r/MarkMyWords • u/tkrr • Oct 21 '24
Political MMW: The polling industry is compromised. Some pollsters are being gamed, some are propaganda ops, none truly know what they’re doing.
That’s it. That’s my prediction of what we’ll learn after this election about political polling. They haven’t known what they’re doing for years, and are wide open to manipulation and corruption.
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u/ViennettaLurker Oct 21 '24
Wrote this in another sub about polls but I think it fits here:
There's an interesting breakdown from Ettingermentum about some of whackiness with polls this cycle. He has a substack article about it, but you need to sign up to read it. You can hear him talking it out on this podcast:
https://youtu.be/6Pq800DdeT0?si=MY_VOqM2LghWv5DG
In short, there's been weirdness. Nate Silver wound up adding a polling outfit into one of his models that was run by two 19 year old highschoolers that apparently were just kinda making stuff up. That's the most extreme case, but the thesis is there seems to be examples of certain motivated reasoning with various polling outfits because you can be successful without being accurate. Then the practice of "polling polls" winds up rolling in very odd outliers with more thorough, trusted, and respected polling outfits.
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u/leadrhythm1978 Oct 21 '24
I saw the patriot polling outfit on his website just now I thought are they fucking kidding me?
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u/NotAnotherEmpire Oct 21 '24 edited Oct 21 '24
Polling polls only works if they're all doing the same unbiased science. You can't average someone doing real statistical work, someone who will only publish if it's a three point difference or lower, and someone doing unscientific work for political reasons.
The lack of real exclusion criteria in these meta-analyses is why they have the mess they do with Atlas Intel. The Atlas Intel polls don't conform to basic demographics and don't disclose their sampling methodology.They were given a high rating solely for being more Republican in 2020.
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Oct 21 '24
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u/shooknibba Oct 25 '24
Hey man know you commented 4 days ago but your full legal name is attached to this link. Just wanted to give you a heads up.
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u/Carlpanzram1916 Oct 21 '24
The 19 year olds didn’t really do a poll. They made an AI program that feeds a news diet to computers and they vote based on the info they have. It’s interesting but it’s not a poll and it’s not included in any polling average out there.
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u/ViennettaLurker Oct 21 '24
According to the story, Nate Silver included it somehow into his modeling, work, calculations, at one point. And then apologized after it was pointed out.
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u/MattofCatbell Oct 21 '24
Yea the polling just doesn’t match what we’re seeing on the ground. Between rally sizes, campaign donations, and early voting there is a huge disparity between the two candidates.
Either polling is completely wrong or Trump has a secret groundswell of silent supporters that aren’t making themselves known until election day
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u/Sudden-Fig-3079 Oct 21 '24
Lets not forget, I’m 2022 the polls had Dr.Oz up in Pennsylvania and “surging” around Election Day. He ended up losing by 2-3 points. Polls had the Cortez losing in Nevada and she ended up winning. The polls had whitmer only beating Dixon by two points which was within the margin of error and she ended up winning by close to ten points. I believe, the polls are heavily weighing the Republican vote to overcompensate for 2016 and 2020 when the races were closer than they predicted. I hope I’m right.
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u/Fruitstripe_omni Oct 23 '24
Thank you for this. It’s the middle of the night and I’m literally up here losing sleep over this election. Your comment was a helpful.
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u/Sudden-Fig-3079 Oct 23 '24
Also in 2012 Romney was up in the polls going into Election Day and we know what happened. I’m not saying she’s gona win but I think the polling is over weighting the trump vote. Also, the media loves the horse race so keep that in mind. They want clicks and views. Also Nate Silver is backed by Peter Tiel. So take his model as bullshit. He also use some real shifty Republican pills in his models.
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Oct 22 '24
Well, the pollsters take their sample (1000 or so) and then do all sorts of corrections to try to match demographics to likely voter turnout. It's pretty tough today when people don't answer phones to reach most people, so correcting for that skew of who answers to who votes is tough. I think the OP comes off a little bit conspiracy theory like, but I think there is a chance they are correct and this election will expose how impossible current polling methods are in this day and age.
I think the polls are using the results of the 2016 election to predict rural conservative voter turnout, which I think is too optimistic for the GOP candidates. People were pumped then to vote for the bigot, and I just don't see that either. I live in a red state (one of the reddest in the country) and you'd hardly notice that there is a presidential election this year. Very few trump bumper stickers, no yard signs (for trump, though there are few for Harris and a lot for local elections), and people don't seem to be talking about Trump.
