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Lock Him Up? A New Poll Has Some Bad News for Trump
(www.politico.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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I'm not super trusting of polls anymore, especially because they're usually done by telephone. However-
This makes me a little more trusting despite that whopping MoE. It sounds like bad news for Trump overall.
I have a related degree. The reason people distrust polls, is because the media frequently misreports or misrepresents them.
Eg. aggregated polling from the 2016 suggested Trump had a 1/3 chance of winning. If you believed some media coverage every poll said Clinton was certain to win. That was how the media reported on the polling, not the polling itself. Invariably Trump winning in 2016 was within the margin of error.
Not a large margin of error. You're extrapolating from 1000 people to 300 million. It's astonishing it's that low if you think about it.
Not that common anymore. Often they'll do a a telephone poll then supplement it with online or other methods. Here's IPSOS's article about this poll:
https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/politico-indictment-august-2023
I remember reading 538 leading up to the 2016 election, and hearing them say repeatedly that if Trump has a 1 in 4 chance (or whatever amount) of winning the election, not only is it possible for Trump to win, but in fact it means you actually expect it to happen in 1 out of 4 times.
Yeah I remember this too. I think the problem is that people simply don’t understand statistics and don’t realize a 70% chance of winning is totally different from getting 70% of the vote. I like what 538 has been doing in recent years by presenting odds rather than percentages, but people like echo chambers that confirm their biases so idk if this “polls don’t work” narrative is going to go away any time soon.
That's the article that has caused me to trust 538 above any other election prediction source. When HRC was doing a preemptive victory lap in Texas and HuffPo was publishing articles that said she had a 99% chance of winning, Nate Silver and Co were the only ones willing to admit the possibility of what would later become reality.
And then the big companies came in and wrecked 538.
Ok, fair enough. I defer to your expertise.
Indeed, the problem isn't polls themselves, assuming they're well constructed they're generally sound data, it's the interpretation and packaging of it as reported to the larger populous that gets in the way. Sometimes it gets to the point of funny when someone does an infographic where 30% and 60% somehow appear to have the same weight.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics...
Not that it matters here, but in case you want to use them somewhere serious:
Populous is an adjective
Populace is a noun
Thus why I'm not a writer, but at least the intent was there 🙂
I'm doing good if it doesn't look like a drunken baboon wrote it sometimes due to fat finger typing.
Considering people tend to view probability as 100% A, 100% B or 50-50, I'm not sure showing a 30-60 split as the same weight is really a bad choice...
My biggest issue with polls is that the media tout them as predictions, ignoring the fact that even if the data is 100% valid, circumstances can change dramatically in just a couple of days.
I maintain that polls are not actionable data for voters. They can help campaigns see trends and gauge the effectiveness of messaging, but they are useless to voters.
They can and do change in just a couple of days, but the real issue is that the media invariably fails to mention the margin of error or confidence interval.
It's always Candidate A 51%, candidate B 49%. When in reality it's inevitably something like "There's 19/20 chance that candidate gets between 48.5-53.5% of the vote, and that candidate gets between 46.5-51.5% of the vote."
And then when candidate B wins, the media will go "Why did the polls get it wrong?" when the election was always to close to call definitively.
Oh, and this is obviously ignoring the far more sinister use of misrepresented polling data, micro-demographically targetted thanks to big data harvested from social media. Think Cambridge Analytica algorithms which have determined that women in village X with one child and dog, being more likely to vote party Y, and then targetting them on social media with stories about the polls showing the result is a foreglone conclusion and that there's no point voting.
Thanks! I really like how Lemmy users with expertise in their area can add nuance to a lot of reporting, it really matters.
The 2 percent of Democrats who don't think he's guilty are suspect at least.
Like, do you not believe the people responded the way they say they did?
No, I'm just not certain it's an accurate sample. Polls were way off in 2020 and 2016.
They actually weren't though. Trump lost the popular vote by a huge margin in both cases, which is what was predicted.
Trump won within the margin of error in 2016.
They weren't. Aggregated polling in 2016 gave Trump a 1/3 chance of winning. That's not low. It's actually quite likely. Him becoming president was invariably within the margin of error in many polls.
Eg. 2016
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
2020:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/senate/
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/house/
2022:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/
The media reporting on polls (and anything scientific for that matter) is universally abysmal, that's why you mistakenly think otherwise.
Define "accurate". Define "way off". What do you think a poll tells you?
What you're upset about is how you're interpreting polls - and I guarantee you you're doing it wrong.
90% chance is not a guarantee success. 30% chance is not a guarantee fail. They're probabilities.
This poll, taken alone, tells you what these people think. It's not a prediction and by itself doesn't really say much. Taken in aggregate with other polls you can start to form an idea. But NO POLL will ever tell you the future.
Not the responses themselves but the methodologies of collecting responses don't result in accurate representation of the population.
Using collection methods that skew demographics in one direction or another, like older people being more likely to pick up a phone call.
Failing to account for other potentially major variables. Like the 2016 and 2020 elections, pollsters failed to account for negative voter turnout, people who were motivated to vote against a specific candidate, which had major impacts on the elections.
In this poll responses were collected online and the sample was weighted to reflect census demographics
I like that, it's a pretty good breakdown of controlled variables. And it looks like they're factoring in socioeconomic factors too, which is always a good thing.
After the last however long of bad polling, especially in the last 8 years, it's refreshing to see some better methodology but it's still going to take a while to get that general trust back.
Most polling is done via landline phone. Thus polling does reflect well on the actual voting population.
I'm not so sure that's true anymore. I don't go looking at every single study but I usually see a mix of landline, cell/sms, and online samples
That is why I said most, not all.
It would probably particularly represent older voters, who might lean towards Trump. Although I'm over 60 and white and answer the landline phone, and I abhor him and get more progressive every day. Come to think of it, I also hang up on pollsters, so...