And Clare Malone is a senior editor there? Must be Senior as in High School Senior.
These are the opinion makers?? God are we in trouble!
Posted on 08/13/2016 11:07:52 PM PDT by V K Lee
If you’re a close reader of political news, the website longroom.com might very well have come to your attention in the last week. The site hosts a polling page that purports to “remove the bias in the polls,” which mostly has the effect of showing Donald Trump up in the presidential race, though most polls show Hillary Clinton leading him by solid single-digit margins. If you’ve been a bit distracted by the Olympics and don’t have a clue what LongRoom is, no harm, no foul. In fact, that’s probably for the better, because the site’s methodology is askew and its purported “staff” has all the appearance of being fictitious.
For instance, the FiveThirtyEight polls-only forecast, which consolidates hundreds of polls, shows Clinton winning the popular vote 48.9 percent to 41.5 percent. The forecast gives her an 86.3 percent chance of winning the election right now. According to the most recent check-in with LongRoom, Trump is leading Clinton by 0.6 percentage points. The site’s methodology page assures readers that “it is a mathematical certainty, that as the election approaches, all of the polls will begin to match the polls here on LongRoom.”
Good to know.
LongRoom has already engendered the ire of my colleague Harry Enten, who took the site to task earlier this week for being, essentially, a novel form of election fan fiction:
“LongRoom claims to “unbias” the polls using “actual state voter registration data from the Secretary of State or Election Division of each state.” The website contends that almost every public poll is biased in favor of Clinton. Think about what that means: The website is saying that a large number of professional pollsters who make their living trying to provide accurate information — and have a good record of doing so — are all deliberately biasing the polls and aren’t correcting for it. Like many conspiracy theories, that seems implausible.
I’d also point out that election offices from different states collect different data. Some states don’t have party registration; other states don’t collect data on a person’s race; some states collect data on neither. There are some companies that try to fill in missing data for each state, though it costs a lot to get that data. Isn’t it more plausible the people who get paid to know what they are doing are right, while some anonymous website on the internet with unclear methodology is wrong?”
The methodology of LongRoom is, in other words, not quite sound. And while fan fiction, it is a particularly elaborate work of fan fiction, making us somewhat curious about its authorship. In 2012, Dean Chambers did much the same thing, “unskewing” the polls that correctly showed Mitt Romney losing, only to admit after the election that he’d been misguided in his efforts — Chambers’s name was out in the press and to his credit, he publicly took stock of his mistakes after the fact. But LongRoom and whoever runs it has gone out of its way to obfuscate its identity. The site has an “about us” page which lists four people associated with the site, but they each seem to be without any semblance of an online paper trail, an odd thing in the age of the internet.
“Michael Ellis,” the man listed as LongRoom’s managing editor, is described in only the vaguest of terms as “an Internet Executive with over 23 years of experience, including general management of mid to large sized publications. He has been involved with internet community management his entire career.” The three other staff members have similarly indistinct bios, and rather than photographed headshots, the staff is depicted in sketches. None of the staff appears to have Twitter accounts, let alone follow the @LongRoomNews account. Searches for the staff on other social networking sites did not lead anywhere and there is no listed point of contact for any of the LongRoom staff members anywhere on the site. FiveThirtyEight reached out to the site’s only point of contact for comment — a support email address — and did not hear back. A public records search for LongRoom yielded no results for the business. (In addition to its “unbiased” polling operation, the site aggregates news stories.)
But an analysis of the site’s IP address showed that in April 2015, LongRoom switched its registration to a domain that for a fee, allows registrants to keep their names private — Domains By Proxy, LLC. The last name associated with the website, as recently as January 2015, is Fred Waid, who listed the site’s associated organization as “American Separatist” based out of New Mexico. FiveThirtyEight reached out to Waid but had not heard back as of publication.
As English majors know, it’s best not to get too bogged down by the authorship question — work must stand on its own at a certain point, which is why everyone should stop obsessing over Elena Ferrante’s true identity — but polling is a business of transparency. It’s not enough to write out your methodology; if one purports to be holding other polling organizations publicly accountable, then isn’t it only fair to be publicly accountable yourself?
