Harry Truman after winning the 1948 Presidential election.

Now that we are in the Early Voting season, we are hearing about “the polls.” One candidate is up and then is down. We don’t know how the pollsters are getting reliable information. Maybe it’s not so reliable. One thing is certain – the only poll that really matters is the final one on Election Day. So don’t be lulled into a false sense of security – we can still lose. This is your chance to make your voice heard. Let’s look at some unexpected outcomes in past elections. 

From The Conversation: “The question looms in nearly every U.S. presidential election, even in this year’s race: Could the polls be wrong? If they are, they likely will err in unique fashion. The history of election polling says as much."

"That history tells of no greater polling surprise than what happened in 1948, when President Harry Truman defied the polls, the pundits and the press to defeat Thomas E. Dewey, his heavily favored Republican foe.

Pollsters were certain Truman had no chance. One of them, Elmo Roper, was so confident of Dewey’s victory that he announced two months before the election he would release no further survey data unless a political miracle intervened.

Rival pollsters George Gallup and Archibald Crossley largely completed their poll-taking by mid-October – and missed a decisive shift in support to Truman in the campaign’s closing days.

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As I point out in my latest book, “Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections,” the misfire of 1948 was exceptional. And that describes most polling failures in presidential elections: They tend to be exceptional, unlike previous polling errors.

A cartoon published two weeks before the 1948 election, in which Dewey was projected to win by a large margin. Clifford Kennedy Berryman, Artist/National Archives, Records of the U.S. Senate, 1789 - 2015

No pattern

When the polls go wrong, they almost always do so in some unanticipated way. Errors spring from no single template.

This variety helps explain why polling failure is so unpredictable and so jarring. The epic miscall of 1948 has never been duplicated in U.S. presidential elections – although the shock of Truman’s victory may have been rivaled by the profound surprise that accompanied Donald Trump’s win in 2016.

Trump’s victory represented polling failure of another kind: Polls in 2016 were not so much in error nationally as they were in states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

If Hillary Clinton had carried those states, as polls had indicated, she would have won the electoral votes to become president. But errors in state-level polls upset national expectations, in part because those polls tended to include too few white voters without college degrees, a key Trump constituency in 2016 and this year.

Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016 was unexpected and reflected that polls in 2016 were not so much in error nationally as they were in key states. Brendan Smialowski / AFP/Getty Images

Voters changing or making up their minds late in the campaign led in 1980 to another type of polling failure – the unforeseen landslide. Polls that year mostly signaled a close race between President Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. At campaign’s end, the race seemed too close to call.

Reagan won by nearly 10 percentage points.”

The moral of this story is that you cannot trust the polls. Don’t stay home because the polls look good for your candidate. Don’t allow others to decide who will win public office and how you will be governed.  Here is the link to the Early Voting Sites.