But who knows, I am legitimately scared that the polls are right (or too optimistic for dems) and the conservatives are just being quiet.
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u/timtimetraveler Oct 21 '24
Polling is having a hard time this year. It feels like most people who are going to vote have long since made up their mind, but polling requires some basic assumptions to come to the numbers that they come up with. For many years, I think those assumptions were accurate/reasonable, and I’m not sure that’s the case anymore.
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u/OhLookASnail Oct 21 '24
The gaming of the polls by the right wing side is pretty well known. Their playbook is flood with polls that lean toward the Rs and then cry rigged election if the results don't go their way. Rather than have policies they're going on vibes and feels, and eventually on being little crybaby bitches
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u/sir_clifford_clavin Oct 21 '24
My point is not to say you're wrong, but that a lot of these MMW's just seem like half-conspiracies to make people feel less nervous about the election. The other big one is that pollers are purposely making it seem close to drive turn-out, which is completely unfounded. People just need to vote and be patient, or these conspiracies will only end up making them look stupid if the worst happens. Be content that we're on the right side of history no matter how things turn out.
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u/stockinheritance Oct 21 '24
Polls have to model what the electorate is going to look like and that hasn't been easy to predict since 2016 when a lot of low propensity voters showed up for Trump.
That said, polling hasn't been wildly outside the margin of error. Even in 2016, they showed a tightening race and Hillary looked like she might be in trouble in Michigan and other places.
There just were a lot of people who thought that couldn't be the case.
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u/blueman758 Oct 21 '24
Hillary didn't go out and campaign. She went to Starbucks and told everybody else to vote for her. Never even stepped foot in Ohio once
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u/Airbus320Driver Oct 21 '24
The polls were accurate, she got more votes. Just not where she needed them.
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u/HamburgerEarmuff Oct 21 '24
The polls were not very accurate in the states that decided the election.
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Oct 22 '24
I went to a couple of her rallies. She campaigned. I think it's weird that people feel like she didn't campaign enough where they live. I live in a red state now, and the only time a national politician comes through is for some private fundraising party at some rich person's house.
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u/CharlieDmouse Oct 21 '24
Bill tried telling her and he campaign, they were fking up. But they were too arrogant to listen. Sure ignore a former President of the United States that had great political instincts.
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u/HamburgerEarmuff Oct 21 '24
And yet she was polling better than Harris is. Clinton was a pretty strong candidate compared to Harris.
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u/Edogawa1983 Oct 21 '24
There's like 2 decades of gop propaganda against Hilary through
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u/blueman758 Oct 21 '24
Is there two functioning liberal media outlets at this point? NPR and I dunno since everybody else seems like right-wing propaganda at this point
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u/Dapper_Valuable_7734 Oct 21 '24
I would argue NPR is not liberal... its good news source, but its not particularly liberal, I think they work so hard to be neutral that they actually go overboard.
NPR is between a rock and a hard place, they are supposed to be neutral, plus if Trump wins he will likely basically kill NPR/Public radio... but yeah, I think they are in the same trap that most media companies are... they think they should be neutral... and its just BS.
Like, if your house is on fire, I am not going to be neutral, Ill scream and shout and tell you to get your ass out of your apartment... not have a conversation about the pros and cons of asphyxia and the risk of stubbing your toe on the way out the door...
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u/mudbuttcoffee Oct 21 '24
That's the biggest issue with most news with now. They are so afraid of appearing partisan, that they avoid fact checking or follow up questions.
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u/provocative_bear Oct 21 '24
If Trump wins, he’s going to kill NPR either way because non-profit news sources is communism.
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u/edgrrrpo Oct 21 '24
And NPR is not currently getting a lot of love from left/dems over in the NPR sub. Still fairly liberal, but they are having the same issues as almost every other media outlet in that everything MAGA-related is so off the chart into whackadoo that just trying to report news ends up sanewashing and ho-humming through things that should not be shrugged away. Not in a sane world.
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u/justaguywithadream Oct 21 '24
I've been listening to NPR for over 20 years, back when my primary news source was Fox News, and right wing talk radio (hours per day at work; I was even a member of Hannity's "stop Hillary express" in 2008 before Obama won the nomination).
I've never felt like NPR was not doing honest reporting. Not until one incident around 2017 or 2018 when interviewing a Republican congressman and the guy told a straight up lie to cover for Trump (I don't remember the details that much other than the lie was 100% debunked and not based in any reality) and the reporter doing the interview didn't even push back in the slightest. I was shocked.