If the internet in her infinite wisdom has any more information about who’s behind LongRoom, we’d love to hear more. Please send tips to the email link below.
Thanks for this...
When things seem too good to be true, they probably are...
The internet is a "her?"
Well it is 2016. Everything is now a her.
Before that, everything was black.
“Think about what that means: The website is saying that a large number of professional pollsters who make their living trying to provide accurate information — and have a good record of doing so — are all deliberately biasing the polls and aren’t correcting for it. Like many conspiracy theories, that seems implausible.”
Like Journalists. Making a living trying to provide accurate information and have a good record but somehow ALL tell the same lie and report in bias fashion
Honestly, I don’t pay much attention to polls. I can control my vote tho, I hope so anyway.
Ignore all media
Get Out The Vote
So, a very liberal Nate Silver site is trying to debunk another poll analysis site. It sounds much like the “professional journalists” acting shocked that anyone would accuse them of bias, except now it’s the “professional pollsters” acting shocked.
Just remember, from the NY primary to Indiana, Trump over-performed his Real Clear Politics polling average by 9 percentage points. Even the Wisconsin primary, one of his worst showings, he over-performed his RCP polling average by .6 of a percentage point. What makes the “professional pollsters” doing the polling now think they are getting it right now when they obviously got it wrong during the primaries?
“Professional pollsters” are not above political bias any more than “professional journalists” are.
rothschilds....soros....rockefellers...hilarity clintoons gang...hous of saud...E.U. group....at least are against Trump.......
half the money of the world....
I think the contrast in attendance.....
is all the accuracy anyone can expect under these conditions...
pols?...?
Funny/odd that 538 is even concerned with it...
And Clare Malone is a senior editor there? Must be Senior as in High School Senior.
These are the opinion makers?? God are we in trouble!
I just remember from 2012 hoping that the polls were wrong and that unskewedpolls.com was right. Hillary should be crushed this year but when you have so many voters who are stupid, ignorant, etc, what can you do?
Go get ‘em Trump!
Where’s Laz to turn this kook to the right?
Someone needs to hack Diebold, and the spanish company SCYTL and find out what they are up to.
This is like asking the question of how or why something can come out of nothingness....so many conflicting agendas in the media & the culture concerning this election. Here’s my 2 cents: in this election Trump has 2 things Romney did not have in 2012 IMO: 1: Trump has “voter enthusiasm”...this enthusiasm gap shows in how Trump over-performs in all his elections as opposed to what his polls say. 2: Trump has a “Bradley Effect”...people simply will not tell pollsters or ever friends & family that they will be voting for Trump.
These 2 things, that I believe are in play, make this election difficult to poll & give Trump an upside that can’t be nailed down. Is it enough for him to win....who knows ? But he’s certainly not down in the polls like is being reported, especially by the likes of Silver who has been dead wrong about Trump all year long.
lol
country is ####ed if this continues.
100 pounds women on TV beating up six guys.
I’m sure most have read about the women in NYC challenging me, an ex boxer to various strength competitions because I had gained weight to 250.
The outcomes were hysterical.
Even if, and I doubt that if, the usual pollsters are trying to be accurate, the greater majority of Trump’s support is not in any of their databases of usual suspects to poll.
The polls, as events have shown throughout Trumps primary, are only able to approach the appearance of accuracy if the contest is limited only to the usual DNC vs GOPe matches.
A large percentage of Trump’s support comes from folks who’ve otherwise given up on the process of elections since they were never represented.
They are propping the market. Never in history were markets going so high when growth was so low or negative. I believe McCain also lost the elections right when he was doing good because surprise surprise, they decided to show the bad accounting of real estate at the last minute.
Opinion maker in islam was the story maker, ie. a bunch of fiction writers without money who ended up working for the Caliph to crush all followers of Ali, heir of Mohammad. We are in trouble indeed with all these milenial losers who only talk about what they learn from video games
Nate Silver isn’t what he pretends to be.
Trump is way ahead of Hilliary and the polls are skewed in order to cheat her to a win. Since you are New here I thought I would mention that.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.