When the undecided in a poll make up 20 percent of the sample, no one should be surprised at a surprise especially if the leader in the poll is only leading by 10. To 13 percent. Perhaps pollesters need to look at who makes up the undecided. Are they conservative, liberal, or interest in picking a winning candidate.
Well as long as things are politically stable and demographics don’t march on and the economic backdrop doesn’t change and nobody’s home situation changes and … and … ummm …. Well this should be easy.
Having a lead in a poll a couple of weeks out is not like being up 29 in the second half (too soon?) …
And if understanding statistics were easy they wouldn’t come after lies and damned lies.
An awful lot of people who write _about_ this stuff, from the outside, really need to confront what they do not understand. There are no races. There are no “fights for the lead”. There are just games. “Elections”, they are called.
I've been referring people experiencing "polls meets reality shock at other Substacks to Strength in Numbers. Given how close the race in Michigan was, I thought there was a good chance of a close race in Wisconsin. I think that the polls did help in one respect, in that I think they encouraged the hard run of David Crowley in the past weeks. I hope he and his supporters, joined by those who supported his opponent, will continue to campaign just as hard all the way to November. I would love to see a Democratic trifecta in Wisconsin again. (For a good examination of how the Republicans took over, see the book, The Fall of Wisconsin.)
One thing about polling I've been struggling with how to articulate for a long time is how we (laypeople) view probability as applied to election polls.
Most of us would not be all that shocked to see a 90% free throw shooter miss a shot, or to see a 20 pt favorite lose a football game. Those are surprising results, but they fall within our expecations that sometimes rare events occur.
When polls indicate a 70% probability of one candidate winning, we have a different knee-jerk response when the election goes the other way. Why? I'm having a hard time thinking of other probabilistic events where we project certainty onto estimates.
A way to think about the difference is the number of repeated experiences we have. Someone who watches football or basketball or baseball watches games week after week. Over the course of a season experience builds up and expectations are more finely calibrated. In addition when a low probability event occurs (Patriots come back from 28-3 or this summer Red Sox go 21-4 in July), we tend to form strong memories. While Hong's loss or Flanagan's win is notable at the moment, when the next set of primaries comes around, who will remember (besides Elliott)? On the other hand, in the short run the WI governor polls and to a lesser extent the MN senate polls were in the media all the time in the last couple weeks so we became "certain" that the polling numbers were significant because they were repeated over and over again. As they say repeating a lie doesn't make it true and reporting a polling result multiple times doesn't make it more accurate.
Granted, polling primaries is hard and the polls tend to miss the actual outcomes by a very wide margin.
So here's a suggestion: don't release polling information that you know has a chance of being wildly wrong. And don't publish results if you're a news organization. And if you're SIN don't aggregate these unreliable numbers and present them as if they convey valid information about the electorate.
What public benefit is served by putting out highly unreliable information?
You state that the Democratic Party primary in Texas is a plurality contest, which it is not. As you know, the primaries in Texas require a candidate to receive a majority of the primary votes for that office. If no candidate wins a majority in the initial primary, the top two vote getters in the initial primary compete in a runoff primary.
When the undecided in a poll make up 20 percent of the sample, no one should be surprised at a surprise especially if the leader in the poll is only leading by 10. To 13 percent. Perhaps pollesters need to look at who makes up the undecided. Are they conservative, liberal, or interest in picking a winning candidate.
Well as long as things are politically stable and demographics don’t march on and the economic backdrop doesn’t change and nobody’s home situation changes and … and … ummm …. Well this should be easy.
Having a lead in a poll a couple of weeks out is not like being up 29 in the second half (too soon?) …
And if understanding statistics were easy they wouldn’t come after lies and damned lies.
An awful lot of people who write _about_ this stuff, from the outside, really need to confront what they do not understand. There are no races. There are no “fights for the lead”. There are just games. “Elections”, they are called.
I've been referring people experiencing "polls meets reality shock at other Substacks to Strength in Numbers. Given how close the race in Michigan was, I thought there was a good chance of a close race in Wisconsin. I think that the polls did help in one respect, in that I think they encouraged the hard run of David Crowley in the past weeks. I hope he and his supporters, joined by those who supported his opponent, will continue to campaign just as hard all the way to November. I would love to see a Democratic trifecta in Wisconsin again. (For a good examination of how the Republicans took over, see the book, The Fall of Wisconsin.)
One thing about polling I've been struggling with how to articulate for a long time is how we (laypeople) view probability as applied to election polls.
Most of us would not be all that shocked to see a 90% free throw shooter miss a shot, or to see a 20 pt favorite lose a football game. Those are surprising results, but they fall within our expecations that sometimes rare events occur.
When polls indicate a 70% probability of one candidate winning, we have a different knee-jerk response when the election goes the other way. Why? I'm having a hard time thinking of other probabilistic events where we project certainty onto estimates.
A way to think about the difference is the number of repeated experiences we have. Someone who watches football or basketball or baseball watches games week after week. Over the course of a season experience builds up and expectations are more finely calibrated. In addition when a low probability event occurs (Patriots come back from 28-3 or this summer Red Sox go 21-4 in July), we tend to form strong memories. While Hong's loss or Flanagan's win is notable at the moment, when the next set of primaries comes around, who will remember (besides Elliott)? On the other hand, in the short run the WI governor polls and to a lesser extent the MN senate polls were in the media all the time in the last couple weeks so we became "certain" that the polling numbers were significant because they were repeated over and over again. As they say repeating a lie doesn't make it true and reporting a polling result multiple times doesn't make it more accurate.
Granted, polling primaries is hard and the polls tend to miss the actual outcomes by a very wide margin.
So here's a suggestion: don't release polling information that you know has a chance of being wildly wrong. And don't publish results if you're a news organization. And if you're SIN don't aggregate these unreliable numbers and present them as if they convey valid information about the electorate.
What public benefit is served by putting out highly unreliable information?
You state that the Democratic Party primary in Texas is a plurality contest, which it is not. As you know, the primaries in Texas require a candidate to receive a majority of the primary votes for that office. If no candidate wins a majority in the initial primary, the top two vote getters in the initial primary compete in a runoff primary.
Well one problem is pretty conspicuous - the polling averages added up to 109%
Ann Selzer was way off in her Iowa Democratic primary poll of 2018. I interviewed her about the miss at the time:
https://www.bleedingheartland.com/2018/06/22/interview-ann-selzer-stands-by-sampling-method-for-primary-polls/
No doubt it's an even bigger challenge to get a representative sample now.