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WaPo Opinion: Trump’s Black voter bump is a statistical illusion

The data is real, but the conventional analysis is misleading.


All the polling supports the buzziest statistical claim of the 2024 election: Black voters are moving toward Donald Trump.An October 2020 Pew Research survey found that Black voters favored Joe Biden by a margin of 81 points, 89 percent to 8 percent. But four years later, Vice President Kamala Harris’s margin of support among this group is just 65 points (79 percent for her vs. 14 percent for Trump).Inan extremely tight election, a 16-point drop seems like a very big deal.

My expertise isn’t in predicting election outcomes, so I won’t attempt to do so using this data. I’m a decision scientist and a retired professional poker player. I study how we make decisions and how we can train ourselves to make better ones. The conversation around Black voters is an example of one theme I plan to explore in this year-long column for The Post: how our instincts about data can lead us to draw the wrong conclusions.

Read Annie’s Full Column in The Washington Post here >>