On Nov. 5, election officials across America will count more than 150 million ballots to answer a burning political question: Who will be president of the United States? Until then, the best signals we can get will mostly come from public opinion polls, which will be the fuel of endless debate on who has the lead, Democrat Joe Biden or Republican Donald Trump. But what do polls really tell us? Like a picture from a weather satellite, a poll can be pretty good at telling you what people think right now. It’s much harder to tell what people will be doing weeks or months from now.
SAMPLE SIZE
Some polls ask a few hundred people what they think. Others ask several thousand. The number of people surveyed is called the sample size. A big sample is like having more pixels in a digital photo. The more people surveyed, the clearer the picture.