As we enter the final week of the election, a slew of last minute polls that will emerge. This is a good time to remind ourselves that we should not put too much stock in what they say. As I said in an earlier post, pollsters have to make adjustments to the raw data and this introduces systematic uncertainties so that the actual margin of error could be about double the statistical one.

Josh Clinton has done an interesting analysis to try and get a better idea of how much these adjustments can affect the results.

He says that pollsters have to address four questions.
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I have written before about how important the so-called ‘ground game’ is in US elections. This is the name given to the efforts by candidates to get voters to actually vote for them. By themselves, such ‘get out the vote’ (GOTV) efforts may only contribute marginally to the final vote tallies but in close races, as the current one between Kamala Harris and creepy Donald Trump is, they can prove to be the decisive factor by boosting turnout.

Traditionally these efforts operate under the umbrella of the national parties that coordinate with state and local branches, since that provides an ongoing organizational structure and institutional memory that can be called upon in each election cycle. The national party organization provides funding to supplement whatever is raised by the candidates, and this money goes to hire staff members at all levels, down to the precincts. But the bulk of the actual work, consisting of making phone calls to voters, sending out mailers and postcards, distributing yard signs and flyers, and most importantly, going door-to-door and talking to people, is done by volunteers and these volunteers play a crucial role.
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US election campaigns, especially for national offices like the presidency and both houses of Congress, are interminably long and absurdly expensive. This is partly a consequence of the fact that the date of the election is fixed (for federal offices they are held every even year on the day after the first Monday in November), which means that planning can be done a long time ahead. Furthermore, the almost complete absence of restrictions on the money that can be raised and spent (whatever flimsy restrictions there are are easily worked around) means that vast sums, billions of dollars, are involved, giving an outsize influence to wealthy individuals and organizations.

People in other countries are incredulous that elections in the US are run by the states and that each state largely makes its own rules, and these rules are determined sometimes by highly partisan state legislatures that seek to give an advantage to their own party. They do this as far as the law and the constitution allows but in the age of creepy Trump, they are sometimes willing to go over the line. In many other countries, elections are run by a central, largely non-partisan, body. The reason for the state variability in the US goes way back to the origins of US that required the 13 colonies that had been separate entities to join together to form a single nation. Since each colony had been operating largely independently of the others, they jealously guarded their autonomy as much as possible and thus gave as little power to the central government as they could. Hence we have this patchwork of systems. One argument in its favor is that it allows for innovation in that each state can be a laboratory to try out different ways of doing things and, hopefully, the ones that works best may be copied by others.
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