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2020 Senate · MI

Data for Progress · fieldwork ended 2020-10-17 (17 days before the election) · 830 respondents · Online Panel/Text-to-Web · partisan sponsor (DEM)

The poll said

Democrat 48% · Republican 43%

D+5.0

The certified result

Democrat 49.90% · Republican 48.22%

D+1.7

The arithmetic

  1. Poll margin = 48 − 43 = 5.00
  2. Actual margin = 49.903 − 48.218 = 1.685
  3. Signed miss = 5.00 − (1.685) = 3.315
  4. Absolute miss = |3.315| = 3.315

The poll overstated the Democrat by 3.3 points and had the right leader.

Where these numbers come from

Poll and result: 538 raw_polls.csv. Poll ID 71623, race ID 6280 (538 database).