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submitted 6 months ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/politics@lemmy.world
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[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 3 points 6 months ago

Actually, if you wanna educate me on science and polling, can you answer this question? That's one that I am genuinely curious about that I don't know the answer to; maybe if you're super up to speed on polling you might know.

[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world -1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

This is the only question there:

I would be interested to go back and look at some of the polling that led up to recent special elections where Democrats won, and see how the poll results compared with the election results – if you follow polling in detail (which again, I don’t), do you happen to know where I could look to find that?

But yes, if you can tell me what race specifically, it would take two seconds to find a poll for you.

And I'm willing to do that if you can calm down with the insults and multiple replies if I don't respond immediately.

It's the work day homie, you gotta give people more than 5 minutes to respond before spamming them. But this is important, if there's a chance you'll start believing in science again, I can spend less than a minute googling something for you.

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 4 points 6 months ago

But yes, if you can tell me what race specifically, it would take two seconds to find a poll for you.

Sure thing.

  • New York's 26th Congressional District on April 30, 2024.
  • New York's 3rd Congressional District on February 13, 2024.
  • Utah’s 2nd Congressional District on November 21, 2023.
  • Rhode Island's 1st Congressional District on November 7, 2023.
  • Virginia's 4th Congressional District on February 21, 2023
[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world -2 points 6 months ago

New York’s 26th Congressional District on April 30, 2024.

I was just going to do the first one, but that had 60k voters and Dems won it 2 to 1...

They barely cracked 10% turnout...

Not even getting into how the name "Kennedy" fucks up search results with the word "poll" in 2024

But there just wasn't time between the state party saying the candidate, and when the state party held the special election for a poll. And I'm not sure how anyone would be surprised.

So let's look at the second instead.

I googled "NY3 polling" and immediately got this

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/house/2024/new-york/3/

Most polls had Souzzio up 4, Souzzio won by 7.

But, I'm really not sure why you want to explicitly and only look at Special elections, elections that occur "off season" with short campaigns and unpredictable turnout because nothing else is on the ballot.

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

But, I'm really not sure why you want to explicitly and only look at Special elections

It's fair. My point in looking at that, is to overall test the assertion that polls are indicative of how people vote. It kind of seems looking at the methodology for the OP article's poll, like if any accurate information came out of the poll about how the election would go, it would be more or less an accident (or a result of the fact that the poll and the election are both general measurements of how people feel politically overall, and not much more resolution than that.)

You could flip what you said around, and say that because the special elections are much less complex, and the polls were done much closer to the actual election than polls today about the election in November, I'd expect the polls to be much more predictive of how the election will go, than the OP article.

So, let's analyze. As you said, it's actually not that hard to find polls and results. I'll follow your lead and look at 538 (for the first three, which is all the effort I feel like investing in it).

Kinda looks like the polls have some methodology problems. I raised some plausible details for some of what those problems might be, and when we check, hey objectively do it seems like there are problems with the output? We find that, hey look, there are problems. Science!

(Incidentally, that poll for Utah claimed a margin for error of 4.26 percentage points, with the use of three significant digits of claimed resolution adding an extra layer of hilarity when it turned out their final answer was off by a factor of 267%.)

[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world -5 points 6 months ago

Hey, you learned how to Google for polls, it's more than I thought, and we don't want to push it too far your first day.

Later we can talk about what methodology means, because from how you just used it, I think you just heard someone else use it.

If you want to read ahead:

https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2023/04/19/polling-landscape-methodology/

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 2 points 6 months ago

Dude you can't explore with me a question about the accuracy of polling and find out that the answer is that modern polling is objectively shit, which was my point all along even before I started even looking at the question, and then get all condescending about how I don't know what I'm talking about. 🙂

Well, I mean, you can if you want, I guess. I'm happy with my conclusions from the day, though, you being rude about it notwithstanding.

[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world -5 points 6 months ago

So...

You knew what the answers were and thats why you asked for those specific polls as a "got ya"?

That's... That's just trolling.

Literally, the definition of it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(slang)

Not sure why you'd just admit that.

But if that's all you're doing, I guess class is over.

[-] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

You knew what the answers were and thats why you asked for those specific polls as a "got ya"?

Not even slightly, no. Not sure how you got from what I said. I just picked the most recent 5 elections that have happened, and invited you to find polls for them. I genuinely had no idea what the results would be (and I wouldn't have predicted that the polling results would have been so wrong, bordering on absurd.)

Not sure how you got from me being unable to use Google and you have to teach me, to now I knew the truth all along and I just withheld it from you to trick you and so that means that all of a sudden it's not the truth anymore. But good luck with things, in any case.

this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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