I think there was Republican calculation that RFK was going to be like Bernie Sanders and Clinton, and lead to a another democratic party schism, I hope that it’s instead causing a schism among people who thinks masks/vaccines/shutdowns were worse than millions dying from Covid. My guess is that the MAGA idiots cannibalizing their own Speaker of the House may also have tarnished the Trump brand a bit. Agree with others that polls are just, like, someone’s opinion, man.
Well, this is literally how all statistics function, not just electoral polling. So if you’re going to dismiss electoral polling out of hand, there are many other things you’ll have to mistrust. But again - one poll, yes, you can’t conclude much. Many polls asking similar questions? Now I’m listening. Are they showing similar trends or all over the map? The former - okay, maybe there is some herding going on but not easy to detect.
Probably some aren’t. Pollsters try to account for that by looking at how people actually vote relative to the polling.
There is some evidence this occurs, but also evidence that it doesn’t, which suggests that it’s probably situation specific or not a massive population-wide effect that everyone is subject too.
One problem with the posting is that the margin of error isn’t reported. But that isn’t the pollster’s fault.
The polls in 2016 were mostly fine. Taken on aggregate, they suggested that a Trump win was well within the realm of possibility when considering the electoral college, but all the media talked about was the top line number that showed Clinton up by about 3% on average. Her victory in the popular vote wound up being a bit smaller, but within the margin of error predicted by the polls.
I agree that this one single poll a year before an election doesn’t tell anyone much, but people are very much interested in how RFK’s entering the race will affect Biden and Trump’s chances. It gives their respective campaigns something to think about. For everyone’s sake, I hope Biden doesn’t take the wrong message from it.
That is why reporting the MOE is so important. 4% is a lot - it suggests that Biden’s actually lead on Trump could be as small as 3%, which implies that RFK could be bleeding support from both candidates equally.
It’s time to go on 4chan and say that Q was mistaken. It wasn’t JFK Jr. that was going to make a “comeback”, it’s RFK Jr. and that Q supporters need to support him…
Even if accurate, this poll only shows how the candidates would stack up against each other for the popular vote.
As anyone who has been paying attention already knows, the popular vote doesn’t determine who wins the election. No Republican has entered the White House with a majority of the popular vote since the 1980s.
My guess is that if the pro-FormerGuy voters end up having to deal with the unavailability (jail or other reasons) of their leader, they are still going all-in for whichever pro-hate, pro-delusion candidate is on deck to represent their “interests” [which I truly do not wish to know more of, especially those involved with proliferating violent hate groups in the U.S.]. So they are hedging their bets.
Or maybe pro-RFKjr really are attracted to the concept of “a Kennedy” in the White House for reasons best known to them. How many are people who were even alive during the last Kennedy administration? Man, I wish I could see the stats on that.
The super weird Venn overlap of yoga moms and hippie woo types in Austin ETA: with QAnon is well-documented by now…
… and in the past, I have been taken by surprise by things some yoga people have said to me. These days, not so much. The bigger problem is that this phenom has spread (I admit this is a hyperlocal example of my own lived experience), in a place as blue as Austin. Which is pretty blue.
I donated $25 to Katie Porter for her Senate race and now every Democrat in every state in a tight race is sending me emails begging for money. I really hate that they can sell their lists like this.
Even more than that, we already know this election will really come down to just 5 swing states - Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia…and even there, just a few key districts within these states will determine the outcome.
I doubt it’s just Austin, but FWIW one of the founders of Whole Foods fits in that Venn overlap, and I’m (sadly) aware of hippy-ish Austinites further to the right (like Q-involvement) than that. And it’s where Alex Jones is (was?) based. The longer I’ve lived elsewhere, the less I miss it - which is not something that I thought I’d ever express (but I also didn’t say that I don’t miss it at all).
I think all polling in the current environment is biased - in particular towards older respondents and the credulous. In other words, T**** voters. Though now that latter group includes RFCrayCray voters, too.
Pollsters reach people with a lot of time on their hands (aka, not workers) and people who haven’t clued in that calls/texts/emails from unverified sources represent security risks. They miss people who have busy lives and who are wary of fraudsters.
