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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

#471

Post by darawk »

mr_toad wrote: post #366
darawk wrote: post #288

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. 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 te…

He's not telling them not to exercise their rights. He's telling them not to protest violently. He is encouraging them to protest. He's encouraging those protests to be non-violent.

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

#472

Post by darawk »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #387
ineedasername wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they were saying the protests should stop. They made on observation about how the protests were perceived by others , and that perception, correct or not, influenced voting decisions.

This is changing it from "they said to stop" to "they said it was wise to stop," and the distinction basically only matters if you want the Democrats to win. You're saying the same thing either way.

Of course the distinction only matters if you want the democrats to win. The comment being discussed was made by a Democratic strategist.

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

#473

Post by darawk »

nxmnxm99 wrote: post #305
darawk wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no correlation between when a Dem condemned violent protest and whether they won their election You got a source on that? It's clear that democrats lost ground, despite the Republican party's abject failure to control the coronavirus. This should have been the easiest win in world history, and somehow, the Democrats barely escaped with the presidency. There is pretty clearly something to explain here.

Every single demographic went further red than 2016 besides white men. There’s a reason for that.

I'm aware of that. But I don't see what that has to do with my point.

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

#474

Post by amanaplanacanal »

masonic wrote: post #383
dragonwriter wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There aren't many people with $100 million income Sure, but there's also a couple with over an order of magnitude more . > So while I'd rather the media reported the median income than the median income, it's the number we have and hopefully it's a useful approximation. It's not a useful approximation of anything, and we have a lot more detailed information that “average income of voters of one side vs. the other"…

Sure, but there's also a couple with over an order of magnitude more. Who has an income of more than $1 billion a year?

There are people whose wealth on paper grow that much. Maybe they are counting that as income?

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

#475

Post by newswasboring »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #445
newswasboring wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lived experience is different from experience. But I think its illdefined and widely misused term. The way I see it lived experience differentiates internal and external experiences. For example a white person, black person and an indian person all can have the same police encounter (external experience) but live it in very different ways. Its because the white person and to an extent Indian person do not carry the fear of negative stereotypes because they have not lived the life of a black person who has had these counter multiple times and knows people for whom the exact same encounter turned out really badly.

There is a difference because one party has lived a completely different life so the same exact physical conditions lead to very, very different mental impact. Thus terms lived lived experience are important and the concept is worth looking at. It enables use to think in a more nuanced way and incorporate more information than what is exactly in front of us.

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

#476

Post by codegrappler »

chmod600 wrote: post #426
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…

I've come to the conclusion that it makes sense (morally, though perhaps not persoanlly) to broadcast your viewpoint when it is generally suppressed, but not when it is already a mainstream viewpoint. A blue message in redville makes it more acceptable to discuss and is an opportunity for communication and progress; likewise for a red message in blueville. But if you are broadcasting a blue message in blueville, you…

I wish I could do this better. It still scares the heck out of me to say something that could be construed as even remotely redville when I’m in navy blueville. I’m sure others feel the same way in the opposite circumstance.

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

#477

Post by rjkennedy98 »

jungletime wrote: post #257

Dr.SHIVA Ayyadurai, MIT PhD. "Inventor of Email" Analyzed the results in Michigan and came to the conclusion that 69k votes were taken from Trump and given to Biden. His reasoning here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ztu5Y5obWPk&feature=youtu.be

That was not convincing at all and had some really glaring errors. Dr Shiva somehow confuses percent of overall voters with percent of Republicans to make it seem like there is a conspiracy going on. He says that margin for Trump should be a flat line so that if there 5% republican all-ballot voters it should be off by the same margin in Trump vote as a precinct with 80%. However if 20% of republicans flip that would mean 1% flipped vs 16% in those examples which is a line with a slope. Literally flipping those graphs would make them look the same for Biden as for Trump. All it shows is basically a kind of regression to the mean. Precincts with high republican or democratic all-ballot voting weren’t as republican or democratic as they seem. There could be many good reasons for that such as that voters that go against the way their communities vote tend to not be all-ballot voters.

Also, Dr. Shiva is not an independent voice. He ran in Massachusetts as a Republican.

