What the heck is going on in the South Carolina Democratic primary?

| 6:30 pm EST February 24, 2020
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The Democratic 2020 primary contest in South Carolina is going to tell us a number of things. Will Joe Biden’s firewall with African-American voters hold up? If Biden wins the state, will the media begin portraying him as having momentum? If Bernie Sanders loses the state, will the media stop hyping him as the supposed frontrunner?

The polls coming out of South Carolina have been confusing, and unfortunately, they’re being reported on in a largely inaccurate way. We have three new major polls coming out of the state. CBS News has Joe Biden up by five points. PPP has Joe Biden up by fifteen points. NBC/Marist has Joe Biden up by four points. So which of these is accurate? That’s where things get tricky.

All three of these polling outlets have a valid track record. There’s no reason to presume that any of them are full of crap. And yet at least one of these polls is going to end up being proven very wrong. That’s what happens when pollsters try to calculate a group representative collection of people to poll, at a time when a race is rapidly shifting. The statistically valid way to deal with this is to average the three polls together and conclude that Biden is potentially up by eight points. If that ends up being the actual result in South Carolina, it’ll change the entire trajectory of the primary race.

The one thing that no pundit or news outlet should ever do is to just grab one of these three new polls, throw it on the screen, and treat it as if it’s the only new South Carolina poll. MSNBC just had a chyron on the bottom of the screen which asserted that Biden has a “slight” lead in South Carolina. We suppose that fits best with their ratings-friendly narrative about Biden being in trouble, and Sanders being the presumptive nominee – but it’s not what the numbers actually say. The polls get a bad rap because of how the media routinely mis represents what the polls are saying.