well the election countdown is on and there's no shortage of political polls indicating which candidates have the edge or are trailing behind among voters but not all polls are equal and some information can be confusing especially for the uninitiated no single survey can fully capture a race it's more about giving a snapshot from a group of selected voters responding to a set of questions during a moment in time so what purpose do political polls serve for the public and how should you read them we turn to The Experts director of the Monmouth University polling Institute Patrick Murray and Ashley Koning director for the Rutgers Eagleton Center for public interest polling Ashley and Pat good to talk to you both um so you know we have this sort of murky information ecosystem especially when it comes time for elections what I'm hoping to get to is to help our viewers our audience understand how to read polls so Pat let me go to you first um there are margins of error and waiting um all of these terms that get put into a poll for its legitimacy what's your number one tip for folks when they're looking at a poll to make sure that it is in fact a credible one yeah well I mean there's two things that you have to think about one is The credibility of the poll and I would go to uh a place like real clear politics which averages polls but what they do is they sort out some of them so at least they they curate some of the bad ones out of there but the other part of this is that what I hear all the time is your poll said candidate X was up by two but this other poll said candidate x uh Y is up by one why are they different and the media is telling me that that that's a different poll and it's not they are with the margin of error they're telling the same story of a very close race and I think that's more what we need to do with folks particularly with the polling that I'm seeing coming out of this election well and Ashley I mean that also goes into when we talk about head-to head polling versus issue polling what role does it play especially in an election cycle like this and what's your tip for folks who are reading them yeah I mean we have to understand that polling is very important because polling sometimes gives us what the public thinks on issues that may never get their day at The Ballot Box but what polling is not is it's not a crystal ball and like Patrick was saying this is a snapshot in time of what people are thinking and we're trying to predict an unknown electorate of likely voters so we have to be careful of how we're interpreting pre-election results it should be telling us where the race is headed what issues are important it's not going to tell us who's necessarily going to win on Election Day so Pat when you're doing let's say a presidential poll and you have a candidate like Donald Trump um where conventional wisdom has sort of gone out the window when it comes to some of the ways that we PLL um what is it that you're looking for when you conduct a poll like that because you and I spoke over the years how confidence was sort of shaken back after 2016 even 2020 a little bit um how should folks be reading these when Kamala is up as you just mentioned you know two points in one poll um trailing in another Donald Trump has changed the way we think about polling um you know we we do know we looked back at the 2020 election and there was a small but systematic under representation of Donald Trump in the polls his support and we're not still not sure exactly why so it has shaken things up so what we're doing and you should look for polls that that point to the uncertainty you should look at polls that that try to point out not just where the candidates stand in terms of their support but where their floors and ceilings are where the possibility of movement is so then Ashley in a polarized climate like this what role do these polls serve and how useful can they be yeah I mean this is the only quantitative systematic assessment we have of what the public is thinking in the political process whether pre-election or not that's why they're so important um they don't take much time or resource from an individual for their voice to be heard and we are representing all voices in in highly well done credible polling all voices are being represented in the sample that we are taking that can be generalized back to the population so you know there is still great value in doing these I think where we need need to have more of is an educational effort and for the average citizen to learn how to be a good pole consumer and a little bit of a detective and make sure that polls that they see are providing enough information to be seen as credible or high quality so I'm wondering then Pat real quick I mean when you take a week like we've had right these historic hurricanes in parts of the country and if you're looking at a presidential race how much does the timing matter because these are snapshots of time when you're talking to folks right so you can find out that something happens like a major event where somebody who was a likely voter last week is not a likely voter anymore because they have other things on their mind and in a in a an elections like we've been having recently and certainly this one which is going to be decided Maybe by 10,000 ton 20,000 people in a in a particular state that could matter but what you want to look at polls is what Ashley said is you want to look for the why we do a lot of questions about the why the issues the the underlying Dynamic the value systems of Voters uh that don't get doesn't get reported as much as that horse race but that's really what where polling has its strength and that's what voters should look to to explain what's going on and what could potentially happen when this election finally rolls around next month Patrick Murray Ashley Koning thank you both so much thanks much every be with you [Music]