Poll­ster fig­ures out weird Trump-Biden results: Ask your neigh­bor

Anoth­er day, anoth­er pres­i­den­tial elec­tion poll. One says for­mer Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump is up, and anoth­er gives the nod to Pres­i­dent Joe Biden.
How does a vot­er make sense of it all?
One poll­ster thinks it has an answer: Just ask your neigh­bor whom he or she is plan­ning to vote for.
Like many con­sumers of polit­i­cal sur­veys, poll­ster TIPP/Insights has been angling to deter­mine who is real­ly lead­ing in the dead heat race.
So, for its lat­est analy­sis, it did a deep dive into the data and found five indi­ca­tors that Trump could be ahead.
The head­line num­bers for its lat­est sur­vey found Biden with 42% nation­al sup­port and Trump with 40%. It described the race as “neck and neck” and with­in the mar­gin of error of plus or minus 2.8 points.
But as it dug into oth­er ques­tions, it found an edge for Trump.
First, the polling out­fit looked at inde­pen­dent vot­ers, who are expect­ed to play an out­size role in the Novem­ber out­come. Among inde­pen­dents, TIPP said …