Posted on 08/09/2016 8:44:42 AM PDT by baxtelf
We’ve reached that stage of the campaign. The back-to-school commercials are on the air, and the “unskewing” of polls has begun — the quadrennial exercise in which partisans simply adjust the polls to get results more to their liking, usually with a thin sheen of math-y words to make it all sound like rigorous analysis instead of magical thinking.
(Excerpt) Read more at fivethirtyeight.com ...
He’s pretty honest about the problems with state-level polling in primaries and about the non-polling based weightings that he got wrong in the primaries. That doesn’t undermine his getting all 50 states right last time, and even getting the percentages very close in each state
Okay, any Kentuckians ready to explain yourselves?
I agree. I’ve lived through enough campaigns here at FR and heard “skewed polls”...”bumper stickers”...”yard signs”...”overflow rallies”...and guess what...We’ve had two elections where we got BHO. I fell for the “polls are skewed” in 2008 and 2012. Not going to fall for that again.
Some pollsters are biased. Sure. Fine. Some even fudge their numbers. But you honestly think ALL the pollsters are biased? And in the same direction? That's self-delusion.
Nate looks more black and white than silver...
It was nearly 50/50 with slight lean towards stay the day before. Thats a bit different than the 10 point average now...
In my opinion, what is scaring the establishment so much (and pollsters as well) is that in virtually every primary, Trump out-performed his poll numbers, usually to the tune of 2-5%. That vote cannot be captured in any poll, and it is enough to flip an election. It remains to be seen whether this silent voting bloc, who will not tell a pollster they are voting for Trump but who will, in fact, vote for Trump, is big enough to carry Trump.
Pollsters now know why they were wrong about Brexit
http://www.businessinsider.com/pollsters-know-why-they-were-wrong-about-brexit-2016-7
We’re going to summarise Wells’ analysis here but it’s well worth reading the whole thing for the nitty-gritty stuff. Basically, Wells says, the pollsters got six things wrong:
• Phone polls don’t work anymore, and even online polls are inaccurate. The telephone polls came out low for Leave, but even the online polls, which were more accurate, understated the Leave vote. Both types of polls predicted a Remain majority but the online polls were less wrong than the phone polls. This was crucial because the experts assumed the accurate prediction was somewhere between the phone and online results. In reality, the Leave vote was above the online prediction.
• Polls undercount voters who are hard to reach. Most polls are done over three days of research in which pollsters try to reach a sample of voters. Wells suggests that period needs to stretch to six days so that hard-to-reach voters are included.
• Graduates are over-represented in polls. Under-educated people are undercounted in polls. “There need to be enough poorly qualified people in younger age groups, not just among older generations where it is commonplace,” Wells says.
• Polls fail to add “attitudinal weights.” Some voters say they don’t know how they will vote but their votes can be predicted if you know more about their attitude to connected issues. In the Brexit poll, pollsters tried to weight their results with info about voters’ views on race and immigration. But even that weighting was flawed.
• Turnout models are wrong. Pollsters failed to realise that turnout was key. Their turnout models of who would actually vote were all wrong. “In almost every case the adjustments for turnout made the polls less accurate, moving the final figures towards Remain,” Wells says.
• Models for reallocation of “don’t knows” are wrong. You can’t vote “don’t know “ in an election, so those responses need to be reallocated to one of the voting options. “In every case these adjustments helped remain, and in every case this made things less accurate,” Wells says.
who is absorbing the cost of these polls at this stage of the game?
Sometimes the polls are wrong. Usually, however, they're right. Brexit was unusually hard to poll because nobody's ever had an election like it, so it was hard to model who was or was not a likely voter.
If I remember correctly Nate Silver was 100% sure Trump would not win the GOP nomination.
The aggregate polling average still has Trump up by .6%. Not losing by 10 pts.
It’s not D +12% or D+ 9% that the dumbass pollsters have their turnout models.
Gallup’s latest shows party self-ID as Even.
R 28%
D 28%
I 42%
And if Romney kept the pressure up on Obama and didn’t fold like car window shade screen when Obama/Candy Crowley teamed up on him.
The problem is that the dopes in 2012 ran the silly unskewed website when in fact the polls were skewed... in Romney’s favor. They were predicting a R +1-2 turnout. Instead it was a D +6.
So now it’s a case of the Republicans who cried wolf.
But the samples this time really are bogus. The polls are averaging D +10 when Obama’s historic 2008 win had D +7 (Obama won by 7) turnout and 2012 was D +6 (Obama won by 4).
There is no way Hillary has near the excitement of Obama. Just look at her and her rallies. Now compare Trump to McCain or Romney.
If the turnout is under D +3 or less, Trump wins. If it’s D +4 or better, Hillary wins.
first tell the August 2012 polls not Nov 2012 polsx when everyone cleans up there act .
these are called Dem party psychos push polls !
lets talk more recent history 2014
the left wing media push polls dead wrong and
wildy off .
its August not November
A large but decreasing portion is paid for by media outlets (ranging from FoxNews and the Wall Street Journal to the WashPost), sometimes it's universities and think tanks, and some of it is paid for by polling firms looking to get free PR. Their hope is that the PR will translate into paying clients for in-house political and corporate work. That last category I think is growing - and it's definitely not in their interest to get a reputation for doing bad polls.
I don’t care what they say, a poll that oversamples Dems by 15 points is not reality.
Well, that's horse-crap. They make their living generating revenue from the source that wants to see the results. This site completely ignores the primary turnouts showing Democrats shrinking and Republicans gaining. It also attempts to suggest that Hillary will get a 2012 turnout like Obama. The pollsters are happy to call more Democrats than Republicans and they are happy to just call registered voters and adults, because this leaves out the highly motivated Trump voter.
The problem with any poll is determining turnout. If you know the makeup the electorate, you can predict the outcome of an election pretty clearly.
The question for this election is whether Cankles will be able to reassemble the Obama coalition, which counted on a very high number of African Americans and Hispanics. I just do not think that minority voters are going to go out in as large of numbers as before.
All polls are weighted based on what they expect the electorate to look like. So most polls are expecting a Democratic leaning electorate (based on 2008 and 2012), somewhere between 4 and 8 percent D advantage. But what if the electorate is roughly even on election day? Then all of the polls are completely off base.
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