There have been 907 polls conducted by 141 pollsters regarding next month’s US presidential election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, according to data from aggregator FiveThirtyEight. They have been conducted online, over email, on the phone and via text message. In total, they have queried the voting intentions of 821,525 American voters, nationally and in 44 states and congressional districts.
This is the data set of our collective disquiet. It has been mapped and charted, interpreted and extrapolated, celebrated and lamented. With days until the election on November 5, it has yielded precisely the same statistical conclusion that we would have drawn with no polls whatsoever: the election is a coin toss.
I was not among those 800,000 and odds are neither were you. Yet I suspect we have both looked upon their tabulated responses with great interest and engaged in the quadrennial pastime of presidential poll-watching and prognostication — a tradition since the advent of scientific polling in 1936, when George Gallup predicted Franklin D Roosevelt’s victory. This year’s data, despite its current lack of thesis, is our modern picture window on the political world.