Posted on 11/07/2014 9:00:37 AM PST by Kaslin
I've been called a lot of things over the years, but "biased for the Democrats" has generally not been one of them.
But that's what I and other pollsters were labeled following Tuesday's elections by statistical gurus such as Nate Silver of ESPN.
What's that? You've never heard of Nate Silver? Well, don't worry; neither has 99 percent of America. The other 1 percent probably relied on his lousy statistical forecast and bet that Brazil would win the World Cup earlier this year. (They got routed.)
But Nate is right. Pollsters, in general, got 2014 wrong. My firm, InsiderAdvantage, polled only Georgia. Our final poll had the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, David Perdue, leading the race 48 percent to 45 percent over the Democrat, with the rest either undecided or going to the Libertarian candidate. But darn it, we just couldn't force the undecided voters to tell us how they would vote!
Of course, we nailed it on who was in the lead. And our polls showed the Democrat fading fast. But if we had just put the screws to the undecideds we polled, we might have been able to extract enough data to realize the magnitude of what was about to happen.
That meant on Election Day, when Michelle Nunn, daughter of former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, lost to Perdue by a 53-percent-to-45-percent margin, our firm, along with all other pollsters, were forced to walk the political plank and atone for our sin of not nailing the race down to the very percentage point.
Silver is indeed right. Most pollsters polled with a Democratic "bias" this year. But his argument is slightly less sinister than one might imagine. He doesn't accuse us of being partisan or "cooking" our numbers. What he is really saying is that, for whatever reason, the voter turnout models that we used to weight our polls were too favorable to groups that would tend to support Democrats. Not to mention his belief that some of us are incompetent.
But I sort of want to thank Nate. He and the gaggle of liberal journalists who are sniping at pollsters have helped take away the final vestige of suspicion with regard to our firm's and other pollsters' ability to be objective. With me having been a Republican elected official who chaired state and national campaigns for the likes of Newt Gingrich, it seemed like it would take a lifetime for some in the media to stop treating me as an escaped GOP convict turned pollster/analyst.
So in answer to those who wonder why companies like mine were only close to being right, instead of being dead on, here is my answer.
The American people cannot stand Barack Obama. They dislike his policies. They dislike his "above it all" demeanor. And they rose out of their chairs and off their couches and came out in droves to defeat anyone who they thought was even remotely supportive of him or his administration.
Yep, I was one of those dumb pollster/analysts who thought that no president in a midterm election could possibly be as big of a drag on candidates as was Obama. But I was wrong. He wasn't just a drag; he was his own voter turnout machine for Republicans.
The fact is that too many Americans wanted to vote to make it clear that the emperor has no clothes. And they did so. After all, the polls had shown that they are unhappy about Obamacare, Ebola, the IRS, ISIS -- you name it. And it wasn't a matter of frustration with "all politicians," as some in the media tried to spin it. It was the president and his policies. Period.
And so they raced to the polls in mass numbers and decided that they would do whatever they could to rescue their nation before it was regulated and red-taped to death.
As for the technicalities of polling and all of its problems, that's for the next generation to figure out. As I wing my way back to my home in Florida, polling is hardly a concern of mine. Like my friend and colleague Brad Coker of the polling firm Mason-Dixon put it, we have other lives, and besides, we care more about college football right now.
I'll even take Mr. Silver's predictions into account when it comes to the NCAA football championship playoffs.
See, Nate? I'm not as biased or as stupid as you think!
Silver was the darling of the left in 2012 because he predicted (fairly correct) the outcome of that race. He fell out of favor with the libbies early on this year when he said back in March that the GOP would take the Senate. Why ESPaNder is so in love with him is beyond me.
HERE IS THE PUNCH LINE. And it is true, we are sick of dumbo. Sick to death of him in every way.
So in answer to those who wonder why companies like mine were only close to being right, instead of being dead on, here is my answer.
The American people cannot stand Barack Obama. They dislike his policies. They dislike his “above it all” demeanor. And they rose out of their chairs and off their couches and came out in droves to defeat anyone who they thought was even remotely supportive of him or his administration.
Yep, I was one of those dumb pollster/analysts who thought that no president in a midterm election could possibly be as big of a drag on candidates as was Obama. But I was wrong. He wasn’t just a drag; he was his own voter turnout machine for Republicans.
The fact is that too many Americans wanted to vote to make it clear that the emperor has no clothes. And they did so. After all, the polls had shown that they are unhappy about Obamacare, Ebola, the IRS, ISIS — you name it. And it wasn’t a matter of frustration with “all politicians,” as some in the media tried to spin it. It was the president and his policies. Period.
And so they raced to the polls in mass numbers and decided that they would do whatever they could to rescue their nation before it was regulated and red-taped to death.
What a bunch of self serving claptrap! If only...if only we coulda, shoulda, woulda.
The unadulterated fact is, Matt, you BLEW it with the rest of your AJC, Sunday Atlanta News Commentaries and shows and all the rest.
