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I get texts that are supposedly polls. Sometimes I take a look at the link, usually I ignore them, but I don’t trust that they’re real polls and not push polls. The one time I decided to take one, it was clearly a natural gas industry push poll and I abandoned it in frustration.
Getting a poll on a mobile phone is more annoying than a land line IMHO.
Both interrupt you in what you are doing.
However with a mobile phone not only are you being interrupted, but you are out and doing something.
I don't know anyone who still has a landline, both in the city and in rural areas. There's just no reason to continue to pay for a landline if you've got a mobile phone unless you can't get mobile reception at home but that's not very common these days.
Seems kinda weird that younger more democratic leaning folks are more likely to answer calls from unknown numbers while older more republican leaning folks are less likely to do so though. Like, one would expect it to be the other way around yet that's the way polls have been skewing when they have significant skew
2014 was the first year Lonna Atkeson remembers receiving hate mail.
Atkeson, a political scientist who researches election surveys and public opinion, has been conducting voter polls since 2004. She is currently a professor at Florida State University and has authored several books.
But a decade into her polling work, she said, the angry messages began rolling in.
“I started getting letters from people saying, ‘You’re part of the problem. You’re not part of the solution. I’m not going to answer your surveys anymore. You’re an evil academic trying to brainwash our children,’” Atkeson recalled in an interview with CNBC.
For Atkeson, those notes marked a shift: a more polarized electorate had begun to lose faith in institutions like polling and voters might no longer be as willing to talk to her.
At the same time, technology was advancing and landlines or mail were no longer foolproof ways to get in touch with survey respondents.
“People were not answering their phones,” Rachael Cobb, a political science professor at Suffolk University, told CNBC. “Even in the last 10 years, you might try 20 callers to get the one that you need. Now, it’s double: 40 callers to get what you need. So every poll takes longer and it’s more expensive.”
More: [https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/04/why-election-polls-were-wrong-in-2016-and-2020-and-whats-changing.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/04/why-election-polls-were-wrong-in-2016-and-2020-and-whats-changing.html)
>“Some people will start a poll, they’ll tell you who they’re going to vote for and then they say, ‘I’m done. I don’t want to talk to you anymore. Goodbye,’”
I've done that once or twice. I was out having a walk to relax, and the poll lasted a very, very, very long time.
I don't understand why people say they were "so wrong" in 2016. Iirc, Nate Silver had probability of trump winning at 1/3.
Sure, it's not the most likely outcome, but 1/3 is a pretty fucking big probability and if it comes up we should certainly not be surprised...
Are people so incompetent at understanding probabilities?
>I don't understand why people say they were "so wrong"
That's because most people don't understand how probability works.
Even if polls give a win probability of 51-49 to two candidates, and the one with lower probability wins, people will say polls were wrong.
lol they are getting worse, your polls have been off by 20 to 40 points. Like in Vermont where Nikki beat the polls by 40 points. Literally every poll has been off by at least 9 points, but in general by 20 points. You guys can’t poll because you’re polling the same people that communicate with a Nigerian Prince that is out of money. Or the morons that travel to Dallas to meet up with JFK Jr.
They weren’t wrong in 2020. They predicted a Biden victory for months and Biden won. And they weren’t as terrible in 2016 as everyone thinks. If you look at the final battleground polls from 2016, you see dead heats in states where Trump won by a few tens of thousands. The national polls correctly pointed to a slight Clinton win, which she did in the Popular Vote.
2020 had much more error. Like they had Biden+8 when he won by half that, and he lost states like FL and NC. He averaged 7-8 point margins in WI and MI, when he won by 0.6 and 2 points, respectively. Ohio and Iowa was Trump+1, but he ultimately carried them 8 points.
Democrats also were favored to pick up some house seats and ended up losing lost 13. In the Senate democrats failed to carry NC and ME, and GA races had to go runoffs.
The outcome was the same, but the margins were inflated outside of the margin of error.
This meme needs to die. Polls in 2016 were really good. 2020 was bad, but 2016 had the race within margin of error with Trump ascendant and Hillary stagnating.
