Originally published at: Poll: Rudy Giuliani widely despised | Boing Boing
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Bill Cosby must be a pretty close second.
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“Reporting about polls commissioned by news media so it has polls to report”
If one needed any evidence that media is utterly dependent on polling to report on polling (rather than say… the news), note how once you get “the experts” hauled in to explain the latest strange (national opinion) polls the one thing they almost never point out is that the poll itself could be notably inaccurate. “It’s still early in campaign season! The voters are unsettled! The undecideds are …undecided!” Oh for once to hear something like: “Perhaps the methods of attaining a ‘random sample’ are fundamentally flawed?” -sigh-
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going all the way back to the days when the “crusading prosecutor” “went undercover” will al d’amato to “make a bust”, rudy has always been a sleazy, conniving, grandstanding, self promoting scumbag. i don’t need to see any polls.
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A well constructed poll doesn’t sample randomly, it attempts to take a representative cross-section of the relevant population. For instance in the USA you’d probably try to get 38% Democrats and 42% Republican registered voters or whatever reflects the overall population.
Of course lots of polls don’t do that, especially in the Internet age when it’s so easy to slap a load of questions online.
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There has to be random sampling built in or else a poll will not be “representative cross-section” of the populace (like “the voters”) thereby sampled. If they pre-divide into those stating “republican” or “democrat” they still must properly randomly sample within those subsets or it’ll skew the results. For instance, they will quote (in very small font) the Margin of Error or “MOE”, by computing 1/sqrt(number_sampled); often collecting survey results until over one thousand is attained so they can report an industry standard of ~3.0% MOE. But that very calculation requires that the sample be ‘properly random’, and it isn’t. They can’t reach a substantial portion of the studied populace because only a very skewed group answers an unknown out-of-state number and takes a (often long) survey, (and, strongly trend older, for obvious reasons). Web polling is even worse as you have to visit the web-page which already pre-selects the sample. Web polling causes a ‘modern’ version of the infamous “Dewey Defeats Truman” polling error.
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Doesn’t the margin of error also depend on the value, not just the count?
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“the value”? [shrug]. alas, in the formulation used by the polling industry the very bad assumption is that the sampling is random and they just use the count of those surveyed. Often burying the fact that they had to call let’s say 25,000 (automated) phone numbers before attaining their 1000. 1/sqrt(1000) → 3.16% MOE. And just think if a science researcher were allowed to throw out, or ignore, tens of thousands of trials prior to getting their sample of a thousand and calling that a representative sample of the whole population.
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I lived in NYC when he was Mayor. I don’t think anyone who was there at the time is exactly surprised by any of this.
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I would presume that Rudy’s fall is tied to his various shenanigans as Trump’s lackey. What I cannot fathom is why all these people associated with Trump are increasingly reviled, but Trump himself remains preternaturally liked by almost half the nation. WTF, fellow humans?
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His numbers will go up again on prison.net.
Thanks, Rob, and nice work on the links in the second paragraph – I needed those reminders.
–p
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As far as Trump cultists are concerned these are the incompetent fools who let their dear leader down. Giuliani claimed to have proof that Trump won in 2020, but lost every court case badly and publicly humiliated himself in a thousand novel ways. Ergo, Giuliani is partially responsible for Trump’s loss.
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That makes sense, and yet it also shows just how delusional his followers are. Everyone Trump touches gets destroyed eventually. One wonders why anyone is willing to get close to him at this point; he’s like a radioactive isotope – powerful yet lethal.
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