Posted on 11/14/2012 8:36:10 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Show one pollster who got the number of votes for Obama correct ~ there’s a reason they stay away from that
I will never look at these damn polls the same after what we just went through.
Too late.
remember that the one poll pulled out of Virginia and Florida because Romney was up big? How did that work out? Never heard anymore about it
Suffolk—they pulled out of FLA, NC, and VA.
“Ping to FR’s own master poller. Jackmercer is one of the (VERY) few who called this election correctly. He got slaughtered for it, but he was right.”
Haha, not sure about master poller but I did basically what Nate Silver did but only in a MUCH MUCH more crude way. I put the national and state polls in an equation and only weighted by whether they included cell phones or were internet based. I also threw out Rasmussen and Gallup because if you compared them to at least 12 other polls, they were (seemingly) crazy outliers.
Turns out that Rasmussen and Gallup were definitely outliers (embarrassingly so) but I had no business throwing them out completely. But since I am a VERY much an amateur, I can forgive myself for over-reacting on that.
In retrospect, I see that internet polls did pretty decent and should not have weighted them as badly as I did. I was right to give more weight to cell phone polls. I was wrong to completely throw out Rasmussen and Gallup; should have kept them in but weighed them down significantly like Silver did.
I called Obama +1.8% nationally and got 49 out of 50 states (technically 48-1-1 since I was really unsure of CO). If I had done the things in the previous paragraph, I would have gotten closer to Nate Silver and the actual final results. I’m really going to get serious with my own model next time.
Congratulations. Living in reality is much more interesting and intellectually satisfying than living in fantasy.
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