As of Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern, our average of national polls says Harris has the support of 45.0 percent of voters, while Trump garners 43.5 percent.
That 1.5-percentage-point lead is within our average’s uncertainty interval, which you can think of as a sort of margin of error for our polling averages.
It’s a little weird that they say Harris is “tied” with trump, even though she’s ahead by 1.5%. That seems like a big deal. Margin of error is important, but it’s just factually true that Vice President Harris is up by an average of 1.5%.
I looked back at how 538 treated polls when trump was up by a similar amount:
https://abcnews.go.com/538/polls-after-presidential-debate/story?id=111610497
In 538’s national polling average, Trump now leads by 1.4 percentage points over Biden, while the two candidates were just about tied on June 27, the day of the debate.
So Harris up by 1.5% is actually “tied”, but trump up on Biden by 1.4% is “leads” (and explicitly different from “tied”!). No mention of margin of error in that paragraph.
🤔🤔🤔
“Irrelevant” is a bit of a stretch.
In a race this tight it’s really not. If the national polling averages were showing either side having a massive lead it might be indicative, but at these ranges they’re meaningless.
If the information wasn’t useful in any capacity then they wouldn’t bother publishing it.
That’s silly logic. Media routinely publish things that are not relevant or useful but which generate fear, anxiety, and therefore attention
538 isn’t CNN and they take their model/polling aggregates very seriously. The standards are actually pretty high there.
Al Gore and Hillary Clinton have entered the chat.