Except we’re dealing with human’s opinions, and we’re relying on them to accurately self report those. Surveying how someone pronounces GIF is not the same thing as surveying how someone is going to vote for President.
And how do they know how people actually voted? By surveying them again. This doesn’t fix the problem.
So…maybe it’s a problem and maybe it isn’t? That sounds like a problem.
It was, which you did later acknowledge.
Meh, this is largely Nate Silver’s attempts to actually say he wasn’t wrong and that the polls weren’t wrong. Almost every poll had Clinton winning by a wide enough margin that everyone was pretty confident she would win. Were they saying she would definitely win? No, of course not, they never say that. But they were confident. Silver was confident. They were all over confident, and afterwards they were scrambling to say they weren’t really wrong…when they clearly got it wrong.
I think polling this far away from an election is inherently suspect and gets way too much attention from the media. Issue polling I might find more useful.
Not really. All statistics depend on sampling accuracy. If your samples are biased in an unpredictable way, statistics cannot fix it.
If I’m measuring soil samples downstream from a paper mill and all my samples come out acidic, that doesn’t mean the soil in the area is acidic. It means the soil downstream from a paper plant is acidic. Same thing with these polls. Garbage sampling yields garbage polling.
They have the actual counts of ballots? If people aren’t telling the truth or their is some systematic bias in polling, then that is partially observable by comparing actual results to polling results. The other reason to believe there isn’t widespread lying to pollsters is that the error sometimes skews Republican, sometimes Democratic. The alternative would be that people are lying equally on both sides, and that would end up being a wash in the poll results.
There’s a good discussion about it by former BoingBoing editor Maggie Koerth here. All I would add is that the benefit of polling outweighs any perceived effect that it’s driving people to vote a certain way. One good point the article makes is that it puts the brakes on media narratives about which candidates are doing well and which aren’t.
I was talking about the boingboing posting by Carla Sinclair, which didn’t give the MOE.
Wouldn’t this also be subject to all of the same issues (sample size, sample bias, lying) that you cite?
This is an issue with people’s expectations of pollsters (and poll aggregators like Silver). They’re expected to “pick a winner”, say whether they were “confident” or not. The public demands a binary outcome, that people be right or wrong and there is no room for uncertainty. Silver basically said " I’m 67% confident that Clinton will win" and the media took that to be “Nate Silver predicts that Clinton will win.” People can say what they will about his methods, but he gave Trump a much better shot than most.
Confident is also a loose word. If there was a 2 in 3 chance that I’d win 5 bucks tomorrow, I’d be pretty confident that I’m getting 5 bucks tomorrow. If there was a 1 in 3 chance I’d get hit by a car tomorrow, I wouldn’t feel that confident about my survival chances. “Confidence” is context dependent, and is related to the consequences of a particular outcome.
That polling is never going to be perfect isn’t a reason to dismiss it out of hand. The people who do the polling need to be transparent about their methods and assumptions. Everyone could wait until closer to an election to start polling, but when is the right time to start then? When Trump gets up and cites some crap internal poll to say he has a yuge lead, where does the reality check come from?
They usually are. The media almost never reports on methods and assumptions, though, and people rarely follow links back to the actual survey data to find that stuff.
Of course, but I think people are less likely to lie about what issues are important to them than they are about which candidate they’re going to vote for. With issues questions, the bigger problem is the phrasing of the question, which also rarely gets reported. I just got a survey in the mail from the House Speaker’s office (with McCarthy’s name still attached to it, oddly) and the bias in the phrasing of the questions was laughably obvious. They might as well have asked “Do you agree that Joe Biden is the antichrist?”
I think political polling is broken. I think it’s used at least as much for propaganda as it is for objective, predictive reporting. And I think voters would be better served if the media would pay less attention to them this far in advance of an election. I think at the very least, every outlet that publishes the results of a poll, even if they didn’t conduct the poll, should make it clear what the sample size and margin of error is. Not as a footnote, but right up front. And they should also show the exact question asked. “Who would you vote for if the election were held today?” is a very different question from “Who would you like to be President?” or “Who do you think is going to win?”
On that I agree 100%. People should also be educated on how to interpret the polls, what their flaws and limitations are - it’s good to be skeptical of them.
