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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

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The votes haven't even been fully counted (NY has barely started with their mail-ins), so the exits aren't weighted yet. There are, so far as I know, no valid takes to be made from current exit data.

I posted this elsewhere in the thread but even without exit polls we can make some reasonably solid conclusions from geographical voting data: https://sweep.thedispatch.com/p/the-sweep-dont-trust-the-exi... At this point it seems pretty clear that Trump made big gains among Latinos compared to 2016; with other demographics the jury is still out (I think.)

You don't need exits to know that; there were sharp swings towards Trump in majority-Latino south Texas counties.

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

#532
post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Saying "don't want the Democrats to win" would have made it clearer, my mistake. Ignoring the outlying position the other poster mentions as they will make themselves clear on their own, if you want the Democrats to win those two positions are identical. If you don't, it's two separate negative views of the protests.

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

#533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, and that's why i made effort to differentiate between margins vs winning. In my opinion, 2020's polls were a lot worse than 2016's, but because of Biden's much bigger lead (in the polls and in key states), the polling errors did not cross the threshold to be "wrong" in the winner take all system. Finally, there is an argument that even a Biden 75-25 call gives the correct outcome because each state…

They didn't just add a "shy Trump voter" factor: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/another-pollster-sees... They tried to come up with approaches to get around the very effect the article talks about: Trump voters don't answer survey questions. The main differences in methodology were making fewer assumptions about Republican turnout, larger sample sizes, and different survey techniques. Trafalgar clearly missed…

Like I said in an earlier comment, comparisons between polls and a model aren't completely fair. Part of the model's calculation is that 8.8 points or whatever requires an enormous polling error to swing for trump. I do agree that other polls should get criticism/improve their methodologies to avoid the ~5 point margin in FL, or the 7.7 margin you listed. And, I even think that they may not get as much criticism as their errors warrant because many of these states were off by 6+ points but still went for Biden. Still, Trafalgar has a unique methodology that should be understood better before they are extolled as the "best pollster". And, Trafalgar is not immune to similar polling errors, just in the other direction, and with a wrong result. The delta may be more important from a statistical methodology standpoint, but these polls are measuring winner take all states, and "The Trafalgar Group’s Robert Cahaly is an outlier among pollsters in that he thinks President Trump will carry Michigan, Pennsylvania, or both, and hence be reelected with roughly 280 electoral votes" is a pretty poor prediction based on their data. Does this mean that their data is necessarily poor? No, but it isn't a good sign.

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

#534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone I know who claims Trump is racist can quickly and easily point to specific policies, quotes, and actions - both before and during his presidency. This meme that people don't have evidence for their issues with Trump is not only false, it's comedically ironic.

I don't think so. He is just generally offensive. I use the classic and correct definition of racism that associates attributes to racial groups, or more precisely ethnicities and adds a value judgement to that. You are a racist if you think one ethnicity is intrinsically superior to others. I don't think Trump has that belief, it is also improbable for his character in my opinion.

First, your argument is different from the comment to which I replied. Whether Trump _is_ a racist and whether people have reasons for believing he is a racist that they can articulate are two completely different things.

>I use the classic and correct definition of racism

I really don't have any interest in debating what definition of racism is better - certainly not which one is "correct". But dictionaries and definitions are descriptive and subject to change; they're not normative. If your argument hinges on a different definition of a word, you're no longer have a good faith discussion with someone.

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

#535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's a few ways to infer whether or not a 1% response rate is truly representative, or if there's some selection bias with responders responding because they're different that non responders beyond that one simple binary behavior. My job is basically data analyst/programmer, but I have a decent background in research of this sort (not politics, surveys and qualitative research) and occasionally have to conduct sur…

The badly worded question issue is clearly major, but it's received so much publicity, and with meta pollers like 538 existing it seems like it shouldn't be a huge problem when there's such a wide selection of big money polls available. All those ideas seem decent, but as you said they're not really solving the problem, just inching you toward a less biased sample. I'm sure people that already declined to take the poll are real happy to be bothered again about it. As far as I can tell the only way to actually make polling work is to force people to respond, and obviously that won't happen. And even if it did people would give troll answers(at school we had captive polls and the last question was always "how seriously did you take this poll?" of course the least serious people always marked themselves as most serious). Even paying people to respond biases the sample because now you're more likely to get people who want money(not necessarily totally correlated with income). Of course you can infer that your sample is biased by one side being more enthusiastic, but without a way to enumerate how biased you're nowhere.

