Would we also have to posthumously enshrine Dewey as president over Truman?
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Our telephone polls of retirement communities clearly showed…
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Because someone here will inevitably stand up for the raccoons:
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It’s completely consistent for them though.
- State something with no support all all that it’s real. (biased poll in this case)
- Repeat it again and again and again and again.
- R base starts to believe it, or at least pretend they believe it.
- Point at that base of people as confirmation that something isn’t right and people are “concerned”.
The fact that none of it was ever real never enters the picture. There’s no need for actual proof or facts.
It’s depressing that it works at all. If our media wasn’t so bad and actually cared about what’s real instead of “both sides must be represented” they might point this out.
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Yes, Arizonans do know BS when they see it. That’s why they decided not to put a sewage treatment pool named Kari in the governor’s mansion.
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Nate Silver has entered the chat.
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is cocaine still a thing?
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Yeah, baby! C-c-c-c-c-c-cocaine!
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That one was a pretty big miss but 538 was basing that specific forecast off of just two polls, which were taken in August and September. The September poll was conducted by the Northwest Progressive Institute (which is sponsored by the Democratic Party) and was 48/44 in Kent’s favor. So the DNC can’t blame 538 for a projection based on a poll that they themselves paid for.
Overall the 538 House forecast was reasonably accurate. Right now the Republicans are on track to win about 221 seats, give or take a seat. So that’s well within the 80% confidence interval that 538 put out on the eve of the election:
I was just listening to a recent Pod Save America episode and the (Democratic) hosts were actually praising 538 and Nate Silver, saying that the forecast was decent and that he’s still among the best in the business. That’s obviously a controversial take on this forum but I challenge anyone to point to an election forecaster with a better track record over the last several cycles. Seriously, if there’s someone better out there I’d like to know it.
Edit:
For those that say that the confidence interval is to wide to be useful, fine. But given the large number of races that were decided by razor-thin margins, often under 1%, ain’t nobody going to give you a more realistic confidence interval given the margin of error in polling.
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I liked my own username until Cleese came out as a right-wing asshat.
Now I am stuck with it, but I like this board and don’t want to start again.
However, I’m not sure I’d ever be brave(?) enough to jump into a forum with a username like, oh, fancy that, the cocaine-user-name has inexplicably vanished.
Well I never.
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They could do something like this…
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You’ll not see me take that challenge. because (national) polling sucks generally. Here’s one nerdy thing to keep in mind: how do they calculate margin of error? They take the reciprocal of the square root of the number of respondents they were doggedly able to get. (so you often see +/- 3%, that’s because they pounded the phone lines until after phoning maybe 8000 they got 1000 to answer: 1/sqrt(1000) → 0.0316… does 1:8 bode well for ‘random’?) But that’s only semi-accurate if the sample is ‘truly random’. By truly random we should accept that every voter had an equal chance of being included in the sample. Can they reach you on your phone? nah. Can they reach me? hell no. (so a better margin of error would be in the double digits) I don’t envy political pollsters - at least the honest ones (and Rasmussen, for example is not ‘honest’) because they simply can’t get a decent sample. old folks may answer a land-line but young ones can’t be reached …and web-polling sucks even more; as you have to have decided to visit a site first and that’s pre-selection right there.
In passing, aggregators (like 538) who are assiduous in eliminating the truly lousy polling houses will score slightly better than average… because, well, they’re averaging (and scaling). but last i read 538 still includes Rasmussen. oh, and trends with same basis sets are more believable than non-trends. …ok, too boring already, …sorry about that. make an end, Frink out.
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Which polls was he looking at? The fabulist bullshit GQP sponsored polls, or real ones conducted by trusted agencies?
did you see that post? Let’s welcome crystal meth dealer into the community! LOL!!!
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Reminded me of this…
Franchise (short story) - Wikipedia
In the future, the United States has converted to an “electronic democracy” where the computer Multivac selects a single person to answer a number of questions. Multivac will then use the answers and other data to determine what the results of an election would be, avoiding the need for an actual election to be held.The story centers around Norman Muller of Bloomington, Indiana, the man chosen as “Voter of the Year” in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Although the law requires him to accept the dubious honour, he is not sure that he wants the responsibility of representing the entire electorate, worrying that the result will be unfavorable and he will be blamed.
However, after “voting”, he is very proud that the citizens of the United States had, through him, “exercised once again their free, untrammeled franchise” – a statement that is somewhat ironic as the citizens did not actually get to vote; even he himself did not vote for any candidate, law, or issue.
The idea of a computer predicting whom the electorate would vote for instead of actually holding an election was probably inspired by the UNIVAC I’s correct prediction of the result of the U.S. presidential election in 1952.[1]
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He managed to vanish in a puff of smoke as I was replying.
Any puns here unintended but gratefully acknowledged.
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Even if these assholes put every vote in the box themselves, and had someone else count them as they did so, they’d still deny the results at the end.
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So very true. That’s the worst part- we all see exactly what they’re doing, but it still works. It’s crazy-making. Cults are what lead to motivated reasoning at that scale, so I can only conclude that the American GOP is a cult.
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