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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
In this video clip
(may require MSNBC subscription to view), Rachel Maddow shows the visualization of the movement of a Wisconsin poll that ran between Thursday and Sunday of last week.
What's so crucial to see is that the Thursday numbers (prior to the release of the Access Hollywood tape) showed Trump with a very slight lead. In the Saturday-Sunday results alone, Clinton was up 20 points. The shift was astronomical.
edited 13th Oct '16 2:11:50 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Poll demographics are always skewed towards the elderly, to a point where I am not entirely convinced the time of week has so much of an impact.
How many people below 30 own a landline with a publicly listed phone number? How many of those answer polls. I've worked in a (Canadian) polling company and I can tell you that unless a study is specifically targeting age groups, it's mostly old people. The response rate hovers at 8% a lot of the time.
edited 13th Oct '16 2:24:40 PM by Ghilz
My family still has a landline, and I've personally responded to three polls that called me: one in person and two automated.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I am not saying people like that don't exist. (Also, by your troper page, you're 39, you're outside that demographic I was specifically quoting)
I am saying they are a minority. And that skews the polls. Studies published 2 years ago listed people 24 and down as 66% using Cellphones uniquely. And that remaining 34% includes "I live with my parents so there's a landline but I don't answer it and only use it to make the occasional outgoing call" That was 2 years ago, I guarantee you that number's even lower now and further decreasing.
You start with a 66% of the age group pollsters straight up cannot reach. Add that response rates across all age groups have declined in the past decades, and it's a natural fact that most polls tend to be generationally biased.
edited 13th Oct '16 2:35:09 PM by Ghilz
That's absolutely true, and I didn't mean to minimize it as a problem. The inability to legally poll cell phone users is something that's going to have to be addressed if we're to get any kind of reliable data from them in the future.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"It's only a part of the problem. Even if cell phone numbers were to be made public to polling companies (And good luck passing that law), people generally speaking are far more hostile to responding to polls. Again, that 8% response rate is 8% ''of dialed calls", so cells are not counted.
Canada's got a "No Call" list you can sign off to avoid solicitation. It still allows company you have business with, and polling companies to call you. And if anything, the list has still made the response rate drop for polling companies, coz people think you've violated the list when calling them. And even if they know it's not covered, odds are if I bothered to find it and fill it, I am the kind of person who will refuse to answer a poll.
edited 13th Oct '16 2:42:43 PM by Ghilz
Polling methodology takes those factors into account, by using the proportion of demographics that respond to the polls and weighting them against the proportion of those same demographics in the country as a whole. Regardless, I don't have a good solution to offer about the general hostility to pollsters. You can't have people self-select for polls because it's grossly unscientific.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Having worked with a poll company, what you say it true, BUT there's an asterisk.
That asterisk is that sometimes it's actually straight up impossible to do so, because the response rates from specific social groups are so low, it's not possible to get enough of them in the time available and adjusting for that low a number means your poll is using such a small sample as to be meaningless. So it's more accurate to say they try to compensate for it. This can be especially true when the poll is time sensitive.
Plus there's the issue that you can run into an problem that the response rate is so low, the people who actually do answer might not representative of their age group :-P
edited 13th Oct '16 2:47:42 PM by Ghilz
Yeah wasn't there a poll consistently showing Trump ahead because they were only asking one younge black guy and were then extrapolating his pro-Trump opinion to be representative of the entire demographic?
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
x7 — In the US, the "Do Not Call" list bars telemarketers from trying to sell you crap you don't want, but it doesn't stop charities from begging you for donations, political polls, or the Bureau of Nosy Statistics from "conducting a survey."
I just hang up on all these people. The telephone is there for my convenience, not so random strangers can call me up and bug me. The main advantage of cell phones (besides being portable) is you can turn the stupid thing off.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank.So apparently, quite a few Utah voters plan to vote for
this guy
.
Granted, many predicted that Utah's Mormon population wouldn't go for Trump, but I wasn't expecting them to vote for...whoever this is.
Oh God! Natural light!Trump's going full paranoid, at this point I can't see him conceding the election if he clearly loses.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/13/politics/donald-trump-allegations-fallout/index.html
The Daily Show did a good job of puncturing that abscess. They took that horrible thing and made it funny.
I'm still fucking sick of him, but now I don't feel like hurting myself or Drowning My Sorrows anymore.
Thank you for noticing, though.
edited 13th Oct '16 4:14:15 PM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

It appears Trump has finally lost his patience, because he's now accusing everyone that's accusing him of sexual "misconduct" as "horrible, horrible liars" whose claims are "absolutely false"... and that he intends to sue them all and even has the evidence to debunk their accusations. Why he doesn't simply show it now is probably something best left unpondered, lest we lose our sanity in trying to figure out how Trump-"logic" works.
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.