Poll Vault: Hillary leads Trump who leads Hillary who leads Trump

Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing, a British writer remarked perceptively, and nowhere is it truer than across the pond, where weekly surveys are the norm in the months leading up to the Presidential elections.
Depending on the mode, the method, questions, sample size etc, polls conducted at the same time can show a wide range of results, allowing every side to claim imminent victory -- although elections are still more than four months away, a week itself is said to be a long time in politics.
This week’s crop of polls shows Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump by double digits in an ABC poll (51-39), by only 5 points in an NBC/WSJ poll (46-41), and a virtual deadlock in a Quinnipaic University poll (42-40). A ''Rasmussen Report'' survey shows Trump with a four point lead (43-39).
What the polls do not show -- or they do in fine print and small footnotes -- is large margins of error (+/- 4 per cent in ABC poll), small samples (often less than 1000), and sketchy methods (Rasmussen is online and by telephone), among other limitations.
There is also the business of the missing numbers (the sum of opinion never amounts to 100), suggesting that some 5-15 per cent simply hold back their preferences/views -- enough to change the results when they express it.
To top it all, popular votes are not what is going to decide the presidential election; electoral votes based on a winner-take-all system will. Al Gore won more popular votes than George Bush in 2000, but Bush nicked him in the Electoral College.
Still, for the record, Hillary Clinton leads Trump in most polls, surveys, projections involving both popular vote and electoral college. The big surprise: the fact that Trump is even in the same frame or picture, even as a straggler.
''I don’t get how they can be deadlocked. This frankly worries me,'' former labor secretary and Harvard University professor Robert Reich said this week. ''Trump hasn’t put up a single television ad, his campaign is in shambles, he has almost no field staff, he’s spent almost zilch and his campaign bank is nearly empty, and he’s been getting nothing but horrible press. Hillary Clinton has been blanketing swing states with ads, her campaign is being run like clockwork and it’s huge, and she’s pulling in and spending money like mad.''
''More to the point, Trump is a bigoted petulant egomaniac with the temperament of a hyena. She's experienced, competent, and intelligent. What’s going on?'' he wondered.
What’s going on is the polls never tell the full story, much less the end result. Conservatives claim there is a vast reservoir of Trump supporters who do not share the elitist, coastal view of the Republican candidate as a bigot and a fool. Call them Trexiters.
Besides, there are so many variables in the elections that some pollsters are devising a new way of forecasting possible results – from polls of polls to new algorithms that take into account past results, specific issues, demographics etc. Some even project possible result in percentages to get around the certitude.
Nate Silver, a baseball statistician who moved to politics after accurately calling the 2008 and 2012 elections, puts Hillary Clinton’s changes of winning at 79 per cent and Trump at 20 per cent.
''We're at halftime of the election right now,'' Silver, who dices numbers for ABC News said this week. ''She's taking a 7-point, maybe a 10-point lead into halftime. There's a lot of football left to be played.''
''Trump has never been ahead of Clinton in the general election campaign. He did a great job of appealing to the 40 percent of the GOP he had to win the election, the primary — a lot different than winning 51 percent of 100 percent,'' he added.
The only recent candidate to blow a lead like the one Clinton holds, Silver recalled, was Michael Dukakis in 1988.
Many reasons were adduced for Dukakis’ eventual defeat: from a lackluster personality (he was dubbed Zorba the Clerk) to lack of passion in countering the Bush Sr campaign, to a PR disaster involving him atop a military tank to show he would make a good commander-in-chief, imitating something that had worked for Margaret Thatcher.
The last pitch misfired badly. Polls did not account for it. It's the kind of pitfall both the Clinton and Trump camps keep watching out for as much as the polls.