Americans love polls. Except when they don't say what they want them to say.
"I'm not sure the polls have changed," says data expert John Johnson,CEO of Edgeworth Economics in Washington, DC. "The results have. The time you really should trust the polls is the closer you get to the election."
Steve Koczela, president of the MassINC Polling Group, says those self-selecting surveys are merely clickbait, for entertainment purposes only, and should not even be labeled polls. He says there often are no controls over who can respond or how many times they can answer the questions, unlike scientific surveys that have representative groups and random selection with a defined margin of error.
