politics

Some folks like to look at current polls and poll averages and make a mental adjustment to the results and see how they’d look if the polls missed the way they did in the recent past. But I think even for people who follow this stuff pretty closely, it can be hard to remember all those details. My goal here is to help with that kind of thing while also showing that the narrative about polling errors is probably an overgeneralization.

Some folks like to look at current polls and poll averages and make a mental adjustment to the results and see how they’d look if the polls missed the way they did in the recent past. But I think even for people who follow this stuff pretty closely, it can be hard to remember all those details. My goal here is to help with that kind of thing while also showing that the narrative about polling errors is probably an overgeneralization.

Observers note that in the 2020 Democratic primary, candidate support in polls is closely correlated with the amount of attention candidates get in the news. This begs the question of whether and how these two things might be causally related, particularly whether news coverage is helpful to candidates. Here I show some evidence that news coverage does indeed help.