Don’t cherry-pick the polls. The 2024 race remains close.

Political analysts like to hold up polls for the answers they give. But sometimes, they prompt more questions.

Is President Joe Biden really ahead by 6 points — and outside the margin of error — in battleground Wisconsin, as a recent Quinnipiac University poll found?

Or is he essentially tied on a five-way ballot, as the same poll found?

Or is he ahead by 2 points among registered voters there, according to a brand-new New York Times/Siena College poll? Or is he down by 1 point there among likely voters, per the same poll, with both results well inside the margin of error?

Similarly, is former President Donald Trump really ahead in battleground Michigan by 7 points among registered voters, as in the same New York Times/Siena polling? Or is Biden ahead there by 1 point among likely voters, as the same poll says?

The answer: We don’t know. Whether that idea is maddening or liberating, all we know is that the race remains close.

As NBC News noted nearly six months ago, expecting down-to-the-percentage-point precision and accuracy from public horse-race polls is a fool’s errand — because of the polls’ margins of error, past polling misses, low response rates among voters and different assumptions about the 2024 electorate (some of the wild swings between registered and likely voter results speak to that).

Now, polls help us understand whether Biden and Trump are underperforming or overperforming among key demographic groups. They inform us about what issues are important to voters, they provide clues about voter interest and possible turnout scenarios, and they help us gauge whether a contest is close or not.

Can they tell us who’s ahead — or who’s going to win — when one candidate is at 48% and the other is at 46%? No way.