Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

One pollster’s explanation for why the polls got it wrong

vox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 565 posts

Re: One pollster’s explanation for why the polls got it wrong

#361

Post by rayiner »

dragonwriter wrote: post #335
jimbobimbo wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.essence.com/news/politics/55-percent-white-women...

This is based on exit polls. Exit polls only interview people who vote in person, which may be generally be useful, but in this election are an enormously systematically biased slice of the electorate. You really can't base any generalizations beyond the in-person voting segment based on them.

At least with the NYT exit polls, they included phone interviews to account for mail in voters. Here is a more systematic post-election analysis, based on a huge survey (100,000+ respondents), from Fox/Associated Press/U Chicago: https://www.foxnews.com/elections/2020/general-results/voter...

This one shows significantly lower Black vote for Trump than the Essence article (12% of men, 6% of women) but an even higher Latino vote (39% of men, 32% of women). Both sets of data show Trump losing support from white men slightly. (Which is consistent with pre-election polling.)

Re: One pollster’s explanation for why the polls got it wrong

#362

Post by ineedasername »

colinmhayes wrote: post #354
ineedasername wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite, it's a subtle nuance. The concept of a shy Trump supporter is that they're afraid of a stigma associated with admitting support for Trump. That is different than someone who just doesn't want to take a poll but may be perfectly happy to tell you their views if you struck up a conversation. My own observation is that over the last 4 years, Trump supporters have become ever more loud and proud of that suppor…

But the reason they're not taking the poll is because they don't want to admit support for Trump, right? Of course some are happy to tell everyone, but some aren't. Otherwise why is this concept of republicans responding to polls less just starting now with Trump?

No, not if the hypothesis of the article is correct: They have lower social trust & cooperation metrics, and are disinclined to answer any polls. As for why it started with Trump, there could be a few reasons, all speculation on my part: He may be attracting people who didn't vote much before, and these new voters are the sorts of people who have lower trust etc., and so don't answer polls. Personally though, I think it might be more that President Trump's messaging fosters & encourages a certain amount of distrust: Fake News, anything negative about him are lies, deep state conspiracies, other views aren't just disagreements but bad/treason/sedition, etc. If distrustful people don't answer polls, and President Trump has made his followers more distrustful, then his followers are now less likely to answer polls. Just a hypothesis though.

Re: One pollster’s explanation for why the polls got it wrong

#363

Post by klipt »

newacct583 wrote: post #294
snowwrestler wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly typical of HN today that a topic that is interesting technically and politically neutral (the challenge of accurate polling) is derailed up top with an inaccurate culture war comment (there is no correlation between when a Dem condemned violent protest and whether they won their election). FWIW, Shor’s theory about poll respondents is shared by Robert Cahaly at Trafalgar, but Trafalgar polls missed badly too in…

Yeah, exactly. People who want to scream about how Shor got cancelled have zero interest in actually discussing anything Shor writes. That said, and to be perfectly clear: Civis should not have fired Shor. It was very bad. (To be fair in the other direction: the guy is a known genius in leftie political circles and my understanding is that he's done very well for himself since termination as an independent consultant…

> Civis should not have fired Shor. It was very bad.

Why, because you agree with his politics? That doesn't seem like a very objective way to determine who we should or shouldn't cancel.

Re: One pollster’s explanation for why the polls got it wrong

#364

Post by kaitai »

darawk wrote: post #288
boomboomsubban wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're defending the person who is trying to explain why polls got it wrong by using polling data to show that their argument belittling the BLM protests was correct. This is ridiculous on it's own, but also ignores things like how wrong it is to blame the protests for violence often instigated by the police, how dumb it is to trust polling data from the Nixon campaign when we know he was involved in all sorts of…

> So you're defending the person who is trying to explain why polls got it wrong by using polling data to show that their argument belittling the BLM protests was correct. He's not belittling them. He's supporting them and their cause, and offering course corrective advice so that they are better able to achieve their stated goals. > This is ridiculous on it's own, but also ignores things like how wrong it is to blam…

But this is part of the problem for Dems: it's perception of truth, not truth, that matters for the undecided voter. So even though a few miles from me it's the Aryan Cowboys and Boogaloo Bois who are being prosecuted for property damage, it's the antifa that people in rural Oregon and Oklahoma are afraid of. They're also very afraid of "white slavery" (yes, I'm using the wording of the 1880s and 1910s [1] because it's the same tropes gussied up for today) -- they're afraid that some foreigner will come snatch their beautiful innocent daughter from Walmart; the reality is of course that their daughter's more likely to start doing meth. And of course there is abortion, too; it's wildly more likely that a Republican woman will need a procedure that will be forbidden under various proposed antiabortion laws than that a woman will have an abortion of a healthy baby in the 9th month, but the second scenario drives Republicans while the first is a fact to be swept under the rug ("it's different").

Dems don't speak to the feelings in the way that modern Republicans do. Dems think that because something is unlikely or illogical, they don't have to spend a lot of time talking about it; Republicans realize those are the best things to spend all your press time on, because then there can be no metrics to look bad on. Republicans know much better how to tap into the fear of the white electorate in particular, and then add the carrot that once the temporarily embarrassed millionaire is restored to riches, there'll be no taxes ;)

[1] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slav...

