Before The Election
After the Election
I think it's safe to say the pollsters were wrong, again.
07 November 2024
6 comments:
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Jon Stewart Loses his mind on his late night show.
ReplyDelete"To the pollsters I don't want o ever fu*king hear from you again"
"Blow me"
https://x.com/Phuzzyl0gic/status/1854204909324746790
From the "you hate them, but you don't hate them enough" file, add pollsters. I had been saying not to pay attention to the polls until the last week or so before the election because next time they can and will advertise they were the closest to predicting things last time and get more business.
ReplyDeleteAs it got closer to the election, it started to seem like the idea was to be keep the polls looking close. Maybe because close polls increases the audience for the media, or something. It's like the pollsters lost the idea of what they're supposed to be. It didn't seem to match the many, many reports we were getting of things around the country.
When I get called, I always tell the guy on the other end of the phone (who's almost certainly a low-paid employee and not personally at fault) the wildest lies I can think of. I've told them that I planned to vote Socialist Labor or Communist just to throw their polls off.
ReplyDeleteOne talking head on TV was saying that it turned out basically as he expected. Trump tends to do about 2-5 points better than whatever the mainstream polls say. A lot of this I think is because there are a lot of people wo secretly vote for Trump but don't want people to know. And a lot of conservatives and Republicans don't trust polls and don't respond to them. Some as has been mentioned even outright lie to the pollsters just to throw them off. I am of the not responding camp. Who I plan to vote for or did vote for is none of anyone else's business. It's probably not that hard to guess anyway of course.
ReplyDelete-swj
Most of what Stewart said is, as usual, dead wrong, whether due to stupidity or deliberate lying. It's easier to list what he got right. One, Joe Biden was very old when he was nominated. Two, the pollsters were full of shit this time around.
ReplyDeleteThe one about the pollsters is actually interesting. I believe it was Nate Silver who first noticed the big problem we had with outliers this time around: there weren't anywhere near enough of them. His argument is at in case anybody's interested. I'll just pick out one quote, comparing hundreds of polls of the Seven Swing States in October to a theoretical honest set of the same number of polls where the answer really was the tie that everybody was claiming: "Specifically, the odds are 1 in 9.5 trillion against at least this many polls showing such a close margin." I had described that as lottery ticket odds, which further research shows I must recant: a ticket to the Iowa Lottery Mega Millions (jackpot as of this writing $334,000,000 according to ) has a chance of winning of one in 302,575,350, which is four orders of magnitude more likely.
I see I did something wrong, and my links disappeared. Okay, I'll try it this way.
ReplyDeleteNate Silver's argument is at https://www.natesilver.net/p/theres-more-herding-in-swing-state
The Iowa Lottery information is at https://ialottery.com/Pages/Games-Online/MegaMillions.aspx