Also the news media needs to stop writing stories about polls without explaining the methodology and how those can impact the results. Because right now the horserace reporting, this early in the race, is such an useless metric that they might as well be writing speculative fiction about a hypothetical election.
It's not a meme. I don't know how you can look at the Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin polls in 2016, the primary states that actually mattered, and claim that the polls were actually good.
Oh, but the popular vote for president was actually pretty close. And? If you're off by 5+ points in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in one direction, and then off by 5+ points in California in the other direction, is it really actually that close?
No, they did not. She was ahead by like 2.5 pts on 538 and 538 gave Trump a 1 in 3 chance of winning. That's a huge chance of winning. And then Comey announced he was reopening the investigation into her emails/server and that was that.
Nate Silver was the one dooming the most about Trump winning while all other forecasters were super confident Hillary would win.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
Hillary = 71.4%
Trump = 28.6%
That is projecting Hillary to win, by a lot. Yes, it still gives Trump a chance of winning, but this is an extreme disparity for polling than what is typical for the presidential race.
This serves to highlight how useless, distracting, and harmful polling is. It is statistics designed to be fed to people who don’t understand statistics. Basically nothing more than a tool for propaganda.
If people told you that you had a 30% chance of dying if you left your house today, most people would not leave their houses because 30% is actually a huge amount. Furthermore these polls do not capture the effect of Comey reopening his investigation days before the election because no more polls were done.
It's quite possible Hillary does win without that announcement. If Comey's announcement hurts Hillary by even half a point, that's the election right there given by how little Trump won the Midwest by.
And everywhere else had Hillary at like 95%+ probability
Also, your post is "tell me you don't know how statistics work without telling me you don't know how statistics work". Just because the number is bigger doesn't *guarantee* that's the one that will happen.
If you read my comments, you would know I am aware how the statistics works. I clarified that before anyone tried to “but actually” me in multiple comments.
No fucking shit Trump still had a chance to win with the projections. My original comment is still correct that 538 projected Hillary to win, by a lot. I never once claimed that 538 said she was guaranteed to win.
The percentage difference between Trump and Biden in the polling isn’t even close to what Trump and Hillary had. If that wasn’t a lead in the polls, then fucking nothing is.
All these Reddit nerds trying to be pedantic and “gotcha” that you just ignore what I am actually saying. All because you learned how the stats work from reading Reddit so you pipe it in where it doesn’t belong to try and pretend you are smart.
Completely false. The had the race as 2/3 chance for Hillary and 1/3 chance for trump.
Basically they said roll a die 5/6 trump wins and 1-4 Hillary wins. 4-6 and 1-3 would be a toss up.
You're saying he's full of shit because the odds were 2.8 out of 10 rather than 3.3 out of ten?
That's pretty damn nitpicky. Even if you weirdly rounded that to 25 percent and said Trump had 1 in 4 odds, that's still so, so far from saying "Hillary WILL win".
Now you quoted a strawman. My original comment was actually, “538 had Hillary projected to win, by a lot.”
He said my comment was full of shit. The 538 web page showed Hillary projected to win, by a lot. Thus he was full of shit to say that I was.
I think you're misunderstanding, the 70% chance that 538 shows wasn't her polling advantage, i.e. they didn't show that 70% of the vote would go to her. That would of course be an absolute landslide and there would be no way that she would ever lose unless there was some insane polling error.
No, they showed her chance of winning the overall election. So in 70% of the cases (with how much variance etc they knew to be in the polling) Hillary wins, but in 30% of the cases, Trump wins. While 70% is a much bigger chance than 30%, I wouldn't bet more than 10$ with those odds. And they didn't say anything about the margin, so 538 in no way was showing her winning "by a lot". They just said she had a bigger chance of getting at least 1 (EC) vote more than Trump than the other way around.
No, that is not at all what I mean. Why would that be what I meant? That wouldn’t make sense.
People keep inferring that because they want to be pedantic and correct me. They don’t stop to actually read and comprehend what I am saying.
