Posted on 11/05/2014 8:26:12 AM PST by C19fan
For much of this election cycle, Democrats complained the polls were biased against them. They said the polls were failing to represent enough minority voters and applying overly restrictive likely-voter screens. They claimed early-voting data was proving the polls wrong. They cited the fact that polls were biased against Democrats in 2012.
The Democrats’ complaints may have been more sophisticated-seeming than the ”skewed polls” arguments made by Republicans in 2012. But in the end, they were just as wrong. The polls did have a strong bias this year — but it was toward Democrats and not against them.
Based on results as reported through early Wednesday morning — I’ll detail our method for calculating this in a moment — the average Senate poll conducted in the final three weeks of this year’s campaign overestimated the Democrat’s performance by 4 percentage points. The average gubernatorial poll was just as bad, also overestimating the Democrat’s performance by 4 points.
(Excerpt) Read more at fivethirtyeight.com ...
Polls biased toward DemocRATS—You don’t say?
I hope they continue to overestimate Rat participation because that will depress Rat voter turnout.
It’s been a problem forever in MA, which occasionally elects Republicans. It’s always a surprise when it happens, because the polls usually over-sample metro Boston.
Quite right. Polls are used to bludgeon the weak-minded into accepting the fallacy of the appeal to majority on far too many issues, e.g. gay marriage.
The wording of the questions, the ordering of choices, the ‘weighting,’ the selection of respondents, the ridiculously small sample sizes vis-a-vis the general population and the massive confirmation bias of the pollsters all serve to expose the Wizards as frauds.
Once upon a time, polls collected and presented data when such collection and compilation was time-consuming and expensive. In the instantaneous worldwide communications age, polls are anachronisms and graven images worshiped by far too many.
And despite all their lies, cheating ,lying and rigged machines they’re still LOOOOOOOOSERS!
YOUGOV (now HuffPost-controlled): worst pollsters?
Before ‘partnering’ with HuffPost these guys were great.
Their final polls:
http://today.yougov.com/news/2014/10/31/yougov-2014-final-pre-election-polls/
All slanted to Dems, margins not even in the ballpark.
HuffPost has corrupted their methodology and/or their panels IMO.
Nate Silver gets it right and ironically enough the predispositive Democratic bias of the polls blinded the Democrats to their catastrophically weakened state. They never saw how weak they were actually were and believed they were stronger since that was what the polls told them and it had kind of a ratcheting effect - downwards to their real level of support.
Its a lesson in that if you take the polls as an article of faith, they’re more liable to harm than to help you. A lesson the Democrats will be digesting long after the shocks of last night’s enormous losses have faded into history. Take polls with a grain of salt.
Was discussing this yesterday morning with my father. Told him I thought the polls were overestimating Dem numbers chiefly because they got so burned in 12.
Rasmussen was my primary example.
BTW the Des Moines Register poll that was called an outlier for having Ernst at +7 was dead on. The Quinipiac poll that came out 12 hours later having the race EVEN was crap.
I knew this at the time as the polling outfit the Register uses has been doing Iowa politics for decades with an impeccable record.
They did that to make the races look tighter than actually were so that they would get the DemoRats out to vote! If they hadn’t even less DemoRats probably would of voted!!
The Register poll told me we’d go to 55 the minute it was posted (and yanked numerous times) here.
But by all means, keep skewing the polls towards RATS. Messes up their fraud calculations and we STILL win.
” the average Senate poll conducted in the final three weeks of this year’s campaign overestimated the Democrat’s performance by 4 percentage points. The average gubernatorial poll was just as bad, also overestimating the Democrat’s performance by 4 points.”
A good chunk of that has to be Texas, and since we finally had one man, one vote (i.e., Voter ID) in this election, the polls were way understating the margin of victory. The polls here were showing a 10-12 point victory, but the average margin was 10 points higher than that.
It’s all the fault of the polls, since the were so skewed towards the demoncrats it suppressed voter turn out don’t you know.
‘YOUGOV (now HuffPost-controlled): worst pollsters?’
Rassmussen, since being bought out by a Soros group, has become the worst pollster. This may/probably only applies to presidential approval, but in that one area the problem is glaring. While all the other polls are showing Obama between 39 and 42, Rassmussen on average has him ~47-48. [Today is the lone exception for wks; has O at 45.] The sole purpose of this misdirection is to prop up the RealClearPolitics poll averages. It’s a sick racket.
bump
Any pollster who was grossly wrong should have their credibility questioned.
Pollsters rely on credibility and trust. No one will trust them next time and rightfully so.
Interesting.
I wonder if there is a way to prove that this election (in Texas) was different (an fairer) than in the past. It would be handy when Holder claims that there isn’t voter fraud.
IMO....Limbaugh’s theory about how they skew polls to prop up Democrats until the last week, when they need to salvage their credibility and start posting real numbers, is now out the window.
They no longer care about credibility.
They will shill for Dems until the 11th. hour. And beyond.
Slanting a few races now means more to them than their
credibility.
“I wonder if there is a way to prove that this election (in Texas) was different (an fairer) than in the past. It would be handy when Holder claims that there isn’t voter fraud.”
There are ways...there are houses in LaHood where they have 14 registered ‘voters’. I suspect that 12 or so of them don’t have ID (since they don’t exist). It would be VERY INTERESTING to look at ‘turnout’ for those residences...and if there’s a steep drop, you ask questions.
But will that happen...I seriously doubt it.
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