That latest poll you heard about on Twitter where your candidate just surged by 7 points? Please, ignore it. A cherry-picked 7-point increase is barely outside the margin of (sampling) error of even the best polls; and that doesn’t account for nonrandom sources of error and bias, such as the fact most people these days don’t answer their phones for a number they don’t know, and the ones who do aren’t really representative.
If you really must watch the polls, please watch a poll aggregator. You’ve probably heard of RealClearPolitics, which simply does an unweighted average of the most recent polls. But @gelliottmorris at The Economist does a much better job of aggregating the polls in a truly principled way. You can see their results above.
Aside from the top-line numbers in the graph above (Biden 26, Warren 19, Sanders 15, Harris 7, Buttigieg 6), they also have several other interesting graphical breakdowns of where the race stands. (Note that the numbers above are based on ALL high-quality national polls, while those below come from JUST The Economist’s own polling firm, YouGov.) First, they show support for the frontrunners among different subgroups — by race:
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Age:
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and education:
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Finally, and in my opinion most-interestingly, they show which candidates are being “considered” by most voters. This is a good indication of which major candidates have the most potential to improve their numbers as the minor candidates continue to drop out of the race:
(If we used a decent voting method such as approval voting for primary elections, instead of the horrible choose-one voting, these would be the top-line numbers, and the swoopy graph at the top of the post would be just a curiousity.)
For right now, there are 4-5 viable candidates, and you should be supporting whichever you think has the best policies, as well as the best plans for getting those policies enacted. Worrying about electability and polls right now just ends up being circular reasoning. But if you are going to look at polls, please use The Economist or some other smoothed aggregate/average.