What polls don’t understand is ME and the thousands maybe millions of us who don’t answer calls from people we don’t know. You know, because they are all scammers and pollsters.
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Fair point. I may be blaming the weather forecast for bad weather. The current point of suggesting Democrats publish biased polls is not a good solution. He should instead be scrapping polls he believes are heavily biased, not just lowering their importance.
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The fact that he thinks that partisan poll shops treat ‘reputational risk’ as a cost seems like sterling evidence of either being naïve enough for ‘sweet summer child’ status; or of having his head rammed good and hard into the sand about the character and motives of the people involved.
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I’d be inclined to put that point somewhere past the cessation of voter suppression and gerrymandering as persistent fascinations. I wouldn’t necessarily be surprised if some of those involved overestimate the precision of their efforts; but it seems risky to dismiss the possibility of political prediction out of hand in the presence of such a strong revealed belief in its possibility and efficacy.
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Sure Nate. Sure. Also, and this is true, Democrats could totally get results like the GOP does if they were just willing to try and overthrow Democracy, too.
Be like the GOP! /s
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If “we” means the media, then that will happen right around when the Earth is a scorched cinder engulfed by the dying Sun.
The whole point of election coverage is that it grabs your attention in the same way as a bouncing roulette ball. If polls or pundits could tell you how an election was going to go – and sometimes they can – then the media would turn to dodgy polls and absurd punditry that cast the result right back into doubt, because no one cares about a race unless it’s a nailbiter. I mean, fivethirtyeight’s day job is literally as a sports betting website.
That’s why every election ends up close to 50-50, no matter how extreme one party gets. It’s also why we hear “both sides” of even the most demented right-wing conversations.
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In 2017 I watched a presentation from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, where the speaker said: “Our polling and survey methods are beautifully optimized for a world that no longer exists.”
I don’t believe the problem has been meaningfully fixed anywhere, and statisticians are all desperate to work out a path forward.
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One of my nephews pointed out that there’s simply no way they can poll the Millennials or GenZs reliably. There’s just no way to reach them that is statistically reliable. That’s a problem for the pollsters. Good. Most of my life (boomer here) I’ve been subjected to media shit that tells me how the election is going to come out before it ever happens, and I hate it.
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Silver’s never really recovered from the “crisis of expertise” he had described, earlier. People don’t trust the experts but he never really made much progress in describing exactly what could be done to improve it.
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Let’s see. Nobody under the age of 40 picks up phone calls from random numbers, combined with how the left felt about polls after the clusterfuck called the 2016 election and the fact that the right has been trying to win elections like this⬇️ since
And they’re still trying to move the goalposts after what happened last night
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I deliberately ignore poll numbers because I believe that very few people participate honestly in them. I
certainly don’t myself, and I don’t expect others do, either. So I consider all polling to be wildly inaccurate.
I’m particularly appalled by businesses that want you to take a survey and then beg you rate them a “10”. I understand that they’re gaming the system for maximum reward, or job keeping, or budget cut avoiding, but that’s their corporate problem. I severely dislike being asked to participate as a pawn in their game.
Too bad for you if you’re in business that depends on polls, but I really don’t care. Count my ballot on election day, the only poll where I watch the results.
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Nate needs to roll up the carpet and go home.
Maybe try real estate or used cars.
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Democrats know that a lot of their voters are lazy assholes who won’t bother to vote if they think the D will win handily. (See: 2016). D pollsters have no incentive to tell those people they don’t have to bother.
On the other hand R voters seem to need a feeling of being winners, so they seem to only come out if they think their candidate/party is winning. So the Rs have lots of reasons to juice the numbers.
Also, if your ‘polls’ are wrong you can always claim it was fraud or GLBT people or something, so there’s that.
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Possible, but my parents just got rid of their land line because only scammers would call it. Mostly robocalls, but some attempts to trick them into saying “yes”. I think a lot of older people are following suit. The land line has become toxic.
So they unplugged it. But my parents are also iPhone users, which also helps because we talk on FaceTime all the time. Makes intercontinental calls so, so much easier.
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I am not the biggest fan of surveys and polls because the people who report polls do not provide context for how the questions in the poll were written, delivered, and ordered.
“Assuming that Joe Biden crushes (edited from bunches) Welsh Corgi puppies for a chuckle, do you approve of his work so far?”
1 Approved
2 Disapprove
3 Strongly disapprove
4 Very strongly disapprove
5 Overwhelmingly strongly disapprove
When I get calls from political survey pollsters, I generally lie through my teeth if I answer at all.
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Who would’ve known that applying tried and true statistical analysis to a bunch of flawed data sets would result in…garbage?
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I’ve seen some of the more honest statisticians just come out and admit that polls in general are a lot less accurate than they were 10 or 15 years ago because people don’t respond to traditional phone polls the way they used to. No shame in saying “the game has changed and we haven’t figured out how to keep up.” But blaming Democrats for their polling practices is all kinds of dumb.
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Well, but Nate Silver is a rational man 
and therefore isn’t being emotional, and so he must be correct, unlike those emotional Democrats worried about oppression and democracy! /s
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Interpretations will differ, but after reading the tweets in question it’s not clear to me that he’s “blaming” the Democratic pollsters for anything. My read on what he said is that the Democratic pollsters are less willing than their GOP counterparts to suffer the reputational risk of releasing biased polls, but I’m not sure he’s making any value judgments about that decision. He’s also claiming that the 538 averages can account for that “house effect.”
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