After 2016 I cannot for the life of me understand why people pay any attention to polls whatsoever. They went the way of the dinosaur yesterday. The past 3 years I’ve spent a fair amount of time traveling around this country. Every night my goal was to settle in for the afternoon/evening in some town and then search out the local brew pub or (preferably) dive bar so I could talk to the locals. There is no better way to get a feel for a place than that (or at least for me). The vast majority of folks I have met have been genuinely friendly and welcoming (though “white” Alabama is generally excluded from that statement). And this really is a good country (with absolutely NO reason to be made “great” again) filled with good people. That said, we live in a giant bubble on the West Coast. The issues are the same but different, just as the culture is in many ways. Kinda like your cousin. We share a lot of the same DNA but we are very different people. It’s easy (too easy) to call Trump supporters “stupid”, but too many of their issues are different (or more critical) than ours. Pollsters need to get off their asses (and their phones) and start getting out into the country if they want a reasonably accurate idea of how this country feels. Unfortunately, despite hoping otherwise, I’m not really surprised at how the election has gone to this point.....
I can understand why people voted for Trump the first time. I even gave him the benefit of the doubt. But it had been an absolute shit show and he is actively threatening and altering our institutions which I view as a threat to our country. He appeals to the worst part of human nature and thrives in it. I can not for the life of me understand how anyone would look at the last 4 years and say let's get more of that. If you voted for Trump this time around then our core values are very different.
When it comes to polls I realize that after 66 years I've never been polled about an election.....I'm guessing few of us have...and there are many who would not if asked....my kind of folks usually..I don't think polls represent much other than those polled probably have a facebook account which I don't have..polls don't account for apathetic citizens or people like el prez who just get giddy about watching it all crumble.
Let's get something here straight, mathematically, binomial distribution(**) polls done with a large enough sample size, given a true SRS(*) - have shown to be very reliably mathematically. The question you have to ask is how reliable these polls are as far as being truly SRS these polls are and how leading/misleading the questions are. Since political polls of that nature, in the electoral vote system are not cheap to perform - a lot of the sites, like 538 try to do a poll of polls as a way to smooth the "bad polls" information - but we really can not tell how bad the original polls are. So, the issue with the polls is not that one has not been included in them - it is that you do not know how scientifically unbiased they are. (*) https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/mks/statmistakes/SRS.html (**) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution
Then why arent they accurate over the last two elections? I'd think presidential elections would be a large enough sample size....I know they're a formula and popular, I just never trusted them to represent the whole collective accurately
on a national level, 538's adjusted aggregate of polls has been fairly accurate. In 2016, IIRC, they said Clinton had a lead a little under 3%; might have been about 2.7%. She ended up winning the popular vote by about 2.4% their last adjusted aggregate was around 7%. When all the votes are in Biden may win by over 6 million votes. That would be somewhere in the 4-5% range. And there is always a stated margin of error of around 3% so yeah, the national aggregates of polls have been well within the margin of error the problems come in state and district polls. Many of the highest quality polling companies do not do state polls. That's generally left to less reliable polling firms. And with the stupid fucking electoral college in place, you end up with these nail-biting nightmares and battalions of lawyers don't blame pollsters for this...blame that gawddam electoral college....it sucks ass
I'm actually not blaming pollsters....I'm saying I doubt polls represent me throughout MY lifetime...as to how polling companies dole out results....I have no idea but thank you for the info...it's interesting. I'm also someone who's always refused to fill out the "race" questionaire when I fill out a form of any kind....my idea of walkin' the walk. Race shouldn't be a question. I also think politics could be better served as something not trotted out and paraded around...I never put up political signs or wear buttons or bumper stickers...keep folks guessing is my motto
Trump supporters have not been the olive branch type of group so they can go get bent as far as I am concerned. I am not worried in the least with how they feel about how I think of them.
Half of Americans just voted to return to the decades-long practice of Americans coming home in body bags every day. Some are stupid obviously, and a lot are simply intellectually lazy, but the rest can't hide behind those excuses. They're sociopathic narcissists who deserve every bad thing that ever happens to them. You know who you are, because you're definitely not stupid.
