Politicians as well as journalists take political polls very seriously. Losses and gains of a few percentage points are overly analysed and commented

Rock 'n Poll

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2025-01-14 13:00:34

Politicians as well as journalists take political polls very seriously. Losses and gains of a few percentage points are overly analysed and commented on.

This interactive explanation shows you why polling results should be taken with a grain of salt. In a lot of cases decimals will prove to be meaningless and changes of less than 2 percentage points shouldn't be subject to much analysis.

Imagine PollLand, an imaginary country. PollLand is a democracy, has a population of 1 million and has 8 political parties. Every 1000 PollLandians are represented in the graphic on the right by a circle. PollLandians don't like sharing their political preferences.

Elections are only held every couple of years. To measure trends in political preferences in between elections, speciallized polling companies conduct surveys, often commissioned by newspapers and tv stations.

Let's simulate that. At the same time we conduct a thought experiment: we assume every PollLandian still has the same political preference as during the last election. So the ideal poll should generate results equal to the elecion results.