Vice President Kamala Harris' refusal to break with the Biden administration's support for Israel's assault on Gaza cost her millions of potential Democratic voters. Will the Democratic Party learn from this and listen to its voters who want leaders to oppose sending more weapons to Israel? #Gaza #E...
Oh for crying out loud. They surveyed LESS THAN 500 PEOPLE.
This "damning" new poll is bullshit. They're extrapolating out from 474 people polled to try and pretend like they can accurately tell me what 19 MILLION people think?
This is just sad.
Edit: lol at the downvote. But seriously, that's not a representative sample size. By several orders of magnitude. This is stupid.
That was for the "Biden voters in swing states" poll, so a much smaller population than most polls. Most nationwide political polls of the general public were in the 1,000-1,500 range for a 2-3 point margin of error. Polls with larger sizes were likely to also get useful crosstabs.
MOE for this poll was +/-4.9%, which is high, but not "this is meaningless trash, what even is statistics?!?", especially when the headline numbers are just general sentiment rather than a head to head. In the worst case if "Gaza" was 24 and "the economy" was 29, it's not a very large difference in the finding.
If the samples are randomly distributed a very small increase in sample size will have a big effect on the probability your sampled estimate will be close to the actual population's reading
I can't seem to find any pages that explain that simple concept simply, but if you're really interested these both get into it
I hadn't even noticed how small that sample size was. 474 is a tiny ass study. This kind of poll should have been conducted with far more participants if it wanted to be taken more seriously. At least 1000. It's an online pollster, so it's not like it'd be impossible to get that many.