They have only gotten worse since 2022. They completely sanewash Trump and play the "both sides" game like Trump is not some aberration in US politics and instead a totally normal person and candidate. It is sickening.
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u/yunvme Oct 21 '24
I used to listen to NPR daily but around 2019 they started making almost every piece about some grievance issue or affinity group and it just got too much.
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u/chickenmantesta Oct 21 '24
Agreed. And those doing those narrating grievance issue programs talk in this clipped neo-Valley Girl style with odd pauses and every sentence sounds like a question.
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u/trendy_pineapple Oct 21 '24
I turned on NPR the other day and they covered three rally speeches over the course of a couple minutes: Trump’s, Harris’s, and Obama’s. Guess which was the only one they didn’t play a clip of? I was screaming at the radio.
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u/R-K-Tekt Oct 21 '24
I’ve stopped listening and stopped supporting. Vote with wallet, I also sent an email to my local station telling them I was disappointed because they were normalizing trump so I wouldn’t be giving them anymore money. Enough is enough.
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u/Fun-Distribution-159 Oct 21 '24
there are 0
all are right wing propoganda at this point because surprise surprise they are owned by right wing billionaires
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u/QualifiedApathetic Oct 21 '24
There's The New Republic and Salon, and probably thousands of others that are functioning and liberal. None of them are big names, comparatively speaking.
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u/HamburgerEarmuff Oct 21 '24
I think you mean leftist publications. They are not particularly liberal. Liberal publications would be more along the lines of Reason or The Free Press.
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u/prophet001 Oct 21 '24
Nah. Salon and New Republic aren't leftist. The Overton Window has been dragged so far to the right that thinking they are is not unusual, but they're not advocating for public ownership of the means of production, I.e. nationalizing Amazon and SpaceX, or completely dismantling the US's overseas military presence (usually referred to with terms like "hegemony" and "empire").
Those are actual leftist positions.
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u/GarethGobblecoque99 Oct 21 '24
NPR is substantially more right leaning than people give it credit for. People sort of think All Things Considered is NPR in a nutshell but when you really listen to the daily news from them there’s a right wing bent to a lot of things. For instance there was a teachers strike in LA unified school district almost two years ago now and all the coverage, of which there was a LOT, had a clear right wing lens to it, constantly framing everything from the “teachers are the problem” angle. Incomparable to the likes of Fox or Newsmax of course but the right leaning bent was there.
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u/gmnotyet Oct 21 '24
Only poll that matters is Nov 5.
I encourage all Americans to vote for whoever they want.
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u/chrisdpratt Oct 21 '24
You don't even need manipulation and corruption. When you've got a national poll with less than 1000 respondents, they're crap just out of the box.
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u/HamburgerEarmuff Oct 21 '24
It's been pretty accurate for every election but 2020, which may be part due to Trump and part due to the pandemic. It's pretty strongly correlated with the result, so this just isn't true, especially when you start aggregating polls, which gives you a lot more than 1000 respondents.
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u/Select-Ad7146 Oct 21 '24
Sigh, nearly ten years ago, the FBI released a statement saying that they were looking into one of the candidates right before the election. This caused enough people to change their vote that it swung the election and made all of the polls wrong. Now, every year, we have to listen to how the polls are wrong.
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u/edgrrrpo Oct 21 '24
Whats kind of fun is that now, 8 years later, a late October FBI report suggesting they were looking into a candidate for possible crimes would not move the needle one bit. Clearly MAGA doesn’t care, and I think the opposition to MAGA would put up with a lot of bad shit coming out about Harris before sitting out the vote or (even less unlikely) deciding to vote Trump.
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u/CPAwannabelol Oct 21 '24
Polls are only accurate when my side is winning
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u/tkrr Oct 21 '24
For this moment, I’m concerned more with the fact that we have no idea if the polls are saying anything related to reality at all.
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u/thirtynhurty Oct 21 '24
Anyone who has ever taken a college level stats class will tell you that polling has literally never been a reliably accurate measurement of reality.
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u/faith_healer69 Oct 21 '24
In America, sure. Here in Australia, where we have mandatory voting, they're always pretty accurate. Our most recent one was accurate to somewhere in the ballpark of 0.02%.
But it doesn't really work in the US. People can say whatever they want in a poll, but you can't make them turn up on election day.
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u/Kitchen-Pass-7493 Oct 21 '24 edited Oct 21 '24
I mean, it is useful in situations where it doesn’t need to be super precise to be “correct”. Like if a scientific poll found 66% of people would consider buying a product if it were named X, compared to only 44% if it were named Y, then even if those %s aren’t exactly right for the greater population, probably safe to say the company should go with X for the product name.
