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How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

nytimes.com

21–30 of 114 posts

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#21

Regarding the Times ' decision to run this article, I wonder how much of it was based upon "hey, polling is kind of goofy" and how much of was "look! Here's another way we can show that Trump isn't really resonating with voters!".

If there was a similar situation for Clinton I could see see Breitbart or Fox talking about it as proof of some Democrat conspiracy. There definitely are biases but I think this story would get traction either way.

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#22

Regarding the Times ' decision to run this article, I wonder how much of it was based upon "hey, polling is kind of goofy" and how much of was "look! Here's another way we can show that Trump isn't really resonating with voters!".

It is not permitted to entertain such thoughts.

Please seek the nearest Correct Thought Unit for urgent help.

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#23

This is really fascinating. I get why the poll creators made these decisions, but the results of the weighting lead to a ridiculous result compared to other polls. Supposedly this poll was extremely accurate in 2012, so who knows?

I'm not sure I get why they bracketed the age group so small as 18–21 vs the broader census definition.

I don't get why the bracketed the age group at all. Surely you can just estimate the distribution?

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#24

Nate Silver at 538 talks about the whole dissecting polls deal, or "unskewing" them. All polls must make methodological choices, and all of those choices have advantages and disadvantages. Spending a lot of time trying to dissect those choices and passing judgment on them is not as productive as: 1. Looking at aggregates of lots of polls. 2. Looking at the variance that a poll captures from one iteration of it to ano…

His dog won pretty handily in the last election, though. It's not an exact science, but his methodology seemed to eliminate a fair amount of doubt from the equation.

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#25
TLDR; The 19-year black man is very small demographic and would have small sample size. Apparently, the sample for LA Times poll includes and outlier who favors Trump which then gets weighted disproportionately to arrive at conclusion that trump is favored by young black voters.

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't doxxing.

'Spose not. I think it is an attempt to subvert the authenticity of the poll though.

A drastically skewed poll isn't very "authentic" in the first place.

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#27
One thing I noted is that NY Times says that most polls have four categories of age and five categories of education; except these aren't categories, they are ordinal variables.

Age and level of education are slightly co-variant (you don't get many 18 year olds who have a PhD). Because the age classification and education levels are ordinal you should use an ordinal smoothing [0] function to turn them into pseudo continuous variables. Given the continuous and co-variant independent variables (as well as other categorical independent variables) and a categorical dependent variable the best analysis is probably to use a quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

[0] http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/2100/1/tr015.pdf and http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ordPens/ordPens.pdf

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't doxxing.

'Spose not. I think it is an attempt to subvert the authenticity of the poll though.

The whole reason for being transparent about the polling methodologies is so we can analyze and critique them.

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't doxxing.

'Spose not. I think it is an attempt to subvert the authenticity of the poll though.

The article does not question the authenticity of the poll. It complements the pollsters on their documentation and sharing of data:

It’s worth noting that this analysis is possible only because the poll is extremely and admirably transparent: It has published a data set and the documentation necessary to replicate the survey.

It does point out an aspect of the poll that may undermine its utility in accurately predicting the result of the election, but it's a pretty dry fact, the repeated inclusion of a heavily weighted voter.

If Trump takes 10-20% of the black vote, then the poll did a good job predicting the results. I don't expect that to happen.

Re: How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

#30

Nate Silver at 538 talks about the whole dissecting polls deal, or "unskewing" them. All polls must make methodological choices, and all of those choices have advantages and disadvantages. Spending a lot of time trying to dissect those choices and passing judgment on them is not as productive as: 1. Looking at aggregates of lots of polls. 2. Looking at the variance that a poll captures from one iteration of it to ano…

His dog won pretty handily in the last election, though. It's not an exact science, but his methodology seemed to eliminate a fair amount of doubt from the equation.

Have you seen the comparisons to Princeton's Election Conesertium which did something similar but without the "special sauce"? He did a little worse, which is a bit of evidence saying Sam's more straight numbers are better than Nate's judgment.
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