In an article by Tal Kopan published today, The Boston Globe asks “Why are election polls all over the place, and which should you pay attention to?” Here’s the lede: WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump by 3 percentage points in Michigan. Or maybe it’s by 1 point. Or maybe Trump leads by 2. Or 4. It…
No matter what poll-based content you read, you are not just reviewing what the data show. You are reading data, corrected for bias, weighted for lack of representation, scored for bias, aggregated, and then manipulated by a model. Each of these “corrections” is a human decision. These models are valuable, but they do not represent…
Who is “winning” the U.S. presidential race? No one is winning the race, because it depends on what people do on Election Day. There is no “ahead” or “behind.” It’s not like a basketball game where the team with a 20-point lead is far more likely to win, and the team with a 20-point deficit…
The polls predicted a Biden landslide, as well as Democratic takeover of the Senate majority. Neither happened. Let’s look at why polls may be having problems with prediction right now. Where the polls were way off According to estimates by fivethirtyeight.com, an aggregation of polls indicated that Biden would get 51.8% of the final vote…
A friend of mine got an email “poll” announcement from the Republican National Committee. This is a “push” poll — an attempt to conduct politics using the poll as a cover. I’ll explain why no legitimate political party should ever do this. Here’s what the email looked like: And if you scroll all the way…
For months, the political media have had nothing to talk about but polls and expectations. Yesterday reality crashed the party in Iowa, revealing the vacuity of the polls and the “expectations game.” Let’s examine how poll/expectations-based “analysis” differs from reality-based analysis. The polls were totally off Let’s compare two recent Iowa polls, the Quinnipiac poll done Sunday and…
When you hear an outlandish poll result, you first thought may be, “Wow, people are stupid.” You’d be wrong. Blame the pollsters and the people who publicize their spurious results, not the supposed “voters” they contacted. In the last month, we’ve heard these unbelievable poll results: 30% of likely Republican voters think we should bomb Agrabah, the fictional…
Sometimes the political media gets so tangled up in its own underwear that it’s comical. Musings about expectations don’t qualify as news — they should be marked “for entertainment purposes only.” That’s why I must ridicule Kathie Obradovich’s recent article in the Des Moines Register (also reprinted into the Boston Globe). There are candidate positions. There is…
I’m sick of people treating presidential poll numbers as if they are facts. They’ve got no connection to the upcoming election. Drawing precise conclusions from a sample of 450 likely voters a year before the election is bullshit. Look, I’m no newcomer to consumer surveys. I spent 18 years launching and working with Forrester’s broad…