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

#478

Post by dragonwriter »

joijoiwejrr wrote: post #469
root_axis wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

306 electoral votes is not "barley getting by", that's the exact same margin as Trump in 2016 minus two faithless electors. That's pretty much the definition of a rebuke.

Biden won by razor-thin margins in the swing states, underperformed his polls by 5 to 10 points across the country, and got crushed in several states which pollsters had said were competitive (e.g. Texas). Meanwhile the Democrats lost seats in the House and (probably) failed to take the Senate despite favourable polls and optimistic predictions of a "blue wave". Happiness = Reality - Expectations. Expectations were v…

> Biden [...] underperformed his polls by 5 to 10 points across the country

While the votes are still being counted and this may change a little bit, he underperformed the last 538 forecast by 2.7 points at current vote count (not 5 to 10 points), just on the edge of the 80% confidence interval (noted because that's what 538 publishes as its uncertainty measure). Note that in social science, the standard cited uncertainty window is the 95% confidence interval, which would be significantly wider.

Now, you might point out that the results were outside of the 95% CI of the polls, which is true, but polls don't predict voting behavior, they measure sentiment. The cited confidence interval of polls addresses only sampling error, but even if as a sentiment measure a poll has no nonsampling error, it has additional known source of error as a measure of voting behavior beyond its sampling error. Notably, polls are typically of either registered voters (which are very different population than "people who will vote") or likely voters (which are still a different population than people who actually will vote, based on some model of the pollster of who will probably vote.) The reason poll based forecasts like 538 exist is because polls, while they are useful inputs for predictions, are not themselves predictions.

On the Senate and House the results are similarly non-extreme outliers compared to the forecasts. The 80% CI for the Senate forecast ranged from 55 D to 52 R. The potential outcomes now have reduced to the range of 50/50 to 52R. The 80% CI for the House forecast was 225D to 254D. Current results are 218D with 16 seats uncalled. Its expected that deviations from the center of the predicted range on these will be correlated, and it looks like they are all hitting at or near the edge of the 80% CI.

Yes, Democrats underperformed the midpoint of the predicted range. But not by enough (and it didn't happen at all in the 2018 midterm) to think that the models are radically wrong.

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

#479

Post by Retric »

ttesttom wrote: post #404
Retric wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that’s really not what the statistics show. Republicans gain a majority of support from high school graduates, individuals with some college experience, and college graduates. People without a high school degree or with a post graduate degree favor Democrats. An individual’s likelihood of being a Democrat decreases with every additional dollar he or she earns. Democrats have a huge advantage (63 percent) with…

This is inaccurate based on latest elections. There isn't full data for 2020 but in 2016 college educated voted Dem +9. "In the 2016 election, a wide gap in presidential preferences emerged between those with and without a college degree. College graduates backed Clinton by a 9-point margin (52%-43%), while those without a college degree backed Trump 52%-44%. This is by far the widest gap in support among college gra…

Trump had unusual support among the uneducated and a strong dislike among the educated. Presumably from his long run on TV. Here are some more typical results.

https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2012/results/president/exi...

  No college degree Obama: 51%
  Some college Obama: 49%. 
  College Romney: 51%
  Postgrad. Obama: 55%
Though this varies by election with the numbers moving a little based on who wins. Obama had a large popular vote lead which flipped the some collage group.

PS: Split tickets in 2020 are another indicator of more topical voting behavior.

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

#480

Post by appleflaxen »

flowerlad wrote: post #183
fastball wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How did Trump get so many votes?" The same people that attacked Schor have undoubtedly also asked themselves this question, without an ounce of self-awareness. Except instead of recognizing their own culpability, the conclusion most such people are coming to seems to be "well, I guess nearly half of all Americans are bad people".

Not bad people, but gullible people. Anyone that believes QAnon conspiracy theories such as Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey are raping and drinking the blood of kidnapped children in pursuit of the “fountain of youth” is gullible.

they are victims of a con, and they are members of a cult, but they are not gullible: they are scared. scared people are easy to manipulate, which is why terrorism (broadly defined, including 24/7 news cycle of calamity) is so effective at public control.

By dismissing the individuals as flawed due to gullibility, you obscure the true phenomena, and make you and your peers more susceptible to it.

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