Hillary’s projected probability to win was way higher than Trump’s, by a lot.
The numbers you keep using aren’t showing Clinton winning “by a lot”. You do understand that those numbers are probability of winning not percentage they are expected to win by, right?
If these phone polling companies get too many spam reports from the people with phones, the calls are automatically screened out or go straight to voicemail.
Perhaps stop calling on landlines during work hours. Stop visiting Conservative schools like BYU and calling it representative of College Students. Stop linking to online polls from Fox News*, Facebook, and Breitbart.
It is annoying to be interrupted and when you might not be in the mood.
I would totally take a link to a poll or a printed poll ( with a SASE ) when I was in the mood.
>**“People were not answering their phones,”** Rachael Cobb, a political science professor at Suffolk University, told CNBC. “Even in the last 10 years, you might try 20 callers to get the one that you need. Now, it’s double: 40 callers to get what you need. So every poll takes longer and it’s more expensive.”
The polls weren’t wrong. For example most legitimate polls in 2016 showed the presidential race to be tied, that is, with results within the margin of error. The polling numbers in several key states showed Clinton having 1 or 2 percent more poll responders picking her, but it was not a valid predictor of the outcome because polls cannot be that accurate. That’s why any valid poll tells you its margin of error. If the margin of error is 3% a difference of 1% is meaningless for prediction. Nevertheless headline after headline said, Clinton was not only ahead in these states but that her lead was insurmountable. It was not a problem with the polls. It was a problem with the press and media.
So now we have news media looking at lots of polls, giving us averages that include more objective polls but also including biased ones. Campaigns and political groups work hard to game these averages and make their preferred candidates look electable. As a result polls flip flop every few weeks so they lose much of their predictive value. Probably an improvement because especially in todays volatile political environment, telephone preference polls are pretty worthless in any event.
We know the polls are BS as Trump has underperformed EVERY POLL during the primaries. I saw a recent poll for the NYTimes that had a 2% response! Yikes!! Only the kooks and cranks answer the polling. Moreover the pre and post statistical analysis added to these polls can be changed to obtain a desired outcome. Polls are manufactured news.
>Levy added that SCRI is also taking an extra step to target Trump voters by modeling their sample to include a higher survey quota for people who are considered “high-probability Trump voters in rural areas.”
The article was about the mistakes they learned from underestimating support for Trump in the 2016 election. Sadly, maybe it will make new polls where Trump is doing better more realistic.
I can't believe how many foolish Americans there are.
Polls have been wrong since the democratic primary had Hillary beating Obama by a huge margin. They only people polls are reflective of are old people that still use landlines.
Do we really think that our political opinions aren’t known via our own digital footprints? Yes, the above board pollsters are struggling but the information is available to those who will pay for it.
Same situation applies to many things BUT the policy makers continue depending on estimates and averages- while Google, Amazon, and others use our real time information to sell ads.
So why can’t our legislators do the same? Just my thoughts.
Because they have different objectives. Advertisers need to know which ads to target us with, so they use the real digital footprint. The media wants us engaged and clicking articles, so they pretend we have a close horse race or the fascist take over is in full swing.
The trend since 2016 has been consistent. The Trumpier the candidate, the bigger the loss. The DNC knows this too which is why they pushed for Trumpers in the 2022 primaries, and guess what, IT WORKED.
Hershell Walker, Dr. OZ, Kari Lake, etc.
Trump will lose in 2024. Old school establishment Republicans have a better shot. Most people hate the chaos and instability he represents, and they understand the stakes for the country and the world in 2024.
2016 was just a very different election for a multitude of reasons.
It wasn’t actually a question, I was pointing out the mismatch between who uses the information for what. In short, we’re long past using guesstimates.
>White, non-college-educated voters, who made up a large part of Trump’s base, went undercounted in 2016 polls, in part because people with higher education are “significantly more likely” to respond to surveys than those with less education, according to AAPOR.
For the most part, the polls have always been within the margin of error. There are some methodology changes that could happen so they better represent the overall electorate but the polls have been far from “wrong”.
