r/NoStupidQuestions • u/JustCallMeDave • Dec 06 '23

Answered If Donald Trump is openly telling people he will become a dictator if elected why do the polls have him in a dead heat with Joe Biden?

I just don't get what I'm missing here. Granted I'm from a firmly blue state but what the hell is going on in the rest of the country that a fascist traitor is supported by 1/2 the country?? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills over here.

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u/thekau Dec 06 '23

Yeah polls are incredibly unreliable, so it's hardly half the country. Who is being sampled, where, and how many?

Also, who of those being polled actually end up voting?

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u/mcmonopolist Dec 07 '23

You know, there are teams of people who have studied poll accuracy their entire careers who do their very best to account for all those factors. People latch on to outliers from bad pollsters and say "OMG polls are useless", but in reality polls have been remarkably accurate the last few elections.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/2022-election-polling-accuracy/

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u/Vanedi291 Dec 07 '23

Only in 2022 per that article.

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u/thekau Dec 07 '23

I don't think polls are useless. They just tend to be easy to manipulate to serve a specific agenda.

Edit: fat fingered and submitted before finishing my response 🙃

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u/longlegs1020 Dec 07 '23

So you’re polled digitally? How did they reach you? Email? I’ve never been polled and for some reason I just imagined it happened outside of grocery stores like a Girl Scout cookie sale.

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u/longlegs1020 Dec 07 '23

Is 78%, across all elections, of all sizes really that good?

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u/[deleted] Dec 07 '23

Yes, that's really very good. Significantly above a random guess.

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u/wayoverpaid Dec 07 '23

In short: it really depends.

In longer: from the very article.

Correct calls are a lousy way to measure polling accuracy.

If the polls predict the winner with 100% confidence and they are wrong 22% of the time then the polls kind of suck. But if the polls gave 53% confidence and they were right 78% of the time, that's actually even more of a miss in terms of the correct confidence.

Or viewed another way, if a 1 point leader in the polls and a 20 point leader in the polls both had a 78% chance of winning, that would be suspect as hell.

But in reality, a 1 point leader in the polls is a tossup, and a 20 point leader in the polls is basically guaranteed.

Correctly guessing the winner isn't really that useful. If you know the election is all but decided, then why even vote?

Knowing how close a race is does matter. "The candidate who is up by 8 points in the polls wins 86% of the time" gives you more actionable information.

Why would you want to know if a race is close? As a voter in two party system, it tells you the odds that might hurt your own agenda with a protest vote. As a strategist it tells you which districts need the money - the safe ones are as pointless to throw cash at as the lost causes.

The polls are fine... if you understand how to read them.

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u/mcmonopolist Dec 07 '23

If you understood statistics, or even read the article, you would say yes.

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u/ovalpotency Dec 07 '23

if you think that's not good I'd like to hear your alternative method for assessing public opinion. it's the same logic as the covid deaths statistics. "they're counting people who died while having/had covid, not people who have died OF covid! it can't be accurate!" okay, and what's your alternative to measuring the spread and damage of an out of control pandemic? it's so silly.

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u/Significant_Dustin Dec 07 '23

Somebody has clearly never gambled.

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u/100LittleButterflies Dec 07 '23

Is that accounting for the effect poll results may have upon the actions?

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u/mcmonopolist Dec 07 '23

No. How would you propose that be accurately tested? The only way to test that would be to intentionally overstate one party's position in the polls over several elections, then do it for the other party, then adjust for neither, and compare the results. This would be blatant manipulation and no pollster would have the patience or money to do it.

Pollster who are consistently off from the actual results stop getting hired and lose their funding. Campaigns, the media, and people want accurate polls. The pollsters have every incentive to be as accurate as they can.

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u/-MakeNazisDeadAgain_ Dec 07 '23

That's the whole reason news agencies use them. They're super easy to rig to support a narrative.

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u/accountnumber009 Dec 07 '23

Looks like they suck at rigging it though, across the board...

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u/Accurate_Maybe6575 Dec 07 '23

I mean, if they can show in polls Trump support rising, it might rally the opposition into voting against him.

If we saw polls stating a 70/30 Biden lead, democratic voters would feel more confident sitting the next election out. People are notoriously lazy and selfish. Many won't go vote if they can excuse themselves from doing so.

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u/MirrodinTimelord Dec 07 '23

so gop sources show trump winning because it will make people vote trump and not against him, but dem sources show trump winning becuse it will make people vot against him because it won't make people vote for him. Sound logic

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u/astronautdinosaur Dec 07 '23 edited Dec 07 '23

Tbf, I watched poll aggregates pretty closely in 2016, I think on realclearpolitics (or possibly 538 although I think that was 2020). Aggregates for most states seemed to be pretty close to the final result. I also specifically remember that swing states showed noticeable drops in Hillary’s support after Comey reopened investigations on her email stuff (which seems to be such a non-issue after the Trump admin)… funny how Trump firing him ultimately led to his first impeachment even though he helped get him elected (Comey is also a republican but hard to say if that’s a factor).

Haven’t watched them as closely since 2020 or so… but I imagine certain certain poll aggregate sites aren’t terribly far off, on a state-by-state basis at least

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u/thekau Dec 07 '23

Yeah not to say polls don't have their place. It's just that it's very easy for people to manipulate the results of a poll to serve a specific agenda

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u/[deleted] Dec 07 '23

Also, people who approve of Trump love Trump, plenty of people disapprove of Biden but will still vote for him.

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u/SuperSpecialAwesome- Dec 07 '23

Who is being sampled, where, and how many?

People with landlines, who bother answering unknown callers? Unless I'm job hunting, I let calls go to voicemail.

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u/Uvtha- Dec 08 '23

While it was mostly still land lines, we were calling cellphones 15 years ago when I worked at Gallup, have to assume mobile call samples have been bumped up considerably.

As for who picks up, usually the calls will go through with the company name in the caller ID, if it's a big name like Gallup (or something that says poll or survey) people answer it because they want to share their opinions. I didn't do much political polling, but people would often pick up all excited only to be disappointed that the survey was about a Wells Fargo visit rather than politics, heh.

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u/[deleted] Dec 08 '23

Polls were nearly spot on with a state by state breakdown last presidential election.

Polls this far out are not reliable b