Today: "wow, the polls were pretty far off, maybe we should have taken them with a grain of salt." Next Tuesday: "Here's Nate Entrails with a deep dive analysis of the latest tracking numbers from the NBS-Squippippinac Approve-O-Meter"
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Political pollster are loath to report how many calls they have to make to harvest one usable poll response, but from what I've discerned it's somewhere between 7-15, which naturally leads one to question how weird are these widgets who volunteered to be tested.
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This wasn't much of a issue in 1968 or 1976, when people universally had a big avocado landline phone in their kitchen, and would always answer even if they had no idea who was calling.
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I mean, pollsters are kind of aware of these issues and know that their raw sample results are demographically skewed. For instance, the sample may be 3% Hispanic males 18-45, where the census says they are 5% of the population; the answer is to shrug and weigh them up by 5/3.
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It's one thing to reweigh your sample so it's roughly demographically similar to the underlying population. It's another thing to reweigh your sample to be representative of the vast majority of people who *don't want to be sampled*.
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Please note I am not ascribing any nefarious motives or biases to pollsters. Even if they were all 100% committed to accuracy, there's no easy way around this issue.
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I will say that reporting a "margin of error" as if the 10-15% of chatty weirdos who wanted to talk to you are representative of the general public is, well, mathematical malpractice.
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It's not that the political polls are *wrong* per se, it's that they no longer contain any useful information at all.
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I'm sure there will be a few polls now touted as "nailing" the election; keep in mind if you assembled election predictions from 100 astrologers and phrenologists and circus seals, you'd also probably get a few amazingly accurate guesses too.
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In short, until there is some way for the political polling biz to prove it has solve its inherent here's-what-the-weirdos-say problem, the only place polls should be reported is on Page 15D, between the Daily Horoscope and Garfield.
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Just to be safe though: if you accidentally answer a call from a political pollster, remember it is your sacred duty as an American citizen to lie your ass off.
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End of conversation
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