In just about any discussion of a poll about the very close presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, you’ll hear the phrase “within the poll’s margin of error.” Those words signal that it is a tight race with no clear leader, even if one of them has a slightly larger percentage of support, like 48% to 47%.
As the director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, which has been taking the pulse of the public on policy issues and elections for the past 30 years, I’ve noted that people have been paying more attention to this technical term since at least 2016.
But those 1 or 2 percentage points were within their polls’ margins of error. And Clinton lost Florida. In a poll about a political race, the margin of error tells readers the likely range of results of an election.
What is a margin of error?
A poll is one or more questions asked of a small group of people and used to gauge the views of a larger group of people. The margin of error is a mathematical calculation of how accurate the poll results are – of how closely the answers given by the small group match the views held by the larger group.
If everyone in the larger group were polled, there would be no margin of error. But it’s complicated, difficult and expensive to contact that many people. The U.S. Census Bureau spent US$13.7 billion over several years in its most recent effort to count every person in the United States every 10 years, and it still wasn’t able to include exactly everyone.
Pollsters don’t have that kind of time – or money – so they use smaller samples of the population. They seek to identify representative samples in which all members of the larger group have a chance to be included in the poll.
The group size is important
The calculation of how close the poll is to the views of the larger population is based on the size of the group that is polled.
For example, a sample of 600 voters will have a larger margin of error – about 4 percentage points – than a sample of 1,000 voters, which has a margin of error of just over 3 percentage points.
The way the sample is chosen also matters: In 1936, the Literary Digest magazine polled people on the presidential election by mailing surveys to telephone owners, car owners and country club members. Everyone in this group was relatively affluent, so they were not representative of the whole U.S. voting population. Calculating a margin of error would have been meaningless because the sample did not capture all segments of the population.
In just about any discussion of a poll about the very close presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, you’ll hear the phrase “within the poll’s margin of error.” Those words signal that it is a tight race with no clear leader, even if one of them has a slightly larger percentage of support, like 48% to 47%.
As the director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, which has been taking the pulse of the public on policy issues and elections for the past 30 years, I’ve noted that people have been paying more attention to this technical term since at least 2016.
But those 1 or 2 percentage points were within their polls’ margins of error. And Clinton lost Florida. In a poll about a political race, the margin of error tells readers the likely range of results of an election.
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