Posted on 09/19/2024 7:15:04 AM PDT by HamiltonJay
Polling, why is it so bad?
Its election cycle, and as you know in this day and age with every poll that comes out and plethora of headlines and stories will be written about it, because polling apparently is now a replacement for news.. and has been for a long long time now during election season. Every new poll will be reported both professionally and among the punditry as either the end of days, or the greatest news ever to come about, depending on where in the political spectrum the pundit lies and whether their candidate is up or down.
Polling has its place, it certainly CAN capture trends, but polling in the modern era, particularly poling for public consumption, is a wholly different animal. I learned this lesson decades ago. At the time I was running a small news site, and I commissioned personally poll on one of the lesser known republican candidates running in their primary just to see what sort of numbers I got. It was mainly an experiment by me, I had no intention of ever releasing the results, and was simply curious where this person actually stood. Given they were never going to be an actual serious threat to win the nomination, I was curious what polling about this individual would come back as. I found a pollster, told them what I wanted, paid them their money and waited… a week or so later, I got the results and I probably poured over them for the next few days in my spare time. I began to realize early on that the polling was not indeed biased toward the candidate I had hired them to inquire about. The wording of the questions, the ordering of the questions, the sampling breakdown, all showed to me at least, they they “knew where their bread was being buttered” and wanted to give me results I would like. Now understand this poll was not a high dollar poll, I was not a national news organization, I don’t honestly even remember exactly how much I spent but I can assure it was at most in the 4 figure range at the time.
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Conservatives refuse to talk to pollsters.
Why? Polling: a weapon in the propagandist’s toolbox meant to sway public opinion.
1) Pollsters have agendas. Accuracy isn’t the top motive until just days before an election. Influence is more important.
2) People don’t like to be surveyed, particularly in this day and age with activist(terrorist) leftists everywhere.
3) Polls can’t account for cheating.
Pollsters can tell you what you want to hear.
THIS IS THE FIRST YEAR I HAVE CONSISTENTLY HUNG UP THE PHONE.
Polling should be a federal crime with 1st offense being a mandatory 5 year prison sentence.
Many are now being used to push an agenda and get voters to vote a certain way.
1% response rate
What is obviously a problem is the number of polls in sub-populations (Hispanics, blacks, Teamsters...) that indicate Trump has gained major advantages over historic Republican nunmbers without showing corresponding gains in the population in total.
Two points: 1) Polls gather their data by phone or on line interviews. Many rational, decent people will not take an unsoliited call or go online to share their private, political beliefs with a stranger. Hence conservatives are undercounted 2) Face it. The country is full of unsophisticated, ill informed, emotional voters whoform the core of the Democtatic base and will vote for Harris. As JohnAdams said a Republic cannot stand when the electorate has such a high perentage of suh people.
The country is indeed in grave danger if the dumb dominate and Harris is elected.
because polling apparently is now a replacement for news.......Since 1932................
Assuming the polling is even done and people are actually called, and I have my doubts, they are oversampling Democrats, the questions are phrased to get the desired result (Kamala), and conservatives hang up or delete the message from their voice mail.
Polls are meant to discourage Trump voters, pure and simple.
Yep....all depends on why they’re asking and how the questions are asked.
Taking the pulse of the electorate, which is what polling was originally supposed to do is now THE LAST THING most polls really want.
No, it’s a narrative driven by all the corrupt pollsters out there. There’s only three that are reputable and honest the rest are corrupt….ESPECIALLY Nate Silver. They have an agenda and that is to make it look like scamala is leading in the polls. Remember their narrative is not new just go back to 2016 around this time they had HITLERY leading in ALL these corrupt polls! Don’t be deceived and disheartened…Trump is gaining steam and winning the inside numbers race. How can SCAMALA be up when 70% of union workers endorsed Trump? Doesn’t make sense does it people. They’re doing a scam job on all of the American people. Don’t fall for it…FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!
Yep, the mismastch where polling consistently shows Kamala underperforming Joe Biden in most Democratic Sub Groups, and Trump overperforming but still polling showing her “gaining”
Both of those things cannot be consistently true.
You could get that dynamic if your sub group sampling size is very very small.. but even when large scale polling of sub groups happens Kamala is consistently underperforming in nearly every single major Democratic subgroup.
Nate Silver is not a pollster, he’s basically a pundit who tries to use math to justify his punditry.
Exactly. No one who has the money to spend on polls has any interest in the truth. They spend money because they want to manipulate perceptions to attain whatever is in their interests. An RNC poll would be just as useless because they would want the answer - well, I would vote Republican if you would just get rid of the Orange offensive tweeting bloviator and put Liz Cheney back in charge.
I always wonder who is being polled - I suspect Democrats, mostly. I asked a lot of members of my extended family if they’d ever been polled (both Dem. and Rep.) - and not a single one ever had.
I suppose if anyone called me for a poll, I’d slam the phone down.
Published polls are tools for molding public opinion, not measuring public opinion.
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