Re: One pollster’s explanation for why the polls got it wrong

#365

Post by AnimalMuppet »

ineedasername wrote: post #347
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I didn't have five of them calling me every day, day after day, I might be more likely to answer. If half of them weren't push polls trying to disguise themselves as unbiased, I might be more likely to answer. As it is, though? No. Go away. All of you go away. You'll find out my opinion when I vote. Until then, leave me alone.

Those of us who don't live in a swing state don't have to deal with them nearly as much.

I wish. I don't live in a swing state. (Though I guess I do live in a hotly-contested congressional district. In fact, it still hasn't been called.)

Re: One pollster’s explanation for why the polls got it wrong

#366

Post by mr_toad »

darawk wrote: post #288
boomboomsubban wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're defending the person who is trying to explain why polls got it wrong by using polling data to show that their argument belittling the BLM protests was correct. This is ridiculous on it's own, but also ignores things like how wrong it is to blame the protests for violence often instigated by the police, how dumb it is to trust polling data from the Nixon campaign when we know he was involved in all sorts of…

> So you're defending the person who is trying to explain why polls got it wrong by using polling data to show that their argument belittling the BLM protests was correct. He's not belittling them. He's supporting them and their cause, and offering course corrective advice so that they are better able to achieve their stated goals. > This is ridiculous on it's own, but also ignores things like how wrong it is to blam…

> He's not belittling them. He's supporting them and their cause, and offering course corrective advice so that they are better able to achieve their stated goals.

Kind of like telling women that they shouldn’t venture out at night? For their own safety.

Or to give another example, the recent arguments made that people shouldn’t publish cartoons that Muslims find offensive, for their own safety.

In all three cases telling people that they shouldn’t exercise their rights “for their own benefit” is seen as highly offensive.

Re: One pollster’s explanation for why the polls got it wrong

#367

Post by lawnchair_larry »

newswasboring wrote: post #174
rayiner wrote: post #116

> I reached out to the smartest polling guy I know: David Shor, an independent data analyst who’s a veteran of the Obama presidential campaigns who formerly operated a massive web-based survey at Civis Analytics before leaving earlier this year Before being fired for pointing out that violent protests alienate people: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/case-for-liberalism-... Schor’s firing is a tremendous examp…

My heart broke when reading your article. There are some very different kinds of accusations put on Shor. The most hilarious is definitely the "you are not black so shut up" argument. I understand lived experience and how it impacts a person's ability to speak on a matter. that I have never seen a person even attempt at explaining how the author's lived experience corrupted their chain of thought. Also the original p…

> I don't understand what exactly the people restricting speech in this way are trying to achieve.

When your ideas can’t be sustained on their merits, your only option is to eliminate people who don’t share your world view. It’s a complete disaster and only breeds fragility.

Re: One pollster’s explanation for why the polls got it wrong

#368

Post by lawnchair_larry »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #324
flowerlad wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pretends to care about them. And that's why I said: Not bad people, but gullible people.

You're missing the point. It's not that they're gullible, it's that one side ignores them completely and the other side is speaking to them. It doesn't matter that the guy telling you what you want to hear is probably lying, its still a better spot than the guy that ignores you because they don't want or need your vote.

It’s amazing how many people in the left still don’t get this. Trump supporters absolutely did not vote for him out of gullibility. They got exactly what they expected.

Re: One pollster’s explanation for why the polls got it wrong

#369

Post by free_rms »

ineedasername wrote: post #351
free_rms wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what the democrats did, though, by picking Biden over Bernie. And they sucked anyways. What values did Biden communicate during the campaign?

As I said, these things are not constrained to one side or the other. Though Biden was a moderate, and overall there was more support for moderates in the aggregate than for the more extreme progressive views of Bernie. That could just have come down to a more cynical calculation about "electability" though.

Whomever's downvoting both of us should chill, first off.

Second off.. I mean Biden's basically center-right, and he does nothing for any of the values most loudly espoused by the democratic base. He'd have been fired from a FAANG company for the "You're not black" comment, but everyone just agreed to pretend it didn't happen instead because we were stuck with him at that point.

So you can't say it's about values instead of winning. The thing is, our values would win. 60-70% of the country supports medicare for all, most people would support a more redistributive tax code, most people don't like the idea of cops shooting their kid, it goes on and on. But the democratic professional class refuses to run on those values, again and again.

Do you ever see the Republicans telling the pro-life people to eat shit the way the Democrats consistently tell progressives? No, they make a deal that they'll fight for it, probably lose, but at least they'll fight, and they get votes for it.

And the coup de grace is that anyone who questions the democrats' commitment must not really be on our side. Probably a closet racist. It's really kind of genius if your goal is to maintain control of the party.

Re: One pollster’s explanation for why the polls got it wrong

#370

Post by tchock23 »

One potential solution is to pay people to participate in polls. Pollsters don’t do this because it is prohibitively expensive and cuts into their consulting margins, but it can reduce sampling bias (it can also introduce a bias if not used effectively).
Post reply on HN