Margin of Error Is Important

I was recently reading this article, in Politico, about mid-term election polls. Throughout the article, they wrote things like "Blackburn led Bredesen by 3 percentage points", or "Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema with 47 percent to 45 percent for GOP Rep. Martha McSally".  They make it seem like that person is actually in the lead, but it wasn't until the very end that they wrote "All five polls had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points".  All polls have a margin of error and it is extremely important to realize what that means, which is that the results fall within a range, not an exact number. So the "leads" they talk about are statistically fiction and don't mean anything.  Realistically, the should say that Kyrsten Sinema may be leading by up to 5%, or maybe she is actually down by 1%, we have no idea, but it is likely to be somewhere in there (and depending on how the calculate the margin of error, you can determine exactly how confident you should that it is even in that range (usually, it is 95%). This type of journalism is irresponsible, misleading, and mathematically wrong. Furthermore, they are degrading their own credibility because they will appear wrong more often than necessary.

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