NORFOLK, Va. — Four years ago, most pre-election national polls showed Hillary Clinton ahead. And mathematically speaking, the polls were right; she did beat President Trump in the popular vote.
But Donald Trump was elected president.
"So, the polling in 2016 is getting unfairly maligned for getting it wrong," said Quentin Kidd, who is a Christopher Newport University Political Science Professor and Director of the Wason Center for Civic Leadership. "The polling was pretty accurate. It projected about a three percent Hillary Clinton win. She won by about two and half percent nationally, a few million votes."
But the Electoral College? That was an entirely different story. All the states that were close went Trump's way.
"This is why people say Trump had the Royal Flush," said Kidd. "In all of those cases, he won by just a few thousand votes. We're talking about winning Wisconsin by 17,000 votes for example. So, what pollsters should have been doing, and people who talk about polling should have been doing, is saying Clinton is ahead, but it's a statistical tie. In other words, it's within the margin of error, so [they] really can't say who is in the lead."
And so, what about this year?
Much national polling shows Joe Biden with a big Electoral College edge Tuesday. But, that assumes he wins every close state such as Florida, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
Kidd's most recent Wason Center poll on Virginia voters last week showed Biden with a 12-point lead in this state.
"Well that is a clear Biden lead, which is outside the margin of error, which in this poll is 3.4 percent," he said. "So there's no way we would say Biden and Trump are tied statistically in Virginia, because Biden's lead is outside that margin of error."
So, based upon the polls, how might things play out Tuesday night?
"What Florida does I think signals what a lot of the other battleground states are going to do," said Kidd.
Despite Biden's big lead in Virginia, Kidd says there's no guarantee of a Biden blowout nationally as some polls suggest, especially, if the President defies the polls in some key states early in the night, just as he did in 2016.
"Now, if Florida goes Trump, and Trump holds on in South Carolina, then it's not going to be that," he said. "It's going to be a much tighter race. And it will come down to Pennsylvania, which is what everybody is keying on. That's where we get the scenario it's going to be a long few days or weeks before we know the results."
The bottom line is, polling is either a useful tool for providing a snapshot on where a given race may stand at a specific moment in time, or it is absolutely useless. Take your pick.