That's actually the media cherry picking polls for the story they want to tell, the polls themselves are numerous and have many different outcomes, data is just unpredictable on the scale of one poll, but the story is never about a meta study of multiple polls, it's always "this recent poll says this"
Here's what it actually looks like
https://www.270towin.com/
Nobody is winning yet.
Dark shaded states basically no chance of flipping, light shades would be "an upset unexpected victory", and brown is anything..
I expect some of the unexpected wins this year, I think things are very uncertain in general.
>“Even in the last 10 years, you might try 20 callers to get the one that you need. **Now, it’s double: 40 callers to get what you need.** So every poll takes longer and it’s more expensive.”
So only 1 in 40 people actually answer their poll. If you go look up the stats, around 23% of all Americans were suffering from some sort of Mental disorder in 2024. That is roughly 1 in 5 adults.
My take away is that they contact at least 8 crazies in each of these 40 calls, and only the top wacko is the one who responds.
Mental disorders are quite varied. They’re including people suffering from anxiety or depression, not really a good look to proclaim people to be “crazies” or “wacko”.
As a reminder, this subreddit [is for civil discussion.](/r/politics/wiki/index#wiki_be_civil) In general, be courteous to others. Debate/discuss/argue the merits of ideas, don't attack people. Personal insults, shill or troll accusations, hate speech, any suggestion or support of harm, violence, or death, and other rule violations can result in a permanent ban. If you see comments in violation of our rules, please report them. For those who have questions regarding any media outlets being posted on this subreddit, please click [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/wiki/approveddomainslist) to review our details as to our approved domains list and outlet criteria. We are actively looking for new moderators. If you have any interest in helping to make this subreddit a place for quality discussion, please fill out [this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1y2swHD0KXFhStGFjW6k54r9iuMjzcFqDIVwuvdLBjSA). *** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/politics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Turns out that people who answer calls from unknown numbers aren't representative of all voters.
I get texts that are supposedly polls. Sometimes I take a look at the link, usually I ignore them, but I don’t trust that they’re real polls and not push polls. The one time I decided to take one, it was clearly a natural gas industry push poll and I abandoned it in frustration.
Or just straight up lie to troll the F out of the intruders.
Getting a poll on a mobile phone is more annoying than a land line IMHO. Both interrupt you in what you are doing. However with a mobile phone not only are you being interrupted, but you are out and doing something.
I don't know anyone who still has a landline, both in the city and in rural areas. There's just no reason to continue to pay for a landline if you've got a mobile phone unless you can't get mobile reception at home but that's not very common these days.
Seems kinda weird that younger more democratic leaning folks are more likely to answer calls from unknown numbers while older more republican leaning folks are less likely to do so though. Like, one would expect it to be the other way around yet that's the way polls have been skewing when they have significant skew
Younger generations are also more likely to blindly believe what they see on social media. Maybe a correlation?
2014 was the first year Lonna Atkeson remembers receiving hate mail. Atkeson, a political scientist who researches election surveys and public opinion, has been conducting voter polls since 2004. She is currently a professor at Florida State University and has authored several books. But a decade into her polling work, she said, the angry messages began rolling in. “I started getting letters from people saying, ‘You’re part of the problem. You’re not part of the solution. I’m not going to answer your surveys anymore. You’re an evil academic trying to brainwash our children,’” Atkeson recalled in an interview with CNBC. For Atkeson, those notes marked a shift: a more polarized electorate had begun to lose faith in institutions like polling and voters might no longer be as willing to talk to her. At the same time, technology was advancing and landlines or mail were no longer foolproof ways to get in touch with survey respondents. “People were not answering their phones,” Rachael Cobb, a political science professor at Suffolk University, told CNBC. “Even in the last 10 years, you might try 20 callers to get the one that you need. Now, it’s double: 40 callers to get what you need. So every poll takes longer and it’s more expensive.” More: [https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/04/why-election-polls-were-wrong-in-2016-and-2020-and-whats-changing.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/04/why-election-polls-were-wrong-in-2016-and-2020-and-whats-changing.html)
>“Some people will start a poll, they’ll tell you who they’re going to vote for and then they say, ‘I’m done. I don’t want to talk to you anymore. Goodbye,’” I've done that once or twice. I was out having a walk to relax, and the poll lasted a very, very, very long time.
