewed result.

One of the basic elements of a voter model is party affiliation. This Gallup party affiliation poll shows that most voters claim to be independents, and those claiming to be either Republicans or Democrats are pretty evenly split. If you average the numbers for 2020, you find that 28.5% claim to be Republicans and 29.7% are Democrats, a gap of just over 1 percentage point. In June 2020, a Pew Research survey found party affiliation at 33% Democrat, 29% Republican, with 34% identifying as independents. There are many other things involved in a voter model, such as age, sex, ethnicity, turnout, etc., but the point is, no national voter model should have a gap in party affiliation between Republicans and Democrats greater than about 3–4% and probably less.

Now let's look at the oft cited Real Clear Politics National Poll Average, shown below, which has Joe Biden at 7.1 percentage points over Donald Trump. Is this an accurate reflection of the presidential race? Probably not.

read more:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/is_joe_really_up_by_10_points_over_trump.html