Denny, you might be interested in this, as you've been a big fan of Rasmussen and have often trumpeted their numbers. Imagine that. barfo
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/pub...10/election_night/election_2010_how_did_we_do Silver talks about how Rasmussen missed a 40 point win for Inouye in Hawaii (by 23 points including margin of error). Funny things happen when your polls close 3 hours after the west coast ones do and 6 hours after the east coast ones do - and after it's already widely reported by the networks that the house is hugely republican gains and the senate is held by the democrats. You might come to the conclusion that republicans didn't bother to vote because the outcome was meaningless. Yet in the governor's race, which does affect people locally on a day to day basis, Rasmussen predicted 58%-32% for Abercrombie and the outcome was 58.2%-41.1%. I'm also not seeing the bias toward republicans: http://www.rasmussenreports.com/pub..._rasmussen_poll_results_2010_senate_elections
So your contention is that the poll was right, but republicans didn't bother to vote for senator, but did vote for governor? That's really quite implausible. There were 14,680 blank votes in HI for senator. Even if you assign all of those to the Republican candidate, the margin of victory would have been reduced by only 3.8 percentage points. Nevertheless, the statistics say the bias is there, whether your bias allows you to see it or not. barfo
In a way, aren't they actually hurting the Republicans by (supposedly) reporting inflated numbers for them? In the close races, my guess would be they are motivating democrats who may not have voted, into actually voting.
It depends on where the race stands. If the republican is (in reality) tied or ahead (as was most often the case in this election) and the republican numbers are inflated, that tends to discourage democrats from voting because it make it look like more of a lost cause. If on the other hand the democrat is leading in reality, then inflating the republican numbers make the race look more competitive, and that might motivate democratic voters to get out and vote. But that scenario was relatively less common this cycle. barfo
Silver also said the democrats would do worse if they didn't pass health care and he was completely wrong.
Just looking at the last rasmussen link... he understated Shelby's vote %, the alaska result, McCain, Boozman, overstated Fiorina, etc. It looks to me like it really depended on the race.
No it isn't a fact. Though when pollsters do poll, they weight the results based upon what they expect the electorate to look like. So if they think it's 60-40 republicans, they'll weight it that way. And they're not exactly guessing about the 60-40 bit, they try to deduce it by asking a few questions that indicate what party the voter is likely to vote for. And Gallup called me this morning and I did their survey.
Rasmussen has long been known to be nothing more than a disinformation tool of the far-right. That's why Denny loves to post them so frequently.
Right... it's not a fact because... because... because you don't like it. Right. And apparently Rasmussen isn't very good at that, because their numbers were biased towards the Republicans. I don't think Nate is implying that the bias is intentional. It could just be incompetence, or it could be that Rasmussen biases things subconsciously. But the numbers show that whatever the cause, the result is a bias. We'll have to look for a sudden spike in the population of libertarians according to Gallup. barfo
It's only a fact because you like the guy who says it's a fact (and he's wrong). Again, looking at rasmussen's page where he shows his results vs. the actuals, he's not particularly favoring any of the candidates. As I pointed out, he understated a lot of the big winners who were republicans as well as Innouye. And it looks to me like he got worse in the western time zones where the voters knew the Republicans already were assured to win the house and lose the senate. But really, barfo, weren't the election results heavily biased toward republicans? They gained the 2nd most seats in the house in history, won 2/3 of the senate elections, a huge number of seats in state legislatures, as well as a big gain in governorships. Rasmussen predicted the right gain in senate seats and a gain of 55 house seats with several too close to call (republicans gained 60 with some outstanding as of election night). Where is the inaccuracy?
LOL http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/24109 Speaking of accuracy, on Election Day, Nate Silver predicted a pickup of 7 seats in the Senate for Republicans. They picked up 6. In the Senate on Election Day, Nate Silver predicted a 53-seat gain for Republicans. They picked up 61. So let’s see — Republicans went 24-13 in the Senate; he said 25.3-11.6 — he was off by 1.3 seats. In April I said Republicans would go 23-13 (the West Virginia seat was added in July*) and I was off by 1. In the House on Election Day, Nate Silver was off by at least 7.8 (with 10 seats to go) while I was off by at least 10.
http://www.leftcoastrebel.com/2010/11/nates-recent-rasmussen-bias-i-sure-hope.html The brilliant Nate Silver may be just about the best in the polling business, but that doesn't mean he's not subject to insufferable hackery. For one reason or another, Nate has is in for Scott Rassmusen lately and Nate's bias has been spilling into the pages of NY Times this election season. Today's post on Rasmussen accuracy reeks of similar hackedness. Nate made much ado of Rasmussen's worst poll ever in his analysis. The critique is germane, but not in the statistical sense. It would certainly be, by Nate's own god statistics, an outlier and as such should have been removed from Nate's accuracy model. An outlier in statistics is a data point that is outside the norm and that certainly describes the worst poll in Nate's ten years. That's not to say that we ignore it. By all means, Scott Rasmussen ought to take the poll very seriously and find a reason for its inaccuracy. His methodology could be flawed, it could be poor polling questions or polling staff, he should look into why no one noticed it until after released, and it could even be a bad roll of the statistical die. Nate ought to do the same when considering the poll, but if Nate's just objectively looking at the data, he can't just arbitrarily ignore the fact that it is radically outside the norm for Rasmussen. Doing so skews his own model.
I like the bit about god statistics. Unfortunately, this guys objection is not terribly meaningful. Take out the HI results, and Rasmussen still missed by 5.5 points instead of 5.8. And that's still the worst performance among the major polling firms. barfo
Show me some evidence of that. All you are doing is expressing your opinion that he's wrong. Frankly, I've seen enough Nate Silver math and enough DennyMath (TM) to know that he's infinitely more careful about numbers than you are. The difference here is that Nate is actually crunching the numbers, and you are just eyeballing them. In the sense that the word "bias" is being used here, no. The election results are unbiased. They are what they are. Of course it is true that Republicans won lots of races. Bias here means deviation from reality, not deviation from a 50-50 republican/democrat split. In the margin of victory in individual races. barfo
Yes, Rasmussen sure is biased! Stupid criticism; stupid thread. What is the point of it? Every pollster has their misses.