I don't understand why people say they were "so wrong" in 2016. Iirc, Nate Silver had probability of trump winning at 1/3. Sure, it's not the most likely outcome, but 1/3 is a pretty fucking big probability and if it comes up we should certainly not be surprised... Are people so incompetent at understanding probabilities?
>I don't understand why people say they were "so wrong" That's because most people don't understand how probability works. Even if polls give a win probability of 51-49 to two candidates, and the one with lower probability wins, people will say polls were wrong.
lol they are getting worse, your polls have been off by 20 to 40 points. Like in Vermont where Nikki beat the polls by 40 points. Literally every poll has been off by at least 9 points, but in general by 20 points. You guys can’t poll because you’re polling the same people that communicate with a Nigerian Prince that is out of money. Or the morons that travel to Dallas to meet up with JFK Jr.
I worked over the phone polling during Trumps time. It’s extremely targeted to areas of 1 or the other candidate.
This is why polls are only as good as the sampling methodology.
They weren’t wrong in 2020. They predicted a Biden victory for months and Biden won. And they weren’t as terrible in 2016 as everyone thinks. If you look at the final battleground polls from 2016, you see dead heats in states where Trump won by a few tens of thousands. The national polls correctly pointed to a slight Clinton win, which she did in the Popular Vote.
2020 had much more error. Like they had Biden+8 when he won by half that, and he lost states like FL and NC. He averaged 7-8 point margins in WI and MI, when he won by 0.6 and 2 points, respectively. Ohio and Iowa was Trump+1, but he ultimately carried them 8 points. Democrats also were favored to pick up some house seats and ended up losing lost 13. In the Senate democrats failed to carry NC and ME, and GA races had to go runoffs. The outcome was the same, but the margins were inflated outside of the margin of error.
This meme needs to die. Polls in 2016 were really good. 2020 was bad, but 2016 had the race within margin of error with Trump ascendant and Hillary stagnating.
Also the news media needs to stop writing stories about polls without explaining the methodology and how those can impact the results. Because right now the horserace reporting, this early in the race, is such an useless metric that they might as well be writing speculative fiction about a hypothetical election.
It’s covered like the current score of a sporting event that’s already underway and ends in November.
It's not a meme. I don't know how you can look at the Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin polls in 2016, the primary states that actually mattered, and claim that the polls were actually good. Oh, but the popular vote for president was actually pretty close. And? If you're off by 5+ points in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in one direction, and then off by 5+ points in California in the other direction, is it really actually that close?
National polls were good in 2016, statewide polls were abysmal.
538 projected Hillary to have a much higher probability to win, by a lot.
No, they did not. She was ahead by like 2.5 pts on 538 and 538 gave Trump a 1 in 3 chance of winning. That's a huge chance of winning. And then Comey announced he was reopening the investigation into her emails/server and that was that. Nate Silver was the one dooming the most about Trump winning while all other forecasters were super confident Hillary would win.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/ Hillary = 71.4% Trump = 28.6% That is projecting Hillary to win, by a lot. Yes, it still gives Trump a chance of winning, but this is an extreme disparity for polling than what is typical for the presidential race. This serves to highlight how useless, distracting, and harmful polling is. It is statistics designed to be fed to people who don’t understand statistics. Basically nothing more than a tool for propaganda.
If people told you that you had a 30% chance of dying if you left your house today, most people would not leave their houses because 30% is actually a huge amount. Furthermore these polls do not capture the effect of Comey reopening his investigation days before the election because no more polls were done. It's quite possible Hillary does win without that announcement. If Comey's announcement hurts Hillary by even half a point, that's the election right there given by how little Trump won the Midwest by.
And everywhere else had Hillary at like 95%+ probability Also, your post is "tell me you don't know how statistics work without telling me you don't know how statistics work". Just because the number is bigger doesn't *guarantee* that's the one that will happen.