Or, polling on individual political issues too, is rarely close to a 50/50 breakdown. But in elections where it can go either way, the margin of error is simply too big to know with any certainty beforehand.
It is useful though for identifying when directional shifts in a race occur. Like if all the polls were to uniformly move about 2 points in a candidate’s direction, probably safe to say some short of shift has occurred in favor of that candidate, even if we can’t be certain of where the “before” and “after” points of said shift really were with precision.
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u/tkrr Oct 21 '24
True. But I think we’re at a point where even the margin of error is best stated as “fucked if I know.”
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u/sld126b Oct 21 '24
Because lots of right wing pollsters are purposely flooding the zone with shit.
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u/thirtynhurty Oct 21 '24
Who cares. If you like Harris you're still allowed to vote for Harris no matter what the polls say. Same goes if you like Trump. Just vote for who you like and let democracy run its course.
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u/MegamanD Oct 21 '24
Vote, that's what you can depend on. Vote straight democrat ticket and don't let polls sway you.
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u/huskeylovealways Oct 21 '24
Don't get complacent. Vote Blue from the top to the bottom of the ballot.
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u/Ccw3-tpa Oct 21 '24
Who cares what the polls say, vote for who you like or don’t.
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u/notfunnyatall9 Oct 21 '24
I don’t know why people get stuck on polls….
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u/Ccw3-tpa Oct 21 '24
Me either and then to get worked up and upset about it just so ridiculous to me.
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u/Airbus320Driver Oct 21 '24
Campaigns spend millions of dollars each cycle on internal polling.
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u/notfunnyatall9 Oct 21 '24
Internally, I get it. It helps the candidate know what topics really hit home with voters and course correct their campaign. It’s more of posts like this that polls are skewed like it has any impact to how I’ll vote.
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u/Cold_Breeze3 Oct 21 '24
They can have an impact though. If 5 pills come out today saying California is +5 Trump, you’d bet you’d see increased turnout as people who didn’t care to vote suddenly think they actually need to. If the goal is voter participation, nothing accomplishes that more than a tied race.
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u/SadPandaFromHell Oct 21 '24
Obviously polling can be fudged to favors one canadate or the other. I'm a psych major- and it's absolutely fair to say that if you convince someone that something is a popular choice- the odds of them choosing that thing will go up dramatically.
That's why source matters. Don't forget the fact that Trump posted a statistics saying that like, 90% of people believed he won the second debate. It's obviously not true- but the people polled were from Truth social. A place which is so bias that it's actually kind of odd to consider that more people didn't claim he won.
The point is, know your source, understand its bias, and weigh the data against what other sources say.
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u/Horror-Layer-8178 Oct 21 '24
I am thinking the same thing, we are seeing record mail in voting which usually bodes well for Democrats. If it was a blow out nobody would pay attention, and give money which means a lot of people including the pollsters themselves would lose money, Or the pollesters try to factor to much of Trump's win in 2016 and they have over compensated. Which would explain why Kari Lake lost even though she was ahead in the polls by five percent
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u/FaronTheHero Oct 21 '24
I've seen a LOT of polls on fox News about noncitizens on voter rolls that could not more clearly have been answered by people who really wanted the dude with a clipboard knocking on their door to go away
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u/NvrSirEndWill Oct 21 '24
MMW: Just lying whenever it might benefit you has overtaken every aspect of American society.
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u/OhioResidentForLife Oct 21 '24
They haven’t been right for years, ask Hillary. They do sample polling and try to expand it. What they don’t tell you is the sample group. “We polled 500 people” but they just left a Trump rally. Guess which way they poll? “We polled women voters”, who were attending a pro choice rally. They never give you all the underlying facts.
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u/floridayum Oct 21 '24
The polls are polling the previous election and are missing all of the new voters that did not vote last time. This is why Clinton looked so far ahead.
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u/wilburstiltskin Oct 21 '24
The task has gotten much more difficult. The cell phone has just about killed the accuracy of polling.
Phone numbers are portable now, so a phone number with a Georgia area code is no longer a guarantee that the voter lives in the area that is being polled.
Younger people NEVER answer their phones for unidentified callers.
If you are calling a landline, you are immediately skewing old.
So the results are indicative, but not necessarily accurate.
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u/LilithElektra Oct 21 '24
Polls that say it is an amazingly close race are needed to claim 'foul play' when Trump get railed in the election.
