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

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

#441

Post by esoterica »

tomjen3 wrote: post #54
0x53 wrote: post #3

One of the biggest issues I think is that the polling is still done by just randomly calling people. I think I agree that there is a large skew introduced by the simple fact of only reaching people willing to answer a call from an unknown number.

That would seem likely. But then the polls should under count a population that is more likely to vote for the Dems and so the polls should have shown more support for the republicans than what happened in the elections. Maybe we should just have taken the lesson of Dewey defeating Truman and not trusted polls is the first place.

The polls were not great this cycle, but the 538 forecast, which is mostly polls-based, still correctly predicted 48/50 of the states in this election. If you went an entire cycle without looking at a single poll, or reading a single piece of media informed by a poll, do you think you could do better than 48/50?

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

#442

Post by esoterica »

nine_k wrote: post #424
evo_9 wrote: post #104

Who replies honestly to political question to random strangers? I know I don't. What's the benefit of letting anyone know where you stand politically at this point? None. It's much more likely - no matter which side you're for - that the person asking could have an adverse reaction. Things are just way too polarized now, not sure how that can change, but that's how it is. I mean outside friends/family I simply take a…

An effective poll should be highly anonymized, like voting, for the same reasons. You pick a random piece of paper from a stack, check some boxes, put the paper into an opaque box with all other papers. This makes tracking the paper back to you impractical, if not impossible. This is, of course, not achievable by phone calls, and also hardly achievable over the internet (only maybe using Tor). This also may make it h…

The problem with polls is that there is substantial bias introduced by the fact that only a particular type of person volunteers to participate in polls, not because people are lying to pollsters because they are afraid of their identity being tied to their answers. Anonymizing the polls will not fix partisan non-response bias.

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

#443

Post by mastazi »

vkou wrote: post #411
mmcgaha wrote: post #334

Everyone knows Republicans are racist homophobic xenophobic bigoted nazis. Why would they want to admit that to some random over the phone? The rhetoric that we are using to describe the other party is not necessarily helping our cause in the long run. First it is pushing folks with legitimate disagreement away from public discourse. Second it is creating a good-guy/bad-guy scenario that is the equivalent of tribalis…

Do you not think that the mainstream Republican party has moved radically rightward over the past 12 years? It's not spending its energy discussing Laffer curves and energy policy, and whether or not someone can be fired from their job for being gay, or if we should invade another Middle Eastern country anymore. It's spending its energy seriously talking about QAnon, and how the COVID pandemic is over, and and how th…

> But we no longer live in a sane world

One way to deal with this type of dysphoria would be to spend some quality time with people who hold views different from the ones you have, and it would be much better if you didn't do that online, but in person - for reasons that I'm sure you understand well, since you are an HN reader.

Or, you decide that everyone on the other side of the fence is completely bollocks. But will this make your life better?

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

#444

Post by esoterica »

mmcgaha wrote: post #334

Everyone knows Republicans are racist homophobic xenophobic bigoted nazis. Why would they want to admit that to some random over the phone? The rhetoric that we are using to describe the other party is not necessarily helping our cause in the long run. First it is pushing folks with legitimate disagreement away from public discourse. Second it is creating a good-guy/bad-guy scenario that is the equivalent of tribalis…

Because of geographic polarization, the majority of Republicans live in communities that are majority Republican, and the majority of Democrats live in the communities that are majority Democrat. The majority of Republicans face zero social penalty for admitting their support for Trump because most of their friends, family, neighbors and coworkers are also voting for Trump. The 0.1% of Trump voters who live in Silicon Valley are wildly overrepresented on HN, which is why you see so many people whining about being too oppressed by their lefty coworkers to admit that they are Trump supporters, but that is not representative of the actual lived experience of most Trump voters.

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

#445

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

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 understand lived experience and how it impacts a person's ability to speak on a matter.

I don’t. „Lived experience“ is just experience, but woke.

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

#446

Post by raxxorrax »

snowwrestler wrote: post #229
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…

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…

These HR problems have a negative influence on the quality of the work.

To me it looks like "killing the messenger". Listeners want the most accurate data irrespective of the fact that some unknowns can be controlled for or not.

Furthermore to respond to the culture war that you brought up, I think Shor's theory fits my personal experience that some people stopped stating their political opinion in the open. So it is on topic.

That may very well be due to "HR" being a problem or those that play HR on public platforms. The explanation might be correct or wrong, it might resonate with people or not.

Your comment is just a data point here.

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

#447

Post by qPM9l3XJrF »

snowwrestler wrote: post #229
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…

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

Even assuming this unsupported claim is true, it's not necessarily relevant because correlation isn't the same as causation. For example, it could be that Dems are pretty good at reading their local electorate, and left-leaning areas are more tolerant of violent protest in the name of left causes. So Dems in lefty areas did not condemn violence, whereas Dems in swing areas did condemn violence. If this was true, ceteris paribus you would expect Dems who condemn violence to be more likely to lose, just because they're running more competitive races.

BTW, I think people are unfortunately quite tribal nowadays, and tend to assume that extremists have control of the other side even if that's not the case. And disavowing extremists is only partially effective at changing that perception. Think about it--how much have Trump's many disavowals of the far right shifted your perception that he's in bed with them? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0cMmBvqWc Probably not much.

>So either that’s not actually the critical factor, or it’s not possible to control for this factor in any sort of reliable way.

One failed attempt doesn't mean that something can't be done.

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

#448

Post by illiilliiililil »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #432
illiilliiililil wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conserva…

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

Interesting. I came here a bit late.

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

#449

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#450

Post by _fizz_buzz_ »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #391

Why were the errors only in one direction?

Because they are systematic errors e.g. Latinos are hard to poll. Latino vote went more in the direction of Trump then previously. So, every pollster is running into that issue.
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