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

vox.com

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

#431

Post by snowwrestler »

rayiner wrote: post #328
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…

Vox euphemized Schor’s departure in a way that was highly relevant to the subject of the article. The issue isn’t that pollsters couldn’t quantify the problem, it’s that they didn’t even realize the problem existed: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/11/02/shy-trump-... > Trump voters are not liars. As a Democratic pollster and campaign strategist, I feel strange typing these words. But it is required to deb…

I have a hard time believing your musings on culture are relevant to the topic of accurate polling when GOP-aligned pollsters, who firmly believed that Trump voters are less likely to answer polls and built that into their models, also missed badly.

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

#432

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

illiilliiililil wrote: post #428
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…

There has never been such a thing as a politically neutral HN. It's just that there wasn't until recently a userbase to counteract the liberal tech groupthink.

That's more recent, to be honest. When I started reading HN, it was very very libertarian (but mostly non-political).

As it's grown bigger, it's started to reflect the demographics of software/data/professional people, with a bias towards the West Coast of the US.

That's presumably what you mean by the liberal tech groupthink (note that disliking Trump does not make one a liberal, which is a mistake a lot of conservatives have made over the past four years).

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

#433

Post by snowwrestler »

newswasboring wrote: post #429
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…

> there is no correlation between when a Dem condemned violent protest and whether they won their election The tweet shor got fired for was literally giving data for this. Did you see the article about his firing?

Neither that tweet, nor the paper it referred to, attempted to correlate the exact date at which each Democratic candidate condemned violence with their respective election results.

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

#434

Post by newswasboring »

snowwrestler wrote: post #433
newswasboring wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no correlation between when a Dem condemned violent protest and whether they won their election The tweet shor got fired for was literally giving data for this. Did you see the article about his firing?

Neither that tweet, nor the paper it referred to, attempted to correlate the exact date at which each Democratic candidate condemned violence with their respective election results.

that is such an impossible ask. We can only look at these things in aggregate. Contrary to popular belief a whole country doesn't turn on a time. Also even if that is your standard, this finding is still relevant.

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

#435

Post by alentist »

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…

> it's the only good example of the "Cancel Culture"

Here's a few more: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1282404647160942598.html

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

#436

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

colinmhayes wrote: post #382
ineedasername wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yea I agree, they need to find a new term I guess because it seems pretty clear that this is what's been happening to me at least. I guess my question was more along the lines of who doesn't think this was the issue? Seems so obvious that his conspiracy theory squad won't want to talk to pollsters. Plus energized dems are more willing than usual to talk. The 1% response rate is a crazy number. How could they possibly…

Everybody in the industry/science around this has been worried about it for years (at least 2008, when I started paying attention to this stuff).

It's just become a lot more salient now, as the polls have been pretty crappy lately.

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

#438

Post by mastazi »

apta wrote: post #396
mastazi wrote: post #244

This is my personal experience: over the course of my life, I have held both conservative positions and more progressive ones (depending on the topic, and in different periods of my life). I have always been much more willing to discuss openly those positions that I would describe as progressive. This is despite the fact that over the years I have been living in more than a handful of different countries, each one wi…

> I don't know why that is the case, and I would like to hear if anyone has an answer. Cancel culture and SJW mobs.

Cancel culture is often in the back of my mind because I work in tech, however what I said above was not only referring to the workplace, so the question still stands.

Also, you are not really giving an answer, because if the cause was "cancel culture" then the next question would be why cancel culture works that way and not the other way around.

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

#439

Post by mattkrause »

rayiner wrote: post #219
mattkrause wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota aren’t statistically independent though, so if a poll is wrong in one of them, it’s also likely to be wrong in the others too. Correlated errors are tough!

Maybe it’s semantics, but to me that means something is wrong with the model. It’s not just a matter of an unlikely result being happening some percentage of the time. There is some hidden factor that could have been adjusted for ahead of time.

Both, I think.

The model certainly ought to handle correlations, but the evaluation should take them into account too.

You can't treat the election as fifty independent replicates: a miss in both Minnesota and Wisconsin is clearly worse than one error, but it's also not as bad as (say) getting Wisconsin and Rhode Island wrong, where it's more likely that two separate errors occurred.

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

#440

Post by mastazi »

fiblye wrote: post #390
mastazi wrote: post #244

This is my personal experience: over the course of my life, I have held both conservative positions and more progressive ones (depending on the topic, and in different periods of my life). I have always been much more willing to discuss openly those positions that I would describe as progressive. This is despite the fact that over the years I have been living in more than a handful of different countries, each one wi…

I think it also depends on the audience and group you're with. If you're moving around a lot, you might end up in expat/international/diverse groups. Most people who move to several countries aren't moving to villages 4 hours from a city and speaking and blending in with the locals and really hearing what rural people think. Growing up in a small town and moving between small towns across the US every year or so, I n…

It's true that context counts, I can see your point since, similar to your experience, I also come from a rural area and I lived in a tiny town for some years.

But I also feel like I have a "default setting" for situations where I don't really know who I'm talking to, and in those situations, what I said above still applies.

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