Hard Look at Political Polls

I have carefully read all the “We learned from 2016 and now we have fixed it” articles from the pollsters and polling “experts”.

Bottom line—they have not “fixed” anything!

Many Trump voters consider pollsters lefty hacks who would be only too happy to leak their name to other lefty doxxers, rioters and looters.

The polls still can’t accurately predict turnout.

The polls are unable to identify the “Obama/Trump voters” who were so critical in the 2016 election, since there is _no_ way respondents are going to give out that information.

The polls are run by leftists who intentionally over-sample Democrats in many cases.

The pollsters like to use polls to brainwash the public into believing the Democratic candidate is winning, to demoralize the Republican side.

The gaslighting is endless—it is “election meddling”, not from Moscow, but right here in the good ‘ol USA.

In 2016 on Memorial Day, I was with some of my sisters and their families, BILs, nieces, nephews college age, impressionable, we were cruising on my BILs 50’ Pursuit. Nice day. Anchored, we were chatting.

“My sister Donald Trump!? When he says, ‘Make America great again’ he means, ‘Make America white again’.

No one argued. There was no discussion. She was reflecting her pretense that she is informed because of having CNN on in every room in her suburban Connecticut house, in the place of any religious symbol, she is not only informed, but she knows more than anyone who would dare to attempt a correction or a challenge. It would get foot stomp. It would get emotional. A scene for nothing. She would not change her mind. Marooned on her yacht in Sand City Cove. She had guilt to atone for. All of us do. The liberal white women will be the leaders of this morality taking the place of religion.

That’s one faction of this insanity.

I sipped on my drink and I shut my mouth. Any truth would be met with threat of a tantrum as opposed to thought provoking discussion, a different point of view.

I have never said a word to anyone. The ignorant, misinformed hatred is obvious. I don’t stoke that.

I was asked, one time only, by an in-law, a wacko liberal, an old friend, actually, ‘wait, you like Trump? We used to make fun of him in the eighties in NY.’

He asked inquisitively. So I did answer him, saying, “I have no problem with Trump being president.”

It shut him up. He knows I’m informed. But he is unusual. Most liberals pretend I am misinformed. They project.

I say nothing to anyone. That summer 2016, my bullying sister’s attitude let me know there would be a d ss I lent support of Trump. He would win and the bullies would be surprised. Their bullying would not change minds. They would simply shut people up

This year is the same with additional cheating as a factor. Tge tantrums are the same. Obviously they’re more demonstrated. The anger is being used by the powerful bullies. No surprise.

Suppose a pollster is told he needs to sample 1000 people for his results to be “statistically significant”. He makes 1000 calls, but 400 of them don’t yield responses. He just continues until he has his 1000. But perhaps he has had to call 1600 or more in total to get 1000 responses. The fact is, those other 600 are samples, for which his response should be included as “UNKNOWN”.

You remind me of a concern I had four years ago, when there were rumors around that some of the polls to get 1000 responses, were having to make over 4000 calls. People assured me then that I was wrong, but I still have concerns that the response rate is so low that separate polls are not consistently getting different respondents. Thus groups like Real Clear Politics that average the polls together to help reduce random error are actually increasing systemic error. It is widely believed that polling firms try to periodically remove non-responding numbers from their call lists, and are the non-respondent statistically the same as those that do answer their questions?

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