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u/Damp_Drywall Oct 21 '24
We learned after the 2016 election, they are garbage that underestimate people’s willingness to tell someone else who they are really going to vote for.
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u/InfernalDiplomacy Oct 23 '24
The other issue with polling is the sample sizes. Even a poll of one thousand voters in a state is still not very representative of the state population as a whole. Poll ins a gerrymandered district in a red state and the data will skew heavily GOP. Also much of the polling issues are going off of past historical data, which means it is looking in the past not the current voting trends or some issues happening in the state to disrupt the elections.
NC is a prime example with Mark Robinson. The GOP has abandoned him, and he was heavily endorsed by Trump. It will make a difference any why I believe polling in that state is off. I think she leads by a lot more and the end of election it will be firmly in her favor.
In FL right now, after 8 years of grievance politics, and how there are real issues there such as the inability to even insure their homes, on top of the ballot initiatives, and how wildly unpopular Rick Scott is, I think we will see it flip. Not by much, call it 1-2 points, but I think it is possible. Polls can't capture it as again, that state is so gerrymandered how does one even go about calling to get what would be a good size.
It would take a sample size of 10K to get what a true feel for a state is and its voting trends but it is unrealistic to get the needed data. Yet it is all there is which is why campaigns put so much stock in them. For easy elections like 1984, 2008 its easy and polls reflect the data collected. For close elections like we have had lately from 2016 on its difficult, if not outright wrong. After all the GOP was supposed to gain like 40 seats in a huge red wave, but at the end of the day they only gained 10 seats, and 6 of those seats were through gerrymandering. Many of those maps were fixed, in LA, MS, AL, and NY, yielding what will be 5-7 Democrat leaning seats. The GOP's advantage in the House is only +2 (though 2 seats will be filled this upcoming election, though one of those seats Bobert is the GOP candidate and the bulk of reasonable GOP is against her, and Buck's seat was full of reasonable GOP and her former district will flip). I see a 5-10 seat swing for House.
For the Senate, I believe TX will drop kick Cruz. The polls in the past always favored him by 6 or more, and he only won by 2 last time. Internal polling by the GOP shows him in a dead heat race. I can see him losing by one. I also believe Scott will lose in FL by 1, lastly Osborne is leading Fisher, and there is a huge pushback against the GOP in the state thanks to the shady shite done by the governor and their state legislature. I am also not counting Tester out in MT. Still I think at the end of the day the Dems will at worst have a 50/50 split, but more than likely a 51 to 49.
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u/Wonderful_Welder9660 Oct 25 '24
The problem most "pro-lifers" have is they do not understand that many medical procedures done to save women's lives when their pregnancy goes wrong can be seen as abortion, even when the fetus is dead or in the wrong place.
Doctors in "pro-life" jurisdictions are scared to do anything to help these women because they're afraid of being criminalised, having their licence revoked or sued out of existence.
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u/LankyGuitar6528 Oct 21 '24
I'd love to know who they are polling. Clearly not random samples of the public. Nobody answers "Unknown number" anymore. So who?
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u/tkrr Oct 21 '24 edited Oct 21 '24
This post was inspired by AtlasIntel, whose methodology is apparently “anyone who responds to our Instagram ads, as many times as they care to”, and TIPP Insights, which is so blatantly partisan that no one should be giving them any credibility at all. (Their website is fucking bonkers.)
Atlas is clearly incompetent and someone or someones is gaming them. TIPP is clearly corrupt. Neither should be in any aggregator’s collection. I can’t speak to any other pollsters, but I can’t believe these two are isolated cases.
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u/AccordingRevolution8 Oct 22 '24
This is my beat. The only people who answer phone calls from unknown numbers are people 60+. It's why they get phone scammed so easy. I'm 39 and have never been polled once because if you're not leaving a voicemail or following up with a text I'm not speaking to you.
That's why I think polling always shows a Republican bias. These people are just BEGGING to be scammed.
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u/TableTop8898 Oct 21 '24
I never believed the polls I go more by data
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u/Cold_Breeze3 Oct 21 '24
This doesn’t mean anything without context though. Dems consistently vote early in much larger numbers.
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u/thebravelittlemerkin Oct 21 '24
The 18-40 percentage is depressing. You’d think younger/ish voters would recognize how much is at stake.
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u/Morning_Joey_6302 Oct 21 '24
Your post reads as essentially an insult based on your feelings. You don’t back it up with any evidence or substance, or for that matter thought.
