Pre-Election Polls … Some Right, Some Wrong, All Irrelevant

Up until the election, we were barraged with polls – numbers showing some candidates had big leads, only to be contradicted the next day by the opposite information. When all the dust settled and the last votes were actually counted early Wednesday morning, some of the predictions were just flat out wrong. University of Missouri political expert Bill Benoit says polls are really just educated guesses. Benoit says you have to look at the margin of error to get an accurate view of how far off the prediction would be. A four point margin of error could end up translating into an eight-percentage-point swing in the results, a wide gap in a close election.