According to Nate Silver, How to Deal With Election and Vote Numbers Anxiety
At this time, four years ago, polls showed that Hillary Clinton was 12 points ahead of Donald Trump, giving many a false sense of security regarding the election results. Election Night champagne was bought and the Javits Center was filled with balloons under a glass ceiling in the run-up to the election of the first female president in American history. And we know how it turned out.
So now that most of the current polls show Joe Biden is ahead of the incumbent, this could heighten the electoral anxiety that many people have been experiencing for months (or, in some cases, since 2016). To help us get through the next few weeks, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight provides some tips on how to cope with survey anxiety.
Don’t Think Biden Wins
Sure, Biden may be ahead in the polls at the moment, and Democrats seem to be doing well in early voting , but that doesn’t mean he’s ready. Trump currently has a 12 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, Silver said. Even if this rate continues to decline over the next few weeks – say to a 5% chance – it’s still something to be taken seriously in a race where the stakes are so high.
And if Biden does win, that doesn’t mean it’s over: the results of the Congressional race – as well as the state election results – will have a major impact on our political future.
But you also shouldn’t completely discredit polls.
Strictly speaking, based on the difference between some of the polls leading up to the 2016 presidential election and the actual election results, one can easily write off the polls as ineffective and meaningless. But Silver warns against this :
Polling is a flawed tool, more so in some years than others. However, 2016, while far from the results of opinion polls, was not nearly as bad as some critics suggest . National polls have been pretty good , and winning Trump swing states were not something is surprising, if proceed from the fact that the advance in those states was a slight difference . Meanwhile, 2018, with interim results, was one of the most accurate polls in history .
Try not to get hung up on 2016
This is clearly easier said than done, but Silver says some comparisons between 2016 and 2020 are flawed. First, we should not draw any unambiguous conclusions based on sample size from choices alone (no matter how devastating the consequences may be). Plus, even if the current polls are wrong, Silver says Biden can still win the election. In addition, there is no guarantee that polling errors will favor Trump, as they did four years ago.
Wait for the average survey results
Sometimes the results of a single survey can be quite overwhelming, so Silver recommends waiting for the survey averages (coincidentally, such as those provided by FiveThirtyEight ):
But while there is such a thing as insufficient response to news developments, the more common problem in the final days of the campaign is false positives, where guerrillas and the media try to inflate large swings in polls when in fact they show a fairly steady race.
In other words, if you see survey results that upset you, wait until you can match them up with other surveys rather than panic right away.