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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  2719 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why those polls that say Clinton’s ahead could be wrong

    And the reason why they're baloney has nothing to do with conspiracy theories, partisan weighting, or even Russian hacking. It's all about common sense.

Don't believe the math because it isn't truthy enough?

The linked article explaining the truthiness is talking exclusively about post-convention bounces, not noise, not reversion to the mean, not all the polls, not all the statistics.

Play me out, keyboard Nate:

    It’s not that the arguments for why the polls could be underrating Trump’s support (e.g. the supposed presence of “shy Trump” voters) are all that strong. There are reasons to think the polls could be underrating Clinton’s support instead of Trump’s, in fact. But polls aren’t always as accurate as they were in the past few presidential elections, and given the large number of undecided voters, they could be off in either direction. A 6- or 7-point polling error is just on the outer fringe of what’s possible based on the historical record in U.S. elections.

    With that said, it’s not the massive polling miss that would concern me if I were Clinton. Instead, I’d worry about what might happen if Trump was on a rising trajectory as Nov. 8 approaches, having cut my lead down to 3 or 4 percentage points, and then there was a more modest polling error on the order of what we saw in advance of Brexit, where the final polls were off by about 4 points. Polling errors of that magnitude are considerably more common than 6- or 7-point errors.





b_b  ·  2719 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Well, you can't expect this guy to "believe" math when he doesn't understand it:

    Clinton thus jumped to a 14-point lead over Trump in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll on Monday, only to see that lead significantly drop to nine points in the same poll just one day later. That's a 36-percent swing in 24 hours.

    The Rasmussen poll had Clinton ahead by seven points on Monday, but Trump took the lead in that poll by Thursday morning by two points, a swing of 128 percent!

No, that's a 5 percent and 9 percent swing, respectively. This is the same as when a food gives you a "200% increase" in the odds of you getting some obscure cancer, when the study measured a 0.001% chance in on cohort and 0.003% in the other. It's just wrong, and it's one of the many ways media unintentionally mislead the public--reporters aren't generally well versed in statistics.

I'm of a mind with Silver. I think it would be far more likely than not for someone to under report voting for Clinton. To get truthy myself, I think that Trump supporters are macho, and friends of Trump supports feel the need to keep up. When your buddy starts making fun of you for not drinking Miller Lites at the same rate as him, you have an incentive to lie about your beer chugging skills. My guess is that there's a lot of people who are closet Clinton supporters, but who feel the need to keep up appearances. I wouldn't bank on it, however. Actually, that's not true. I gave Clinton 429 electoral votes in our office pool, by far the most of anyone who's playing. It's unlikely she'll get there, but I think the chances are well beyond non-zero.

kleinbl00  ·  2719 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm of a mind that it's fuckin' 24 days to the election and STILL nobody is talking about the elephant in the room.

b_b  ·  2719 days ago  ·  link  ·  

They fucked us in Michigan by passing some new rules about signature eligibility in ballot drives, which state and federal courts have said was a legal thing to do. Makes sense though, because Michigan is usually like the 48th state to catch up to whatever the national trend is. Heaven forbid we be on the leading edge of anything.