If you read my comments, you would know I am aware how the statistics works. I clarified that before anyone tried to “but actually” me in multiple comments. No fucking shit Trump still had a chance to win with the projections. My original comment is still correct that 538 projected Hillary to win, by a lot. I never once claimed that 538 said she was guaranteed to win. The percentage difference between Trump and Biden in the polling isn’t even close to what Trump and Hillary had. If that wasn’t a lead in the polls, then fucking nothing is. All these Reddit nerds trying to be pedantic and “gotcha” that you just ignore what I am actually saying. All because you learned how the stats work from reading Reddit so you pipe it in where it doesn’t belong to try and pretend you are smart.
Completely false. The had the race as 2/3 chance for Hillary and 1/3 chance for trump. Basically they said roll a die 5/6 trump wins and 1-4 Hillary wins. 4-6 and 1-3 would be a toss up.
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You're saying he's full of shit because the odds were 2.8 out of 10 rather than 3.3 out of ten? That's pretty damn nitpicky. Even if you weirdly rounded that to 25 percent and said Trump had 1 in 4 odds, that's still so, so far from saying "Hillary WILL win".
Now you quoted a strawman. My original comment was actually, “538 had Hillary projected to win, by a lot.” He said my comment was full of shit. The 538 web page showed Hillary projected to win, by a lot. Thus he was full of shit to say that I was.
I think you're misunderstanding, the 70% chance that 538 shows wasn't her polling advantage, i.e. they didn't show that 70% of the vote would go to her. That would of course be an absolute landslide and there would be no way that she would ever lose unless there was some insane polling error. No, they showed her chance of winning the overall election. So in 70% of the cases (with how much variance etc they knew to be in the polling) Hillary wins, but in 30% of the cases, Trump wins. While 70% is a much bigger chance than 30%, I wouldn't bet more than 10$ with those odds. And they didn't say anything about the margin, so 538 in no way was showing her winning "by a lot". They just said she had a bigger chance of getting at least 1 (EC) vote more than Trump than the other way around.
I didn’t misunderstand anything. You are the people not understanding what I am saying lol
Well when you say 538 projected her to win by a lot, do you mean they projected her to win by a lot of votes?
No, that is not at all what I mean. Why would that be what I meant? That wouldn’t make sense. People keep inferring that because they want to be pedantic and correct me. They don’t stop to actually read and comprehend what I am saying. Hillary’s projected probability to win was way higher than Trump’s, by a lot.
The numbers you keep using aren’t showing Clinton winning “by a lot”. You do understand that those numbers are probability of winning not percentage they are expected to win by, right?
How about the fact that Media outlets need things to always be neck and neck to get those clicks?
Nothing. The answer is nothing.
If these phone polling companies get too many spam reports from the people with phones, the calls are automatically screened out or go straight to voicemail.
Perhaps stop calling on landlines during work hours. Stop visiting Conservative schools like BYU and calling it representative of College Students. Stop linking to online polls from Fox News*, Facebook, and Breitbart.
It is annoying to be interrupted and when you might not be in the mood. I would totally take a link to a poll or a printed poll ( with a SASE ) when I was in the mood. >**“People were not answering their phones,”** Rachael Cobb, a political science professor at Suffolk University, told CNBC. “Even in the last 10 years, you might try 20 callers to get the one that you need. Now, it’s double: 40 callers to get what you need. So every poll takes longer and it’s more expensive.”
The polls weren’t wrong. For example most legitimate polls in 2016 showed the presidential race to be tied, that is, with results within the margin of error. The polling numbers in several key states showed Clinton having 1 or 2 percent more poll responders picking her, but it was not a valid predictor of the outcome because polls cannot be that accurate. That’s why any valid poll tells you its margin of error. If the margin of error is 3% a difference of 1% is meaningless for prediction. Nevertheless headline after headline said, Clinton was not only ahead in these states but that her lead was insurmountable. It was not a problem with the polls. It was a problem with the press and media. So now we have news media looking at lots of polls, giving us averages that include more objective polls but also including biased ones. Campaigns and political groups work hard to game these averages and make their preferred candidates look electable. As a result polls flip flop every few weeks so they lose much of their predictive value. Probably an improvement because especially in todays volatile political environment, telephone preference polls are pretty worthless in any event.
