Election time, who did you vote for?

[gergroy]

GameOver22 said:

gergroy said:
to those of you arguing about polls and the legitimacy of those polls. I would just like to note that polls can be a good barometer of where an election is at, but hardly a good predictor of where an election will go.

For example, look at the 1980 election, a week before the election most polls had the race relatively tied or Reagan losing, I think there was actually only one poll that showed him winning by the large margins he actually did win by. People complained about that polls inaccuracy at the time, but it ended up being the most accurate.

So basically, take all these polls with a grain of salt, the election is close enough and polling is inaccurate enough that it could go either way.

While I agree with your main point, on average, Reagan was actually ahead in the polls over the final weeks. The margin of victory definitely increased over the final couple days (a lot of short-term factors). Interesting thing about the 1980 election, is most people forget that Anderson had a pretty significant third-party showing.

http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/08/09/what-really-happened-in-the-1980-presidential-campaign/

yeah, my point was that most polls had it a lot closer then what actually happened in the end.