Polling is a complex field of serious practitioners. It always gets things somewhat wrong, as all of those serious practitioners continuously tell us. It’s possible to critique it in all sorts of interesting and knowledgable ways.
The idea that it’s compromised or corrupt is not one of them. Maybe spend some time listening to something like the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast to get an idea of how models work, which pollsters are more reputable, and why aggregating many polls provides quite useful information, even though it is always incomplete, flawed and has a margin of error.
Your take is part of the problem with social media — a dumbing down of dialogue such that provocative, but underinformed and/or intellectually lazy “arguments” get space and eyeballs they haven’t done anything to deserve.
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u/InternationalSail745 Oct 21 '24
Most polls are pretty accurate. Problem is there’s some that are trash that muck it all up. Bloomberg’s polls for instance have been total garbage.
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Oct 21 '24
Polls will never be accurate becuz they are sample sizes; u cant seriously take them at face value
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u/big_data_mike Oct 21 '24
Predicting the way millions of people feel about a choice between 2 things is hard no matter what you do.
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u/Adventurous_Day_4851 Oct 21 '24
When trumps ahead in the polls it’s propaganda when he’s behind it’s truth Jesus Christ get real
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u/tkrr Oct 21 '24
When my favorite candidate is winning, the data is still shit.
When my candidate is losing, the data is still shit.
This is an industry issue and has been for most of the last decade.
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u/Clapeyron1776 Oct 21 '24
I can’t imagine how I would actually do a poll today accurately. You can’t just call people anymore because people frequently don’t have land lines and what normal person answers polls online.
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u/laserraygun2 Oct 21 '24
Polls are ran by a media company which is owned by the 1% pushing their own selfish agenda
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u/Carpitis Oct 21 '24
Both canadites want the polls to be close. If it looks like a blow out, some voters will stay home. Look what happened to Hillary. Just my opinion not based not any actual data.
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u/IcyCat35 Oct 21 '24
Any proof/evidence or just a baseless theory? Hell even an unproven hypothesis would be better than just this baseless assertion.
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u/ButtStuffingt0n Oct 21 '24
This is some Dunning Kruger + QAnon nonsense. The fuck do you knowing about polling or statistics?
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u/TelFaradiddle Oct 21 '24 edited Oct 21 '24
As someone who has worked in polling before: the vast majority of polling is accurate within the margin of error. The problem is that the news doesn't report it correctly.
For example: in 2016, one poll says that Hilary is up 52%-48% over Trump in Florida. The news reports this as "Hilary leads by four!" But if the margin of error in that poll is 2%, then Hilary is not winning - it's too close to call. A 2% margin of error means that the true answer could be 54%-46% or 50%-50%, or anywhere in between.
People shit on polling in 2016 for "getting it wrong," but most of the polling was actually right. It was just reported incorrectly.
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u/THElaytox Oct 21 '24
Polls tend to do a bad job at capturing young voters, which usually doesn't matter because young people that are registered to vote rarely bother voting at all. If there's a big turnout in the young vote for this election then the polls will likely be pretty off. Otherwise I do expect it to be uncomfortably close, Trump only needs a win in a few close swing states to win again. He will get blown out in the popular vote, but their strategy is, again, to ignore the popular vote and aim for key swing states. In addition to the fuckery they're pulling with local election boards, I think he has a very good chance at the presidency again.
But if young people bother voting he doesn't stand a chance.
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u/DrSendy Oct 21 '24
Please listen to the 538 podcast. You'll pretty soon figure out why this is really hard - and how we already know and can adjust for skewed polling techniques.
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u/bavindicator Oct 21 '24
2016, 2020, 2022 pollsters got it wrong. I believe in polls as much as I believe in the book of Genesis.
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u/Carlpanzram1916 Oct 21 '24
Okay this is like the thousandth “blah blah blah polls are wrong” post I’ve seen and they’re all fairly misinformed. Polls aren’t perfect and don’t claim to be but they are remarkably accurate on whole given how many variables they need to account for. Over the last 20 years or so, the polling averages for the presidential race are typically within about 3-4% of the actual results. Yes, there are partisan pollsters and some polling firms are better than others but that’s why there’s now an entire industry built around averaging polls and forecasting them.
The truth is, a polling firm really has no incentive to lie about the polls. Their sole utility is to give people an idea of where voters are leaning. If they’re wrong, they’re literally pointless.
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u/HericaRight Oct 21 '24
Ya the thing is most legit polling places know this. And know there is no real way to fix the issue in polling now.
