In 2008...optimism among many (not me) reigned supreme. All we heard about was oversampling of dems...and anecdotal evidence about record turnout at their individual polling places. Republican turnout as described as mammoth.
Forward to 2012. SAME story...except this time I expected a landslide. All we heard about was "That poll is crap. D+8? YEAH RIGHT!!!" All we heard yesterday was story after story of record turnouts.
It all turned out to be crap. Any FReeper in ANY future elections who talks about a poll being garbage because of their D sample...I will simply remind them of yesterday.
I actually doubt all the polls because I understand a little bit about sampling because I use it for auditing. I’m trained to be skeptical of my own results. I also have a great deal of respect for the polls done and am very hesitant to challenge a poll because the internals seem wrong.
My issues with Nate’s analysis was twofold. I thought he was cherry picking which polls to use and was adding bias instead of decreasing it. Second, his translation of his analysis into a certainty factor to the nearest 10th decimal inferred an accuracy level that is not sustainable from the data.
But he was right.
“All we heard about was “That poll is crap. D+8? YEAH RIGHT!!!” All we heard yesterday was story after story of record turnouts.”
The “polls are oversampling Dems” argument was really one of the more frustrating things to see repeated over and over, here and on every conservative site. It’s like no one understood that the vast majority of pollsters do not weight their polls to a certain D/R/I sample, and it would not make sense to do so (since party ID is flexible, often changes with one’s voting preference, and is one of the things pollsters are trying to measure - weighing to a certain party ID target makes only slightly more sense than weighting directly to a certain result).
The simplest explanation for why virtually every poll this season had a party ID spread of D+5 to D+10 is that the party ID spread of the electorate was between D+5 and D+10. Occam’s Razor.
Sadly, writing anything like this before yesterday would have been enough to get people zotted around here. Hiding from the facts does not make them disappear. Denying the facts does not help us win. That must be one of the primary lessons we take away from this loss.
Good luck with that. It happens every election here.
Top 5 poll lies told here on FR:
1. Polls are crap.
2. People lie to pollster.
3. Undecided breaks for the challenger.
4. Republican’s do worse on the weekends.
5. The polls are used to demoralize not report.