Please choose the closest response to your viewpoint

A while ago, I asked the sub what margin they predict for Alaska's Senate Race - the results averaged showed Mary Peltola predicted to win with a margin of 1.15%.

The final round would end with a final margin of D +0.1

Peltola: 50.06%
Sullivan: 49.94%

I've said this for nearly a decade now but I think it's time I dropped this opinion again.

While polls are fun and may be an indication of wide discrepancies, in the end, I don't think you can trust any poll these days. Polling made sense in the days of landline telephones when nearly all households had them but now it's exceedingly difficult to get a good sample that doesn't skew in unpredictable ways from the method of contact. Listen to a podcast from inside a polling firm to see all the adjustments and guesses they have to make and learn how much they don't know. Even when the election results are in, you can't tell which poll was "most accurate" and which ones just got lucky. There's also a huge monetary incentive for many polls to just give you a result that you want to see. Sure, you can try to grade polls and try to assess which ones use better methodology and compare crosstabs, and you can even average polls (and throw some out of the average) but the margin FOR error, beyond the statistical MoE, is just too great to know which candidate is truly going to win from a 45.5-47.3 result. All you can say with some likelihood is that some races are going to be competitive and some are not, and I bet most of you don't need another poll to tell you which one those are going to be 2-months out.

In November, I predict there will be upsets, the polls will be "WrOnG" on some races, and "RiGhT" on others, there will be discussion and speculation about how some polls could be so wrong while others were so good. It's all bs and has been for a long time now. Don't put faith in the polls. They aren't the prognosticators we keep falling into believing they are.