[Wolfstar]

This study is original material created for the information and use of FreeRepublic.com readers and active participants. Please feel free to share the information with others.

[Wolfstar]

Pinging as promised.

[ambrose]

ping

[Timesink]

Media Shenanigans / Schadenfreude ping

[Timesink]

One question: People's opinions on things do change over time. Am I misinterpreting that you are, to some extent, arguing that polls taken two months before the election are somehow less valid because they did not end up matching with the final election results?

[KayEyeDoubleDee]

What is/are your background/credentials, in terms of statistcs, etc?

[heleny]

Wow, the LAT got 60%? I know 20% (the Schwarzenegger vote predictions) was always wrong, and many FReepers recognized that, but I didn't know their results on the other four questions were so (relatively) accurate.

If someone analyzed the actual error (instead of categorizing right/wrong), the LAT probably would not be in the top two, since their Schwarzenegger predictions were very far from the actual results.

Thanks for summarizing the results and sharing with us all!

[Marie Antoinette]

Nice! Thanks for all you do.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I think your analysis is mathematically flawed. Trouble with independent events and all that. For instance, "YES" and "NO" are not independent. The stated margin of error (MOE) in a poll is purely the 95-percentile sampling error. It is only a statement of the uncertainty attributable to a finite sample size.

The bigger problem with polls is systematic error. People who take time to talk to pollsters (I'm not one of them) are not representative of the population. An honest poll works to suppress systematic error, there are so-called "push polls" designed to produce a certain result where every attempt is made to build in systemic error.

To illustrate MOE: If there are one million red balls and one million black balls and you draw 1000 balls "at random" the 95-percentile sampling error is about 31. This means 95% of the time you draw between 468-532 red (or black) balls, even though the though the "expected" number is 500. Given that you drew 47% red balls (with a MOE of 3.1%) you would also report 532 black balls with the same MOE. The two events are not independent.

[alwaysconservative]

Wow! Bump and THANKS for all your hard work! I understand that you are evaluating the polls only on the terms of their own stated accuracy (MOE), and not their validity. I'm still not sure about the dynamics of a push poll (LATimes) on the actual result, for example. Some of the number shifts were due to external situations (Indian gaming money, the Arnold smear, and candidates dropping out), while others were probably due to forcing a vote in the survery, and not allowing an "undecided" response. And I would LOVE to see the internal polls from each party or candidate to see how they tracked with the public polls.

[R. Scott]

But, but … how will we know how to vote if the talking heads don’t tell us who is the favorite?

[OrioleFan]

Polling today is part of the political corruption in this country. Years ago, polls were used to find out what people think. Today, with the introduction of demographics, polls are used to influence the voting public. You can find a group of people (demographic) who will respond in a certain way to a certain wording of the questions. If the result is not exactly what you want, you alter the wording of question and run the poll again. This is repeated until you get the percentages to come out and that is the result that gets published. When you see a poll it's important to look at who commissioned it. You usually know what the results are going to be when ABC, CBS, Time, CNN, MSNBC, Newsweak, and any other liberal organization is paying the bills.

[Grampa Dave]

Thanks for your excellent work in this thread.

[BibChr]

bookmark

[BibChr]

Thanks for your work. I've wondered (mostly kiddingly) whether polling should be outlawed.

Dan
(c8

[ampat]

Lots of time, energy and money spent on polls and this post. All I can say is: DUH!

[DoctorZIn]

This post has been added to the… California In Transition- Must read Threads!

Want on our daily or major news ping lists? Freepmail DoctorZin

[Doctor Stochastic]

The article seems almost as inaccurate as the polls in some ways. For example, the yes-no vote are described as though they were independent variables rather than correlated. The MOE's are incorrectly described for multiple choice polls (although the polls themselves probably do just as badly.) Additionally, the MOE only describes the statistical error in the sample; polling (as pointed out by the pollsters) is subject to greater error through systematic effects such as question wording, etc.

[Congressman Billybob]

Back on August 12, in my article "Nuts and Bolts in California," I not only successfully predicted all the results of the California recall election, I also predicted the incompetent struggle to understand what happened, after the polls were proven grossly inaccurate. (In all fairness, I missed exactly one prediction. I wrote that there would be one extra Republican candidate whose vote totals would not effect the outcome of the election. But I thought that hoeless Republican would be Bill Simon, rather than Tom McClintock.) I am curious about the methodology of RealClearPolitics. The only three polls that were close to the final pattern of this election across the board were conducted by Stanford University. For some reason, the source claims they did only one. They did three. And the reason they were closer than all the others to the final result is that THEY USED THE ACTUAL CALIFORNIA BALLOT rather than phone questions, to gauge the intentions of the potential voters.

The Editors of RealClearPolitics are usually pretty sharp cookies. But on this unique election, with the evidence in their hands, they are still missing the boat. Big time.

Congressman Billybob

Latest column, "Three People who Have it Coming," discussion thread. IF YOU WANT A FREEPER IN CONGRESS, CLICK HERE.

[Saundra Duffy]

Thanks for a very interesting analysis. I'll pass it on. Thanks again.

[Pres Raygun]

Excellent work. For long time Freepers, the inaccuracy of polls is well known. The MOE of a poll is greatly misunderstood by the public. MOE refers only to the precision of the poll and has nothing to do with the poll's accuracy. Technically precision is a measure of how a particular polling methodology will give the same result if conducted over and over again. For instance if a polling company conducted the same poll three times on the same day, each of the three polls should give the same results within the MOE. Accuracy on the other hand refers to whether or not a particular measurement (poll) is correct or gets the right answer. Precision (MOE) has nothing to do with accuracy. For a poll to be accurate, the polling sample must be unbiased, meaning the people polled must be statistically representative of the actual electorate. Pollsters realize that they never have a truly unbiased sample. Consequently, they try to compensate for the bias inherent in their methodology, but fudging the raw poll results, by correction factors. The only way for a pollster to determine these correction factors is to do the same analysis you have done on their own polls.

In conclusion polls are not to be trusted. Polls with an MOE of 3% may be inaccurate by 20% and the public has no way of knowing the accuracy of a poll until after the election. Tracking polls have some limited value in showing trends, because movement from one candidate to another is somewhat independent of the sample bias and of the pollster's correction factors. Only the direction of the trend is somewhat reliable, since the magnitude of the trend is dependent on the sample bias and the pollster's correction factors. Unfortunately, trends are often only a few percentage points and therefore are under the polls MOE making them meaningless.