I think that that is more of an illustration that polls are always about a statistical likelihood and never about an absolute. With a 3-5% margin 14% is not as unlikely as you might think. (It's ~ 1:3).

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dwattttt 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You need a measure of variance to perform that kind of estimate. There's scenarios where 98% of results land within 3-5% of a value, and the 14% is extremely unlikely. And scenarios where the variance is high, and it's much more likely. (you can also be wrong about what you think the variance is)

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jacquesm an hour ago | parent | next [-]

As far as I'm aware these poll results have (roughly) a normal distribution, right now the spread between the two extremes in polls with sufficiently high 'N' to be taken into account in most reports differ by 19%.

	▲	dwattttt 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		"standard normal" isn't the same as "normal"; standard normal defines the mean & variance (0 & 1 respectively), but normal distributions can have any mean & variance.

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SideburnsOfDoom 19 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

The other issue is that in an election like the US, the results in different states are not independent, decoupled rolls of the dice. i.e. If the results of the first few states lean a few % one way off the polling (within the margin of error) then it's most likely that most of the other states will doe the same.