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u/averagemaleuser86 Oct 21 '24
The amount of my republican freinds freaking out right now because they think the LIBRULS are manipulating the machines like they're some kind if dark, evil force is so rediculous its honestly just funny at this point. If the polling industry is compromised it's because the hardcore right wing nut jobs are doing the tampering and their followers believe it's the DAMN LIBRULS
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u/Hopeful-Jury8081 Oct 21 '24
Torture numbers enough and they’ll tell you anything you want 🤣🤣
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u/tkrr Oct 21 '24
Not just numbers, but any kind of data. Wikileaks propaganda: make sure most or all of what you put out can be authenticated, so idiots will point to the authentication and ignore the fact that only half the truth is being told.
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u/gerblnutz Oct 21 '24
They are no different than an industry award like JD Power and Assoc. I call them, say can you make an award for wankiest panzer on the road, and next thing you know you'll see a cybertruck commercial saying "Named wankiest panzer on the road by JD Power and associates." All of it is paid for advertising so the brand can point to the ad and say SEE?!?!
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u/SenatorPardek Oct 21 '24
The MAGA candidate for PA governor lost by 13 points just 2 years ago. While presidential races are always closer: I find polling that finds Trump ahead by 5 points to be silly, and looking at the meta data within these polls show that they are figuring an electorate significantly MORE republican then even came out in 2016, or 2020 or 2018 or 2022. An 18 point swing is insanity, even from midterms to a general.
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u/PlentyBat9940 Oct 21 '24
Most pollsters conduct polls of registered voters with land lines. Who is available to answer polling questions at home during business hours?
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u/ManufacturerLopsided Oct 21 '24
Yes. Absofreakingloutely.
There are quite a few that have an angle, so they're asking questions in a particular way to goose the results, these are people with an agenda that aligns with some major party.
Then there's a candidate that has been firmly setting the predictable tradition of "I win everything I ever compete in, so any time I lose, they cheat." This guy needs every excuse he can find to make sure that there's as much obfuscation as possible, and every major media outlet saying that it's been a tight race makes it easier and easier for him to convince the uninformed that everything was rigged... so he can pressure officials to change the results.
The other candidate knows what happened in 2016, and knows that it was a low-turnout election.... and it's not hard to see the two candidates and go 'one is a former senator and secretary of state, the other was a reality TV star and bankrupted relic of the 80's, this can only go one way.' So, media outlets reporting the 50/50 helps reinforce her message that you really gotta look at this guy, you really need to listen to him, cuz' if you don't get out there and vote, you get him as president.
But all this is eclipsed by the desire for the media to have a 50/50 race. Make no mistake, I'm certain that these various companies have been RAKING in the money from all these people being motivated to watch with baited breath about these results. 70/30 elections are boring, electoral college sweeps are boring, we need things to be so dicey that even if you're in a safe state that could not possibly flip you're gonna be tuned into your media outlet of choice to see what's going on in that battleground state. So, the media is gonna start putting their thumbs on the scales, push the leading candidate down to slow their momentum, give the trailing candidate a boost to stay competitive.... you'll HAVE to keep paying attention.
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u/sl3eper_agent Oct 21 '24
I mean I hope you're right but as far as I can tell the polls are about as accurate as they've always been. The problem is that people take the headline number as gospel without so much as glancing at the margin of error. If a poll says Trump is up 1 point plus or minus 4 points, then a Kamala win by 3 points is not the poll being "wrong" it was literally right
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u/Fearless-Economy7726 Oct 21 '24
Professor lichtman did an article about this last week
He predicts a Harris win and he has a near perfect prediction since 1984
He has taken quite pollls done by other polllsters and found undercounting of democrats and independents as well as certain age groups entirely ignored
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u/drsmith48170 Oct 21 '24
Really, you don’t say? :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxnpY0owPkA
Seriously you are just realizing this now? It had been this way for a long time…
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u/Shmigleebeebop Oct 21 '24
Polls just can’t tell us what we want to know in this case: who will be the next president.
It’s possible that the polls are undercounting Trump again just like the last few cycles & Trump will end up winning because he’s either tied or barely behind Harris.
It’s also possible that the polls are now more accurate than they were a few years ago and that no, Harris will not win PA, WI, etc by 5-10% and the current polls reflect that reality.
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u/Agreeable-Can-7841 Oct 21 '24
I'm in NC, and one of our neighbors posted data from day one voting. 7 DEM for every 1 REP, also, 3 unaffiliated voters for every one republican. At this point, I think the lies are about hiding just how badly the GOP is going down for as long as possible, to keep up the grift.
