My wish for the next election is that poll trackers look like the one on the right ? not the left

This was yet another election where the polling showed it could easily go either way, but most of the charts just showed two nice clean lines, one leading and one trailing. Bad! pic.twitter.com/kCLyl0TGhO

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) November 8, 2024

The thing about human psychology is, once you give people a nice clean number, it doesn’t matter how many times you say "but there’s an error margin of +/- x points, anything is possible".

People are going to anchor on that central number. We shouldn’t enable this behaviour!

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) November 8, 2024

To be clear, this is a two way street.

It’s dumb when people go wild for the polls that put their side ahead while ignoring the ones that put them behind.

But it’s also dumb to keep presenting data in a way that makes it very easy for people to do this.

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) November 8, 2024

If we’re really serious about communicating to people that polls come with chunky error margins (often much wider than the +/- 3pts commonly assumed, see work here from @DavMicRot & co), then we should design charts that make that impossible to ignore https://t.co/ON6pBs6p48

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) November 8, 2024

Part of that is a problem with polls underestimating Trump again. But the polls will always err in one direction or the other, meaning two nice clean lines will almost always be misleading. pic.twitter.com/oDs3suDaey

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) November 8, 2024

Here’s the article: https://t.co/PqfqYCXYRL

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) November 8, 2024