Free Republic

Senate poll averages across eight battleground states overstated Republican support heading into the 2022 midterm elections, an examination of projected outcomes and polling shows. Democrats on average performed about three points better than pre-election RealClearPolitics polling averages, the Wall Street Journal reported. Republicans may have assumed that pollsters, just like the establishment media, were biased against Republicans and would therefore understate GOP support like pollsters have in the past.

US and Chinese scientists were planning to create a new coronavirus before the pandemic erupted, leaked proposals show. Last month, a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) revealed that an international team of scientists had planned to mix genetic data of similar strains to create a new virus. The grant application was made in 2018 and leaked to Drastic, the pandemic origins analysis group. 'We will compile sequence/RNAseq data from a panel of closely related strains and compare full length genomes, scanning for unique SNPs representing sequencing errors. 'Consensus candidate genomes will be synthesised...

Final polling averages underestimated the lead then-candidate Donald Trump held in a number of crucial swing states, including Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina, in 2016. With early voting underway, critics are beginning to rethink their reliance on polls. “Can We Trust Pennsylvania’s Polls?” reads the title of a New York Times article highlighting the “Trumpmania” among residents in the state. On Thursday, CBS News published an article titled, “What went wrong with polls in 2016? Can we trust them now?” Vox recently posed a similar question: “Biden has a big lead in the polls, but can we trust them?”

After the rocky week that Trump was having with the entire Khan family controversy it seems that of the 6 polls conducted this week by LongRoom, USC-Daybreak, YouGov, CBS, CNN, and Morning Consult Trump holds a lead in 4 of them.

Everybody knows what the word "average" means and that it is the most widely used simple statistic. But it can be highly misleading. That occurred to me in two recent news reports. One article a week ago detailed how households would be affected if we returned to the tax rates in effect from 1994 to 2001, including an elaborate tabulation of the average annual increase for taxpayers by state. The second article dealt with average life expectancies relating to the solvency of Social Security and Medicare. In the first article, the tax increases detailed ranged from an average of about...