Posted on 06/09/2015 5:38:56 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
When Nate Silver, the undisputed king of election forecasting, declares that "The World May Have a Polling Problem," it's time to take notice. Why are public opinion polls increasingly proving unreliable?
It seems clear that two things could be happening. Either those who agree to cooperate with the pollsters are unrepresentative of the population, or they are deliberately lying to pollsters about their preferences.
Why on Earth would either of those, or both, be happening?
Because there are so many polls in the field that few "normal" people are willing to answer questions honestly, leaving responses to oddballs or those eager to have a little fun at the expense of the pollster.
Can you blame them? Growing up in the 1970s and '80s, I never recall our household receiving calls from pollsters. Polls started to become a little more common in the 1990s. But in the past decade or so, they've exploded. I don't just, or even primarily, mean calls from professional political pollsters, though there are certainly more of those, including a lot more "push" polls, in which a person (or, more often, a recording of a person) on the phone asks questions not to gauge your opinions, but to shape them in the direction of a particular candidate or party.
But that's just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I call Comcast to discuss an issue on my bill, and before I reach a human being I'm asked if I wouldn't mind answering a few questions at the end of the call. I take the car in for an oil change, and I receive an email a day later to ask me a few dozen questions about my customer experience — and then a phone call a few days after that,
(Excerpt) Read more at theweek.com ...
Polls are some sort of Orwellian truth squad to tell you what they want you to believe. Get with the program.
Push polling isn’t designed to get the numbers of support, it is there to plant the seeds of rejection of certain candidates.
I don’t answer the questions of strangers.
Silver just got lucky when the results matched his biases a few times in a row. If there was a random or structural problem with polls, the errors wouldn’t all seem to benefit one side of the political spectrum.
I pretty much refuse to participate.
I consider unsolicited phone polls as potentially dangerous as you don't know who is really calling seeking information about you. It may not really be a poll at all...
The author overlooks the obvious:
There are certain demographic groups to are more likely to have a landline phone, be at home to answer the phone, willing to answer the phone, and willing to answer personal questions posed by a stranger, and do so honestly.
Pollsters claim they can poll these people and apply a secret formula to accurately reflect the opinions of the entire population. But, it is all BS, and has been so for decades.
This is why I laugh at polls on gun ownership. Only an idiot would tell the truth to a stranger.
I have in my conservative book collection Matthew Robinson’s “Mobocracy: How the Media’s Obsession with Polling twists the news, alters elections, and undermines democracy”. I can remember it being mentioned in the book that back in the 1976 election season, poll numbers were only mentioned a very small handful of times. By 1990s and 2000s, polls had become the crack cocaine of political debate and discussion in the media.
Very disturbing portrait in this book, to say the least.
With so much leftnoid venom out there I wonder if the question “do you support same-sex ‘marriage’” was asked and I responded “incorrectly” the surveyor might scream “bigot” and threaten me. Also caller-ID has IMHO derailed poll accuracy. Only the lonely and poor don’t have caller ID.
Yet when the ‘respected’ Pew Research Polling states that more Americans are becoming liberal, every one of the hot-air pontificators expanded breathlessly on its importance! This just weeks after EVERY POLLSTER in Great Britain called the May Election WRONG, horribly wrong. It should be a lesson that the error was in favor of the liberal Labour Party but of course there was no bias in that conclusion - right?
polls just like the elections all over the world including the USA are either all bought and paid for or the results are manipulated (digitally) for the “desired” results and true reflections of anyone participating. Hell I doubt if we have had a true legal election since 2004...soros company somewhere in europe counted the votes the last two times...and low and behold it turn out that the elections were both times decided in just a few locations at the very end...at least that was the case in 2012.
Right, polls are utterly inaccurate. You may remember the 12 elections. Many conservatives came up with all kinds of inside baseball reasons the polls were completely wrong, understating the vote for Romney by 3 to 7%.
I fully expected a GOP victory. Then we held the election and dang if the polls weren’t in aggregate dead on. Most notably Silver, who pulled off an amazing level of prediction.
So don’t just tell me the polls are wrong, with the assumption they’re wrong in the direction you’d prefer. Not when actual elections keep proving them right.
Don’t forget that the Scottish independence referendum was wildly off.
The polls also just wildly mispredicted the Turkish elections.
I don’t answer polling calls, and if I do accidentally pick up the phone I hang up as soon as I realize what it is. I only answer Amazon polls or other customer polls when I have something to complain about. If I were exit polled (I never have been) I would lie about my choices.
Does that make me a bad data source?
Because the pollsters are increasingly commissioned to steer the outcome instead of just ask a question. and quantify the results.
“usually a 97 year old lady in Beverly Hills. “
Black, dwarf lesbian here.
Both the polls and Nate Silver were wrong re the 2014 elections, underestimating the Republican vote by several percentage points, and the GOP majority in both the Senate and the House by several seats.
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