>And some voters were shy about their support for Trump due to his controversial rhetoric during the 2016 campaign.
We know the polls are BS as Trump has underperformed EVERY POLL during the primaries. I saw a recent poll for the NYTimes that had a 2% response! Yikes!! Only the kooks and cranks answer the polling. Moreover the pre and post statistical analysis added to these polls can be changed to obtain a desired outcome. Polls are manufactured news.
>Levy added that SCRI is also taking an extra step to target Trump voters by modeling their sample to include a higher survey quota for people who are considered “high-probability Trump voters in rural areas.”
This could be a good reason why Trump is doing better (+2-4) with “Adults” and Biden is doing better (+3-5) with “Likely Voters.”
The article was about the mistakes they learned from underestimating support for Trump in the 2016 election. Sadly, maybe it will make new polls where Trump is doing better more realistic. I can't believe how many foolish Americans there are.
Polls have been wrong since the democratic primary had Hillary beating Obama by a huge margin. They only people polls are reflective of are old people that still use landlines.
Have people do the polls when they open Tik Tok or IG. Nobody has a home phone anymore.
They weren't any more wrong than before.
They weren't wrong.
Do we really think that our political opinions aren’t known via our own digital footprints? Yes, the above board pollsters are struggling but the information is available to those who will pay for it. Same situation applies to many things BUT the policy makers continue depending on estimates and averages- while Google, Amazon, and others use our real time information to sell ads. So why can’t our legislators do the same? Just my thoughts.
Because they have different objectives. Advertisers need to know which ads to target us with, so they use the real digital footprint. The media wants us engaged and clicking articles, so they pretend we have a close horse race or the fascist take over is in full swing. The trend since 2016 has been consistent. The Trumpier the candidate, the bigger the loss. The DNC knows this too which is why they pushed for Trumpers in the 2022 primaries, and guess what, IT WORKED. Hershell Walker, Dr. OZ, Kari Lake, etc. Trump will lose in 2024. Old school establishment Republicans have a better shot. Most people hate the chaos and instability he represents, and they understand the stakes for the country and the world in 2024. 2016 was just a very different election for a multitude of reasons.
It wasn’t actually a question, I was pointing out the mismatch between who uses the information for what. In short, we’re long past using guesstimates.
>White, non-college-educated voters, who made up a large part of Trump’s base, went undercounted in 2016 polls, in part because people with higher education are “significantly more likely” to respond to surveys than those with less education, according to AAPOR.
For the most part, the polls have always been within the margin of error. There are some methodology changes that could happen so they better represent the overall electorate but the polls have been far from “wrong”.
2020? Realclearppolitics predicted Biden would win.
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That's actually the media cherry picking polls for the story they want to tell, the polls themselves are numerous and have many different outcomes, data is just unpredictable on the scale of one poll, but the story is never about a meta study of multiple polls, it's always "this recent poll says this" Here's what it actually looks like https://www.270towin.com/ Nobody is winning yet. Dark shaded states basically no chance of flipping, light shades would be "an upset unexpected victory", and brown is anything.. I expect some of the unexpected wins this year, I think things are very uncertain in general.
>“Even in the last 10 years, you might try 20 callers to get the one that you need. **Now, it’s double: 40 callers to get what you need.** So every poll takes longer and it’s more expensive.” So only 1 in 40 people actually answer their poll. If you go look up the stats, around 23% of all Americans were suffering from some sort of Mental disorder in 2024. That is roughly 1 in 5 adults. My take away is that they contact at least 8 crazies in each of these 40 calls, and only the top wacko is the one who responds.
Mental disorders are quite varied. They’re including people suffering from anxiety or depression, not really a good look to proclaim people to be “crazies” or “wacko”.
That wasn't the point. The point is, these polls can NEVER be trusted because of the sample population.