Podcast: It’s the polling stupid

While they are shrouded in mystery, journalists love them; politicians obsess about them and the public craves them too. In the run up to the US presidential election in less than a fortnight, at least 4 polls are published each day, relentlessly feeding the frenzied 24-hour news cycle. In this episode I discuss my personal take on polling in general, and what they mean in the American context. Even though the US is not blessed with great in-depth political reporting, exceptions prove the rule across the Atlantic too. Drawing heavily on the expertise provided by the award winning news outlet Fivethirtyeight and the work of US scholar Dan Cassino, I encourage listeners to reexamine and reevaluate their own thinking on the subject. After all, polls deal in probabilities only.