Polls indicate Joe Biden is the favorite to win in November — but 2016 sends a different message.
An overwhelming majority of polls four years ago also indicated Donald Trump would lose, tempering voters confidence in the latest round of surveys in key battleground states, according to USA Today.
And just as they did in 2016, polls in 2020 once again show Trump losing in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The director of the Marquette Law School poll said 2016 is "a reason to be very cautious."
"It taught us the lesson that there really isn't safety in numbers because it is possible for a systematic error or change in the last minute of the election to make everybody wrong and that's what we saw in 2016," Charles Franklin told USA Today.
According to USA Today, what pollsters missed was voter sentiment in those three key battleground states where Trump got the margin of victory in the Electoral College — failing to capture late-deciding voters who went for Trump and over-sampling college-educated voters who favored Clinton.
This time around, however, pollsters say most people have already made up their minds about who they’ll vote for, and early voting options will make it easier to gauge voter sentiment.
“I think the polls are telling us a story about what's going on and how people are dug in," Patrick Murray who runs the New Jersey-based Monmouth University Polling Institute told USA Today.
"It doesn't tell us how the Electoral College is going to turn out right now so that’s why you should continue to take the polling with a grain of salt if you’re looking ahead to November."
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