Pollsters: Can We Trust Them?

After the 2016 US presidential elections, many started seriously questioning the legitimacy of polls, and in turn, pollsters. Right up to the election night, polls for months had been showing Hillary Clinton as the almost certain winner of the debate, yet the nation was left surprised. While pollsters argue the public can still trust them, the public has become weary, and reasonably so. In this project, we'll look into this year's presidential election polls focusing on the pollsters themselves -- not at whether or not they were correct in who the winner would be, but on how closely they're projections were to actual results, at least as of Monday Nov. 9, 2020 (with about 98-99% of national results in). We'll look at the data on pollsters and their respective results shared by FiveThirtyEight in their aggregated polling site (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/). We'll narrow down to look only at Joseph Biden's projected results and see how closely these pollsters got to his actual national results. If interested in this project, please feel free to select the Pollsters.html file