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

#536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marx's problem was that he thought of everything in terms of class. If I'm poor, and I know I'm poor, but I also think about something other than class when making political decisions (no matter what that "something" is), then I have "false consciousness". That is, if I don't think about this totally the way Marx says, I'm stupid. Nice. If you think about your life that one-dimensionally, you're poor in a way that Ma…

999 times out of 1000 if I ask a working class American to explain Marx's concept of surplus labor time, they would have no idea of what I was talking about. That is false consciousness. You're talking as if they rejected the idea. They don't even know what the idea is. A sizable amount of working class Americans have no idea that people die. They have no idea that their grandparents died. They have been to wakes and…

It's false consciousness if they don't know what Marx's concept of surplus labor time is? Riiiiight...

The working class is inconsistent with your model of them. It's your model that's wrong, not the working class.

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

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it really doesn't. You're making an extra leap in logic that isn't true for all people. Just because the protests could lose some votes doesn't mean everyone who acknowledge that possibility wanted them to stop. Pick any issue. A person can support the issue and recognize it may have negative consequences. From there I'm making the distinct that beliefs on the issue can go (at least) two ways: 1) The issue is too…

>A person can believe the lost votes are not important enough to override the importance of the protests. That person will spend their time discussing the issues important to the protests, not spend their time discussing how the protests are actually hurting their greater cause.

A responsible person considers the consequences of their actions and what trade offs are being made. Supporting the protests but also considering the consequences are not mutually exclusive and is in fact an obvious step to take for a mature and rational person.

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

#538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

There is no such thing as "external experience", this is just called reality. Experience = reality + human filter (mood, prejudice, ...) Experience is a human concept, therefore it is necessarily subjective. Humans are not machines. Thus "lived experience" is just an empty phrase, invented to give a virtuous appearance to prejudice.

It's a totally normal thing in english to add redundancy to emphasize. Global pandemic isn't wrong and nobody has to pay more to use two words instead of one. Lived experience is the same thing. Nothing wrong with emphasis.

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

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trafalgar got the margin much better than 538 in key states. Your list excludes several that 538 thought would be close but weren't: Ohio and Texas, and which ended up being close but 538 thought would be a blowout: Wisconsin. Putting those states in, you get Trafalgar erring in favor of Trump by 1.76 points, while 538 erred in favor of Biden by 4.37 points: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSulsnjJ96c…

I'll be interested to see the final count and compare on all states, but Trafalgar's issues are deeper than just deltas in my opinion. They had an arbitrary "shy trump voter" factor, which may be justifiable, but any "shy voter" effect is tautologically immeasurable (and thus just a guess on Trafalgar's part). They had weirdly consistent results where Trump was up by 3 points in lots of purple/blue states, which does…

They didn't have an "arbitrary shy Trump voter" factor. That's not how they did it. They observed that Trump voters were less likely to answer polls and tried to get at the data other ways.

Also, who cares about 50-state results? One of the key points Trafalgar's founder has made is that polling is a state-by-state exercise. All pollsters use data to estimate e.g. turnout among different demographics. National pollsters use things like exit polls, but Trafalgar digs into state-level voter registration data.

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

#540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A person can believe the lost votes are not important enough to override the importance of the protests. That person will spend their time discussing the issues important to the protests, not spend their time discussing how the protests are actually hurting their greater cause.

A responsible person considers the consequences of their actions and what trade offs are being made. Supporting the protests but also considering the consequences are not mutually exclusive and is in fact an obvious step to take for a mature and rational person.

OK? If you've thought through your actions, your still not going to belabor the point that the protests aren't helping in the elections. You'll talk about what is important enough to be worth those consequences.
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