If the polling is this wacky, why bother publishing it at all?
If the polling is this wacky, why bother publishing it at all?
Over the weekend, ABC and the Washington Post published the results of a poll that made both operations look like its results were the product of a month-long exercise with a Magic 8-Ball. The way you know it was an embarrassment is the Post story about the poll began by telling us all we should probably ignore it completely.
The Post-ABC poll shows Biden trailing Trump by 10 percentage points at this early stage in the election cycle, although the sizable margin of Trump’s lead in this survey is significantly at odds with other public polls that show the general election contest a virtual dead heat. The difference between this poll and others, as well as the unusual makeup of Trump’s and Biden’s coalitions in this survey, suggest it is probably an outlier.
It was done entirely by phone. What person under, say, 60 answers an unknown call on their phone at this point? And if they left a voicemail to call them back, who would trust it? Basically, they're getting extremely gullible people (i.e. mostly Trump voters) to respond to the poll.
I think the only way you can do successful polling at this point is focus groups with carefully selected demographics, and I would even be dubious there.
Don't get complacent. That's the most important takeaway. We need to not only beat Republicans, but to give them massive losses. We want them to lose by double digit margins so they realize fascism has no place in the US, and MAGA can ma-get the fuck out of here.
I'm really curious to read more about the poll itself later, just with how unusual this is. What in the methodology screwed it up? Or do they just have an incredibly wide confidence interval?
It's also worth remembering I think, polling was very wrong in the midterms. They suggested at best that Republicans would win by a little bit, and at worst the "red tidal wave". And we know now it was a trickle, that they can't even claim as a total victory. Dems gained a Senate seat, and a lot of important state government positions in swing states.
There's a few causes for this mismatch I believe:
There's a lot of shitty Republicans pollsters these days that provide a lot of low quality data.
Analysts overcorrected their models after 2020 and it undercounts Democrats.
The huge backlash for overturning Roe isn't being captured in polls for some reason. Abortion continues to be a huge issue that's benefitting Democrats. The economy and inflation were thought to be the largest drivers for the midterms, but if they were, people saw Democrats as the solution for that.
I just want to make it clear to everyone that being on mushrooms would not in any way make you think that. In fact, it’s pretty stupid to think that any drugs would do that. Anyone who believes in Trump probably needs some drugs
Putting aside a LOT of other issues, the reason we’re seeing more polls that are very clearly nonsense is twofold:
spam calls have proliferated to an absolutely absurd degree, to the extent that most people refuse to pick up the phone unless it’s a known contact - and even that’s not necessarily a sure bet, because caller id can be trivially spoofed.
the mainstream media “outrage narrative”, which drives engagement/addictive consumer behavior/ad views - it behooves media networks who sell ads to present as many situations as possible as a toss-up, regardless of whether or not that’s an accurate representation, simply in the interest of profit.
Mushrooms don't deserve this. They've proven beneficial and healthy in defeating depression, properly coping with trauma, cognitive decline, etc. This negatively associates mushrooms with idiocy and it's irresponsible and unwarranted.
I don't disagree, but those young voters still have to show up to vote or the result is the same. They didn't show up in the last election and my state anded up with a Republican supermajority.
Mid 20s gen z here. I'll be sure to vote for Biden. All in all he's pretty alright in my book. Sure things could be better, but that's going to take a bit more time, hopefully his successors will be better.
I have absolutely no intention of voting for Trump, but if you ask me on a poll about it, I might tell the pollster that I plan to vote for Trump. I don’t want people getting too comfortable with an assumed outcome ever again.
They publish it to try and suppress voters to make them feel like there's no chance. Then when they lose they can claim election fraud because the bogus polling had them winning. It's a common tactic Conservatives use now to suppress votes. People need to show up no matter what the polling or news is saying.
Polling has fallen into the same problem as everything else, they just skew the methods to make the numbers fit a narrative, be that the person paying them or some misguided ideas. Polling has been shit for years now, just ignore it