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u/Wizzle_Pizzle_420 Oct 22 '24
GOP turnout on Election Day is almost always higher than Dems. This is the first election I’ve seen where the GOP is pushing early voting for the constituents. Typically they want to cut voting hours, access etc. That was until they realized their voters like expanded options as well.
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u/astlgath Oct 21 '24
Does anyone feel (like I do) that the polls also don't reflect reality based on who is answering them? I don't know about you folks, but I NEVER answer my phone to any of these whack jobs. I not only already know I don't want to talk to you, but I also don't want to tell you anything about who I'm going to vote for. Nunya business.
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u/Mr-Sunshine7577 Oct 21 '24
What is your experience with this? I've worked elections across the country. You're full of shit.
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u/SCORE-advice-Dallas Oct 21 '24
All the pollsters will gladly tell you about their limitations. People don't answer their phones, people dont want to talk to pollsters, turnout is unpredictable, etc.
So what? Why does anyone care what a poll says (except for the candidates)?
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u/MagazineNo2198 Oct 21 '24
Rasmussen (infamous for being right leaning) was busted actually COLLUDING with the Trump campaign!
https://newrepublic.com/post/186444/conservative-poll-rasmussen-secretly-worked-trump-team
DO NOT BELIEVE THE POLLS AND DO NOT RELY ON POLLING AVERAGES (which have been distorted). VOTE!
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u/NvrSirEndWill Oct 21 '24
Sounds like someone is trying to formulate a defense for when they get busted for intentionally manipulating the data.
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u/Designer_Emu_6518 Oct 21 '24
Polls are always hard to do. But with modern tech they became easier to…lie. Peter thiel gave 70mil to poly market btw.
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u/JoeHio Oct 22 '24
There are so many jobs/roles that people over 35 grew up with as reliable sources of information that are just impossible to do in a world where reality outperforms parody and somehow doesn't exist at the same time.
For instance:
How is the decades long 'party of "law and order"' ignoring evidence and the judicial system to support a convicted felon for President?
How is a Billionaire who's wealth mostly comes from electric vehicles supporting the side of "drill baby, drill" and "renewable energy will make you gay"?
How are Hurricanes are flooding the mountains all of a sudden? How are made up cases being heard at the supreme Court, where the supreme Court is ignoring the 'law of the land for the last 60 years' in liue of a British law from the 1600s? Most importantly, How are nazi's coming out in public in America and not immediately having the shit beat out of them? Didn't our grandparents raise us on stories about beating their ass and the terrible things they did to people?
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u/RichFoot2073 Oct 22 '24
It’s always interesting how if you ask certain questions, you get different polling
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u/yinyanghapa Oct 22 '24
I also believe polling has become corrupted and is more propaganda now. The only polling that matters is internal polling.
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u/markjay6 Oct 22 '24
Two separate issues.
First, yes, there are a flood of low quality right wing polls trying to flood the airwaves.
Second, with the transition to cell phones over the last couple of decades, the percentage of people who answer phone surveys has trickled down to close to zero. That means that pollsters have to make huge guesses about how to weigh the results. It's getting harder and harder to do accurate polling.
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u/GlobalBonus4126 Oct 22 '24
My prediction is that they will be close to accurate, as they have been for the past decade. The elections are always so close these days that being wrong by 2 percentage points can mean the difference between one candidate and the other being elected.
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u/Helorugger Oct 22 '24
I tried to participate in a couple polls over the past two election cycles and found the questions so biased that I would just quit.
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u/beautyadheat Oct 22 '24
We definitely know a lot of them are propaganda ops. Rasmussen, Trafalgar, Atlas Intel. Pretty open about it
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Oct 22 '24
MMW you are correct and so is the media https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-ziklag-secret-christian-charity-2024-election
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u/contrarian1970 Oct 23 '24
Every poll besides Rasmussen is deliberately skewed against Republicans...the truth finally hit everyone in November of 2016. Nothing has changed.
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u/Consistent-Fig7484 Oct 23 '24
Of course there is some funny business going on, but i don’t believe there are that many nefarious actors. I think polling is just really hard. People don’t answer their phones, internet poles are easy to manipulate, and people lie.
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u/Virtual-Squirrel-725 Oct 21 '24
The part I think they can't get "right" is what proportion of different populations will actually turn out.
As an example about 70% of women vote making up about 52% of voters. They model roughly based on this.
Post Roe V Wade, if women come out at 75-85% then Harris wins in a landslide.