The Morning Meeting with Al Tompkins is a daily Poynter briefing of story ideas worth considering and other timely context for journalists, written by senior faculty Al Tompkins.

You might wonder why, after the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, journalists would put any stock in pre-election polls. But the biggest challenge for journalists is not in the polling itself, but how we report polling results.

If you look at the average of all of the political polls that Real Clear Politics tracks, you will find of the dozen hot U.S. Senate races only three of them are not a statistical tie right now. How can I say that when nearly all have a candidate leading by more than the margin of error? It is because journalists are not correctly considering what the margin of error means.

(Real Clear Politics)

In a two-person race with a poll that has a three percent margin of error, a candidate would have to be leading, not by three points, but by more than six points to be a clear leader. Because remember, the margin of error could be three points in either direction for either candidate. Some polls are four percent margins of error. A candidate would have to be a blow-away leader to be more than eight points ahead. 

And yet I see journalist after journalist reporting about candidates that moved up one point and that is big news. It just means the race is still within the margin of error, as it probably has been most of the year.

We put way too much focus on polling as if they will predict the outcome of races that are statistically too close to call. Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr. puts it this way:

In short, the most interesting, talked-about data we get from polls — their findings in close races — simply isn’t that useful or reliable.

This is a huge problem because most people, me included, find it hard to accept “we just don’t know who’s ahead in this race” when a stream of polls are constantly released that give us the impression that we know who’s really ahead.

Pollsters are worried that, once again, Democrats are running better than predicted in the same places where the polls overestimated Joe Biden in 2020 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. Could it be that we are heading for a 2022 replay of overestimations of Democratic popularity?

The New York Times’ chief political analyst Nate Cohn explains: 

Polls are not exact measurements, like the diameter of the Earth or the speed of light. They are imprecise estimates — and even the classic margin of error   seriously understates the actual degree of uncertainty.

But despite all the limitations, a 2020 polling error is not inevitable, either. In fact, our most recent survey showed some small signs of encouragement that 2022 polls may not be like those of 2020.

To that end, Politico looks at how Monmouth polling changed its tactics for the midterm races:

Monmouth University, in New Jersey, is trying a different tack — eschewing horse-race polling for surveys that measure each candidate’s level of support without pitting them against one another. Patrick Murray, the director of the school’s polling institute, said his analysis of the 2020 results didn’t reveal a “silver bullet” for fixing their poll, which also failed to predict the closer-than-expected New Jersey governor’s race last year.

Where polling is still of some value is in tracking polls that examine how interested people are in an issue. The Post’s Perry Bacon Jr. says:

Polling should be used to assess if there is a gap between politicians’ behavior and public opinion on issues that are simple to understand and in the news often enough that it is likely most voters have some real opinions.

And here, Bacon adds, is how journalists should use polling:

Polling should be used to assess changes in public opinion. I am not sure whether 43 percent of American adults approve of Biden, as FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls suggests. Perhaps the real number is 39 percent or 47 percent. Polls do not capture the exact percentage of Americans who support a given idea or candidate.

But many organizations regularly conduct polls using the exact same methods over several months or even years, which means we can trust the changes in public opinion that they show. It is almost certainly the case that Biden is more popular than he was in late July, when the average of those same polls put him at about 38 percent approval.

In other words, use polling results as a barometer that gives us trends, not a thermometer that gives us a precise reading.

The 2022 cost of Thanksgiving meal

USA Today says the cost of a traditional Thanksgiving meal is going to rock you back some this year.  CNBC says, “Inflation for groceries hasn’t been this high since the 1970s,” and butter and margarine prices are leading the way.

(USA Today)

Last week for Savings Bonds with 9.62% interest return

If you are like me, when you hear the words “Savings Bonds” you probably think of the old-fashioned, government-issued bonds that your grandmother might have bought for your high school graduation. They were virtually risk-free and usually had a modest interest rate.

But for a handful more days, you can buy something called an I bond that has an interest rate of 9.62%. The “I” in the I bond stand for inflation. The return rate is tied to the inflation rate that comes from the Consumer Price Index. When the rate goes down, the I bond return rate goes down. Twice a year, the government sets the inflation rate for the next six months. The Government website explains:

The minimum purchase is $25. The annual purchase limit for Series I savings bonds in TreasuryDirect is $10,000. The bond earns interest for 30 years after purchase. You can cash in (redeem) your I bond after 12 months.

However, if you cash in the bond in less than 5 years, you lose the last 3 months of interest. For example, if you cash in the bond after 18 months, you get the first 15 months of interest.

The interest is subject to federal taxes but not state and local income taxes. You choose whether to report each year’s earnings or wait to report all the earnings when you get the money for the bond. If you use the money for qualified higher education expenses, you may not have to pay tax on the earnings.

You can buy the bonds electronically and as “paper bonds,” which means you will get a printed document.

Electronic I bonds: $25 minimum or any amount above that to the penny. For example, you could buy an I bond for $36.73.

Paper I bonds: $50, $100, $200, $500, or $1,000

Consumers can buy the government-issued bonds at TreasuryDirect, which crashed when the offer began earlier this year. The government website advises, “Complete the purchase of this bond in TreasuryDirect by October 28, 2022, to ensure issuance by October 31, 2022.”

In time for backyard bonfires, how to mathematically stack your firewood

Leave it to Popular Mechanics to explain the proper way to stay the timber to make a dandy bonfire. The method involves thermodynamics and math. 

In theory, there are innumerable ways you could arrange your fuel source, but according to Adrian Bejan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University, there’s only one sure-fire way: Your fuel should be stacked just as high as it is wide, like a pyramid. It’s no coincidence, Bejan says, that a pyre and a pyramid are so linguistically similar.

You can think of a fire kind of like a piece of Swiss cheese. In between different pieces of fuel (whether you’re using coal, wood, or another source), there are lots of holes or gaps that air can move through. If your fire is packed too densely, air can’t flow through to drive combustion; if your fuel is packed too loosely, then the air can’t get enough power to move quickly. The scientific term for this kind of hole-filled shape is a “porous medium,” Bejan says.