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submitted 2 days ago by Sunshine@lemmy.ca to c/canada@lemmy.ca
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[-] n2burns@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I keep hearing statements like this, but they're not backed up by data. Polls are rarely "wrong" and aggregators such as 338Canada do a pretty good job of predicting local races. While there are are some historically bad misses (many pollsters for the 2016 US Presidential Election), IMHO the biggest issues is people not understanding what polls actually mean, and the media doing a terrible job of explaining them.

[-] morbidcactus@lemmy.ca 2 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

My tepid take, every poll should report with error bars, would help somewhat, like I know they report moe but still, visual would be best to convey that quickly.

Doesn't help that in my experience, people just don't have a great grasp on statistics, was a common complaint of a statistician friend I worked with for years. As to why, stats specific courses weren't required when I went to highschool, I hope that's changed.

[-] Nemean_lion@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago

Also the 2024 election. Also the bc provincial election last year. Pretty sure the last federal election polls Also were wrong. Polls are instantly biased by the type of people that answer polls, or the audience that the polls are based on.

[-] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago

The polls were good in the last federal election. It's just that the Liberals took the question of "who would you vote for if there were an election today?" a little too literally and called a snap election. People didn't like that and they dropped in the polls immediately because of that bonehead decision. The election result wasn't a surprise for anyone following the polls.

[-] n2burns@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago

Also the 2024 election.

Almost all of the polls were within the MOE. The polls said it was a toss up, and it was.

Also the bc provincial election last year. Pretty sure the last federal election polls Also were wrong.

The results for both of these were very close to what the polls predicted. Not sure why you felt they were off?

Polls are instantly biased by the type of people that answer polls, or the audience that the polls are based on.

Very true, which is the job of pollsters to adjust for. And, as I've said, I think they are pretty good at their jobs.

[-] Nemean_lion@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 hours ago

We will circle back to this in a week and see how things went.

this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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