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.
Not this “unskewed polls” stuff again.
Four years ago, Unskewed Polls was making much the same claim. We saw how that turned out.
WE have reached a point now of total manipulation and polls are to be ignored, more or less.
There are so many agents intervening in this election, both foreign and domestic that the truth died way back in 2008.
Are we more corrupt than say the 1960 election? Not sure but we are in a very bad state...
Tried to get to longroom but could only get “website unavailable” messages.Is it gone?
See, this is where Zogby went wrong. Nate has a cadre of Millenials working for him specifically for accountability laundering...Nate screws up? 'Hey you, what's your name, girl with the nose ring - write a nasty bit about LongRoom'
Reuters has already admitted to changing the way they will poll in the last two weeks.
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN10910T
This has never been done before. Insiders are saying it’s because the polls showed Trump with a 15 point advantage.
Now if you do not believe that then just look at the actual polls in the articles. This takes a little more research, but what you will find is that they are now polling 15% more Democrats than Republicans even thought Democratic voting is close to an all time low and Republican voting is at an all time high. Trump won the nomination with the most primary votes for an RNC candidate ever. This is even though there were 17 candidates.
It’s no secret that Sanders lost 11 States to Hillary’s Super Delegates. In other words. In other word the DNC Super Delegates threw out the Will of the DNC voter. Hillary did not win it fair and square. She stole it via the Super Delegate. Plus Hillary could barely get 100 people at a rally while Sanders had thousands.
Now that we have the nominees. Trump has thousands while Hillary can’t even get 300 people in Orlando as the DNC nominee. At this stage she should have a minimum of 10,000 as the DNC nominee. .
Hillary is NOT popular at all. Trump should early win. The media and the Globalist know this. Hence, why they are throwing everything at Trump including the kitchen sink.
Most pollsters have always lied in an attempt to sway the actual vote on election day. A few days out, they start hedging their bets, reporting an unexpected change in the direction of the polls; knowing that on election day they’ll be shown up for the liars they are.
Must be over target since the long knives are out to,hunt down the messenger
Imagine the media being outraged by a “ biased “ social media web site....
You may be up to something
The hackers may be running scared of being hacked themselves
The polls do not have a “good track record.” Their “final” numbers are outside the margin of error about half the time, and biased against conservatives. Ditto, the “raw” exit polls (the media only release exit polls after they’ve massaged them to match the actual numbers). And, there’s a lot of movement from mid year to election, with a strong tendency toward the conservative. Finally, there is a troublesome difference between “anonymous” polls (internet and robo-caller polls) versus live-caller polls.
Going back to 2012, the “unskewed” polls were predicated on a similar partisan mix that year to prior years. A similar argument could have been made as to the demographic mix. So, the unskewed polls were really “what if”? What if turn-out is not what is being projected in the polls? This was a valid exercise early during the process. But, pollsters have methods to differentiate “likely” voters from others. Going into the last week, Romney looked good. Then, Superstorm Sandy hit, and the President looked Presidential. The numbers moved. Plus, it didn’t help that Romney lost the third debate, having won the first, and gaining a draw in the second. If Romney had at least gained a draw in the third debate and/or if Superstorm Sandy hadn’t hit, Romney would have been elected President and the poll unskewers would have looked brilliant.
In any case, 2012, like 2004, was close.
The fundamentals say that the challenger should win big this year. But, the opposition vote is badly split with the Libertarian drawing high single-digits and a lot of Republican-type voters undecided. There is a lot more upside for Trump than for Hillary. My advise to all Trumpeters is stay focused and Get Out the Vote.
It may be that this is our last hoorah
I will do everything I can to elect Trump. It is what I can do
a large number of professional pollsters who make their living trying to provide accurate information
The above statement is not true. Nate Silver himself has argued the other side. Professional pollsters are motivated by the desire to get hired by the media and by professional politicians. Professional pollsters overlap campaign consultants and those campaign consultants are motivated by the desire to get hired.
Both the media and professional politicians have demonstrated that they are willing to pay big bucks to be told what they want to hear. Jeb Bush is the best example of that. A cursory look at 2010 and 2014 elections would tell any moron that Jeb was not the guy in 2016 primary. But pollsters told Jeb&Co what they wanted to hear and got paid big bucks for lying.
I’d compare in to ads on TV that say: 3 out of 4 doctors use our product...when what the ad really says is: We sent a sample of our product to 3 out of 4 doctors.
The mainstream polls ARE in fact skewed because they are sampling more Democrats than Republicans. This is not a “conspiracy theory” but a documented fact. The pollsters are on the gravy train & as such are propagandizing against Trump with their manipulated polls which are worthless. The establishment are scared of Trump & are pulling every trick in the book. Just look how they misrepresent him & take everything he says out of context.
Well, maybe not. This tells me little Nate is concerned or he wouldn’t even be looking at this site. Moreover, when has little Natey ever admitted his errors, like Brexit, Israel the 2014 election, even Trump’s primaries?
This article says the “professional “ pollsters want to be right, that that is how they make their living.
That’s absurd. There is great wealth in manipulation, and depending on the payment in political years, some even continue manipulation through the final hours of the campaign. Others are concerned with their final polls being close to the vote they’ve worked to manipulate. (It provides a measure of how effective their manipulation has been.)
Any polling firm that will not provide access to their internals wants you to blindly believe them.
Next, with all the media and all the establishment and all the chamber of commerce aligned against Trump, it is ridiculous for this article to suggest polling firms should be viewed as honest. Especially ridiculous when so many of the leadership are themselves politically associated.
Finally, I think scoffing at the idea that bias can be corrected is very short sighted. It’s a question of the right standard and the right mathematics. Mathematics gives insight into bias in all kinds of other fields, so to suggest a general statement that bias cannot be demonstrated ever is absurd. All of us agree that the actual vote shows where prior polls were biased. It is not irrational to look for a bias adjustment standard prior to that vote.
Whether that standard has been found might be debatable, but I can suggest a standard right off the top of my head.........a scrupulously honest, large poll, regularly conducted.
If Trump voters don’t tell the pollster they are voting for Trump, the Dems won’t know how many votes to steal.
Looks like they’re scared of longroom... Which, btw, is inaccessible at the moment. Maybe the left has released their hackers on it with a denial of service or something...
:: 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. ::
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[pause for a large intake of breath and picking myself up from the floor]
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