A new CBS News/YouGov national survey finds Vice President Kamala Harris leading convicted felon former President Trump 50 to 49 percent among all respondents and tied at 50 percent from a sub-sample in the “battleground states” which is pretty freaking useless other than to support CBS’s assertion that, “in recent history, Democrats have needed a larger national polling lead to imply competitive Electoral College chances across the battlegrounds because so many of their national votes have come from larger, safely blue coastal states. But this year, at least so far, we see a different pattern in which the battlegrounds track more closely to the national.”

So we can buy that general notion because it tracks with what we’ve seen in more than a few analyses these days, not to mention the polling averages themselves in most of the swing states. On the other hand it’s frustrating as hell given the lack of actual meaning here to that specific finding.

There’s no “battleground” column in the crosstabs. All it says at the bottom in the polling fine print is “Battlegrounds are AZ, GA, MI, NC, NV, PA, and WI,” nothing about oversampling those states, or whether it’s an average of respondents across the seven or a simple weighted percentage. Which leads us to ask what was CBS’s goddamned point here? Why say “the battlegrounds are tied” but no hint as to which one has the more likely path to 270 Electoral College votes? Freaking dicks.