These can include how participants are selected or how the questions are asked. Assuming polling organisations are not manipulating their methods to get a result that favours their preferred candidate, they will nevertheless be playing “whack-a-mole” with different biases. In other words, Herschel Walker is in the lead and will probably win.īut polling itself is inexact and difficult to get right.
Once the numbers are crunched they can be expressed as: “Herschel Walker is on 48.8% while Raphael Warnock is on 47.4%”, which looks just the same as the vote count will look. Using the latest polling in the US Senate race in Georgia as an example, a big advantage of election polling is that it’s easy for the public to understand. As an anthropologist, I have been looking at the rise in political gambling throughout 2022 to find out how speculating on political events shapes how politics is understood. But there are two places to get relatively unspun data on what might happen: polls and gambling markets or so-called “prediction markets”.
