Will the polls be right in 2024? What polling on the presidential race can and can’t tell you

WASHINGTON (AP) — The presidential race is competitive.

That’s about as much as the national polls can tell us right now, even if it looks like Democrat Kamala Harris is down in one poll or Republican Donald Trump is up in another.

And that’s just fine.

Even though polls are sometimes treated as projections, they aren’t designed to tell you who is likely to win.

Polls are better for some things than others. Tracking shifts in voter intention is hard to do with a survey, particularly when the number of truly persuadable voters is relatively small. Voters’ opinions can change before Election Day and they often do. Horse race polls can only capture people’s viewpoints during a single moment in time. Even then, a margin that looks like one that could decide an election — say, one candidate has 48% support and the other has 45% support — might not be a real difference at all.

When reporters at The Associated Press are covering the election, horse race polling numbers don’t take center stage. The reason for this is that the AP believes that focusing on preelection polling can overstate the significance or reliability of those numbers.

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