Posted on 10/03/2016 8:29:22 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
“Rip” Smith, played by Jimmy Stewart, solved the problem of getting respondents to take part in a telephone poll in the 1947 film Magic Town. He found the perfectly representative Midwestern city and simply asked a few folks around town how they felt about the day’s burning issues.
Stewart’s character, just back from the war, had his work cut out for him. He wanted to break into the then new science of public opinion polling. But he was broke and his competition, George Stringer, was well established. Then he discovered Grandview, which was perfectly representative of the county as a whole. Of course all that fell apart when citizens found out what he was up to and became self-absorbed with their own importance.
Well, in the intervening 67 years drawing a random sample with an acceptable confidence interval in three days’ time has become not just worse, but nearly intractable. This is even worse when the election is “scary” in the sense that some of the candidates, such as Donald Trump, are not bred in the traditional mainstream of the political system.
Here is what the pollster faces in drawing a good sample. The first part of the task is largely technical.
First, calls to non-human telephone exchanges such as computer modems, fax machines and other IT applications, have to be culled out. While most polls don’t report a number for that process, only one or two calls out of 10 may connect to a real human in a big city like New York City....
(Excerpt) Read more at mediafiledc.com ...
Eventually the criminals who run the democrat party will buy off or bully pollsters - but until then they’re one of freedom’s safeguards. They assist with stopping democrat voter fraud...
The gist of the article is that polls are not accurate because far more people today are not willing to take a poll.
That’s why they were so far off in the Brexit poll and that’s why Trump is about to win in a landslide.
Caller ID has pretty much put the polling industry out of business.
Looks like we might have an advantage if lots of Trump supporters or leaning Trump voters simply aren’t responding to polls.
On the other hand, the polls probably aren’t sampling enough poor, latino, black, etc. which will go for Hillary.
Those hesitant or latent Trump voters are what is killing him—and they are the direct result of his gaffes, tirades, and perceived temperment against women, latinos, etc.
I think he could have been up substantially in the polls if he wasn’t tweeting at 3 am.
Hmmmmm...could it. The jig: could it be that they are polling answering machines? Since many people like myself do not answer the out of area or unknown calls I usually let my answering machine pickup. Could it be that these lying pollster weasels are at their leisure marking those calls as a vote for Hillary? Nothing is out of the question for them they lie they cheat they kill whatever it takes to win ! We should be weary..all polls should be suspect!
But, but, but FOX Snooze is reporting the election is over and Hillary won by 4 pts. How can they be wrong??
Pray America wakes
People who don’t like to respond to pollsters are probably those who have determined that the establishment has closed its ear to their voices.
That was a interesting article till the author gives into the MSM directive that most Trump Supporters are White with no college degrees. At that point the article went off the cliff, although a number of the problems pointed out are valid.
Wrote this a few weeks back, but can do with a repost (and some minor stealth edits):
.......
It has been discussed for years what the reduction in response rate has on the reliability of polls. PEW research published an article in 2012 showing that their response rate (actually making an interview) was now down to 9% (nine percent). I have seen another article indicating 8% response rate in 2014.
This is a problem for the pollsters since it makes it more expensive for the pollsters to sample a large enough group. But there is another problem: What if there is a difference between those who reply to the poll and those that don’t? That could induce a large, an overwhelming bias in a poll.
Some research has gone in to answer that question, and in data published in WaPo comparing accuracy and response rates in polls between 1999 - 2014 it did not appear that the accuracy had declined, despite the fact that the response rate had gone from just below 35% to below 10%.
However, for the polling companies this is like skating on thin ice. Just because it worked yesterday, and an hour ago, it may not work now!
In some previous threads I noted that if there is such a low response rate then a single percent difference in response rate between groups voting for different candidates will cause a large difference in the polling result even though there may be an underlying 50/50 split in the preference for the candidates.
For example if there is a real 50/50 split between candidate A and B, but the response rate of the voters who support candidate A is 7.5% and the response rate of supporters of candidate B is 8.5% then a totally unbiased, properly carried out poll (but not able to weigh for the response rates) will show 53% for B and 47% for A.
In the old days when the response rates were well above 80% then you needed much larger differences in response rates between candidates to skew your poll. Such large differences may have been picked up elsewhere.
So to this election: It is quite obvious that the media bias has been worse than ever before. One has to go back to the election 1980 to find anything close - and that was not an election which the pollsters remember with fondness.
Now, is it very unlikely that people who are thinking of voting for a candidate that is vilified almost universally are more (and remember we are talking of a difference of a few percent only) reluctant to answer a poll?
I think the answer to that question is pretty obvious, and therefore I am much less interested in polls this election than previous ones.
So basically the polls show Hillary ahead and her followers are so sure in voting for her they don’t bother showing up to her rallies.
Most polls have a built in bias depending upon who is paying them and their ideological bent of the firm.
Just changing a couple of words in a question can change the responses. I worked first hand with university pollsters who did nothing but research on how to elicit responses by simple word changes and tone of the questioner. The subtle voice inflictions by the person asking the question can means as much as a six point difference in poll responses.
I have repeatedly declined to take polls.
Home sick ... so I have been surfing the news and financial channels.
Foxnews, Bloomberg TV all seem to sat that DT had an awful last week. I am a little worried that they know something that we don’t .... and we are set up for another Romney type disaster.
Why?
Because democrat white liberal elites are propped up by massive numbers of black and brown underclass high school dropouts...Hillary's 'base' is the quintessential banana republic: small number of elites at the top - massive number of poor lower class types (bought off) keeping them in power.
I think that is very true, as well as the MSM not dealing with the reality of a Trump victory.
Not so fast.
Dr. Newhagen points out low income voters may be underrepresented in polls.
Low response rate is worrisome in that if Hillary voters do come home, it could save the day for her.
Same phenomenon is in play in undercounting Trump voters.
You don’t know for sure if you can trust the numbers.
How people will actually vote is more guesswork than established science.
As we saw in CA, turnout at rallies is NOT a predictor who will actually vote.
Bernie Sanders had these huge rallies just like Trump is having huge rallies today but in the end Hillary’s voters did turn out for her.
We can’t make the assumption they won’t. They may not feel enthusiastic about seeing her but they will come out all the same and vote for her.
If that’s the case, polls that show a Trump win could be way off.
More so, call blocking, no home phone number and the fact that people will not respond to sales of survey calls on a cell phone.
Yup.
If that’s true, Hillary’s lead may be understated by some polls in which she’s ahead.
Every one is just guessing because no one knows what electorate will actually show up in November.
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