How confident should you be in election polls? Not nearly as confident as the pollsters claim, according to a new UC Berkeley Haas study.

Most election polls report a 95 percent confidence level. Yet an analysis of 1,400 polls from 11 election cycles found that the outcome lands within the poll's result just 60 percent of the time. And that's for polls just one week before an election -- accuracy drops even more further out.

"If you're confident, based on polling, about how the 2020 election will come out, think again," said UC Berkeley Haas professor Don Moore, who conducted the analysis with former student Aditya Kotak, B.A. '20. "There are a lot of reasons why the actual outcome could be different from the poll, and the way pollsters compute confidence intervals does not take those issues into account."

If one wants a handy rule:

"Perhaps the way we interpret polls as a whole needs to be adjusted, to account for the uncertainty that comes with them," Kotak said. In fact, to be 95 percent confident, polls would need to double the margins of error they report even a week from election day, the analysis concluded.