The tracking poll is “annoying”

Is it really a poll? Is it taken seriously or is it to remember Rui Rio’s “victory”? Pythagorean administrator has already appeared.

The most constant numbers about the elections presidential 2026, since the campaign officially began, are those of tracking poll, shared by .

In the midst of political analysis, there are those who call it a poll, there are those who say that this It’s not a poll – “200 come in, 200 go out, always changing”.

15 years ago, when TVI presented this new feature (in Portugal) called tracking pollthe director of Intercampus, António Salvador, appeared to explain how this questionnaire works.

“It is a survey in which fieldwork is carried out more or less continuously with the respondents. The work is more or less continuous, because the respondents are being refreshed throughout the investigation, but the new part is always superior to the old.”.

Being a daily publication rhythm, each respondent only responds to two surveys in a row: “Those who respond to one and two no longer respond to three, as more than half leave each survey”. If you don’t leave after the first survey you answered, you leave after the second.

Returning to the present, to the 2026 presidential elections, the survey is now carried out by Pitagórica for CNN Portugal, TVI, JN and TSF. It reinforces that tracking poll and updated daily with a minimum renewal of 200 interviews: the oldest ones leave and the most recent ones come in.

There are some questions about this format. It’s daily, there is constant renewal and Maximum margin of error is 4.06% – is almost double, for example, the recent one, whose margin of error is 2.2%.

“Uncomfortable”

These questions, these suspicions, caused Alexandre Picoto to appear “on the ground”. The administrator of Pitagorica, the company responsible for the current tracking pollis against the doubts that have been raised.

Alexandre suggests that “information bothers you”citing accusations of “inventing facts”, “manipulating perceptions” or “conditioning the vote”.

Despite a poll “not to be a prophecy”is a “portrait of the moment, with measurable uncertainty”.

For Alexandre Picoto, the issue is not that Pythagorean is the only daily source of numbers; the question is: and the others? The company’s president defends more conditions, support or incentives, to increase the diversity of public measurements. Instead of “penalizing the only investment that, in that period, guaranteed data available to everyone”.

And Alexandre remembers the famous day in January 2022, when Rui Rio appeared ahead of António Costa – and Costa won with an absolute majority in these legislative elections. But it was just that day. “That day has been repeatedly isolated as proof of an alleged “failure” of the barometer”, he laments.

“What is rarely remembered is that, in the following days, the series itself moved again and began to reflect a scenario compatible with a more comfortable victory for the PS”, he recalls.