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Which is kind of the point. If the point was just to see who might win, why publish the results? If the polls say Trump wins, then it’s useful perhaps in business where you might want to long term plan for the future economic policies Trump brings. Or it might be useful to the various campaigns as a signal of where the weak points are. I suspect that they aren’t getting the polls generally available to the public, which are not about reporting the likely winners, but in motivating or demotivating various factions in the electorate. CNN isn’t trying to guess the outcome. They want to scare democrats into voting and working harder for Kamala and saying she might lose is motivation for people who are afraid of a Trump second term. If they’re wrong, it’s not like they get a black eye even.
I think what makes more sense is to try to gage enthusiasm and whether or not some factions of the base are not on board. Kamala has a big problem because of Israel Palestine. There’s a fairly large portion of the left that’s jumping to either staying home or voting Green Party. If they’re serious, I think that’s a problem no matter what the polls say. I don’t see the same divide with any issues for Trump. I see lots of people saying they can’t wait to vote for Trump. Both things seem important as data points.
According to some polling at least, Israel/Palestine ranks rather low on voter priorities: https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/eba2f5ad-57c0-4c7b-b546-296a1e273e06_1456x1241.png
Depending on the motivations of the pollster, I can imagine various reasons why they’d publicize accurate results (eg to advertise their polling outfit in case you want to hire them to poll on other issues of note). But I haven’t actually been able to find much about how public polls are funded and why. You?
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