You can try to rehabilitate your record somewhere else, but not here with me. 48% does not equal 53% by any measure. The fact is that you had the intuition that the daughter of a Senator who disappeared from the Georgia Scene in the mid 90s, who dropped her husband's name, and was Siamesed to Obama is not a hard guess to figure out she'd eventually lose. Making excuses how you couldn't wheedle out the right answer is BS - just good ole boy "aw shucks" horsesh1t. Go away - we don't need you.
The only pollster I’m ever going to pay attention to for the rest of my life is the one the Des Moines Register uses, is it Seltzer?
What the pollsters don’t understand is what is not political. Americans, have had a thumb stuck in their eye repeatedly. Beating up Republicans is one thing, but when school kids are complaining about their lunches because of his bitch old lady he’s pissed just about everyone off.
What really sunk him however may have been more subtle. He screwed everyone with medical deductibles.
I don’t know him, but one of the very last pollsters I would listen to his Towery. From the looks of him and his record (his pathetic explanations notwithstanding), he spends more time in a tanning booth than actually doing anything substantive with respect to scientific polling.
I essentially said this elsewhere here. “Republicans did not get a ‘wave’ of support; they were the beneficiaries of a ‘tsunami’ of disgust for Obama.”
I suspect that is as close to the truth as anything.
It’s pretty simple, the GOP used consumer data to identify ‘potential’ GOP voters that haven’t been turning out. They then targeted those voters and they turned out or mailed in ballots.
I think most people had a vague idea that the Obama administration was reasonably competent, given electoral success in being re-elected despite the continued unpopularity of some of his policies. That well of goodwill evaporated abruptly over the lack of an Ebola quarantine policy or even minimal levels of coherence on the subject. The lunatic nurse didn’t help either. The idea of ISIS and their death-cult-effed-uppedness, coupled with open borders (and American unemployment) probably played a part too, but I do think it was the Oh-My-Gosh, what-the-heck-are-they-thinking over Ebola that was the final straw.
Now to be honest, I suspect some sort of mischief as I did with the Cantor race. You can’t just have all the polls go out the window one fine day, especially since we don’t have paper verification on so many of our eminently hackable voting machines. If the next election gives you a result that you truly disagree with, having accepted questionable results when you agree with them will make it harder to argue when you don’t.
“HERE IS THE PUNCH LINE. And it is true, we are sick of dumbo. Sick to death of him in every way.”
Here at FR-We’re TWICE as sick of him because we had a head start and have been at it longer!! :)
Making excuses how you couldn't wheedle out the right answer is BS - just good ole boy "aw shucks" horsesh1t. Go away - we don't need you.But Gaffer, how do you really feel? LOL!
“I think most people had a vague idea that the Obama administration was reasonably competent...”
Most people that work for a living know that he is a bumbling idiot affirmative action hire that demonrats propped up to appease their white liberal guilt.
He isn’t qualified to be a restroom attendant! That moron has sealed his status as the worst POTUS in history, twice as stupid as Jimmy Carter.
By 2016 the Demonrat party brand will be so toxic, Hillary will openly express that she hates his filthy rotten guts!
Not all were wrong. The Des Moines register’s Selzer & Co. poll of Ernst had her winning by 7 when all others (including Quinipiac during the same 24 hour period) had them dead even.
Most, including many here, said Selzer’s poll was an outlier. I hate the register but there polling group has been doing Iowa elections for years and they ARE the Gold standard.
If the author understands statistics then he is being dishonest in this article. If he doesn’t understand statistics then he should not be the spokesperson for his company.
Nate Silver is a statistician. His use of bias is a statistical term not a description of the leanings of a poling company.
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http://lesswrong.com/lw/ha/statistical_bias/
“Bias” as used in the field of statistics refers to directional error in an estimator. Statistical bias is error you cannot correct by repeating the experiment many times and averaging together the results.
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Nate Silver’s approach is using other polls and applying an averaging methodology to them. His analysis of the results after the fact showed that the original polls contained a “statistical bias” that could not be corrected by his averaging results.
I am among those sick of that little POS ad his walrus-like wife attempting to bull their way into every aspect of American life. I despised the both of them with a white-hot intensity as early as 2007 when I read his passages about his dislike for all things white and all things western.. and what really tipped it for me was his “standing for the muslims” comment. I grew to disdain the millions of Kool-aid - addled worshippers who attended by the tens of thousands his TelePrompTer readings... ogling, fainting, cooing and damned near creaming themselves on his every word.
And now, here we are, six years into his filthy, corrupt regime, with a markedly diminished America. This country has spiraled downward ever since that evil bastard ever entered the White House.
This incoming Congress had better properly read the public’s demands that they confront that miserable little stain at every turn... read up on and employ every single Alinskyite tactic of isolating and attacking the target. Destroying his presidency MUST be Job One!
“Most people that work for a living know that he is a bumbling idiot affirmative action hire that demonrats propped up to appease their white liberal guilt.”
Nobody propped him up out of any guilt; he is the perfect tool to keep Planned Parenthood’s agenda on track despite the resulting murder of millions of “his” people. He was also the perfect tool to push the “gay agenda” (which he himself actually opposed) because it is almost illegal to criticize a negro today - even a mulatto. His skin color gave him license to push a lot that would have been more difficult for a white (read: adult) politician to push through.
You get the polls you pay for. The LSM got the results they wanted.
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