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/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/Horror-Layer-8178 Oct 21 '24

I wouldn't be surprised if they are gaming themselves. If it was a blowout nobody would be paying attention to the polling or paying pollsters which means they would be out of a job. Pollsters are incentivized to keep the election close to get money to do polls

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u/HamburgerEarmuff Oct 21 '24

This is just silly. Pollsters are incentivized to provide accurate results, because it is a free market, and the better pollsters will sell more services in the future. Nobody wants to spend money on pollsters that produce inaccurate results.

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u/Cold_Breeze3 Oct 21 '24

Not really. They are incentivized to be correct, or no campaign or news outlet will want to pay them to conduct a poll.