Trump’s lie about “eating pet dogs and cats” is his best-polling lie. It polled nine points better among his supporters than his lie that “in some states it is legal to kill a baby after birth”. It polled 24 points better than his lie that “public schools are providing students with sex-change operations” and 44 points better than his lie that “noise from wind turbines has been shown to cause cancer.” The raw numbers dictated the emphasis of his fiction.
billseymoursays
No matter what I say, I never poll below 47 per cent.
That’s what scares me. How can that be?
flexsays
I no longer trust the polls.
I can’t say for certain that the polls are wrong, and I know there are some people at my workplace who say they will be voting for Trump. As an aside, they think he will help small businesses, and they are eager would-be entrepreneurs who are only working as engineers until they get their businesses off the ground. They are all young white men who don’t care about social issues, they just want to be millionaires and they think they will have lower taxes, regulations, or mandatory minimum wages to pay under Trump. Who am I to burst their bubble of incorrect notions of how economics works? They wouldn’t listen to me anyway, so it’s not really worth my time to try. They are all also putting their money in crypto in the hope that they will be able to sell the crypto for a lot of money in the future (i.e. speculation).
However I know that I don’t answer my phone when I can’t identify the number, unless I am expecting a call from someone I don’t know. Even so, I’ve twice spoken to pollsters this cycle, and told them I will not be participating in their poll. So do most of my friends. I’m almost 60 years old, so it’s not just a young persons thing to ignore unwanted calls. The only people I know of who does answer every phone call are my parents, who still use rotary phones.
What I would like to see in any polling data these days is how many total unique phone numbers they tried. If the poll results are “Out of 1000 random American’s polled, 47% are planning to vote for Trump.” I then want to know how many numbers they tried and got no answer or a refusal to participate. If they reached out to 1000 random phone numbers and reached 1500 people willing to take the poll, then the poll may be close to being accurate. If they tried to phone 150,000 numbers and only reached 1000 people willing to take part in the poll, then the numbers are probably highly skewed.
Internet polls are notoriously inaccurate because of selection bias. Only the people interested in an issue will take a poll about it. This was learned many years ago, and there was a term for it, Pharyngulation. Where PZ would be informed of an internet poll on some issue like separation of Church and State, advertise it, and the hoarde (TM) would descend on it to push the results in a humanist direction. Many members of the hoarde (TM) figured out how to vote many times (usually it just took clearing your internet cache). I think with the introduction of smart phones, and the ability of the user to know who is trying to reach them, the selection bias for phone polls has been increasing.
There is only one poll which really matters, the vote we cast on election day. Vote!
According to Sidney Blumenthal,
That’s what scares me. How can that be?
I no longer trust the polls.
I can’t say for certain that the polls are wrong, and I know there are some people at my workplace who say they will be voting for Trump. As an aside, they think he will help small businesses, and they are eager would-be entrepreneurs who are only working as engineers until they get their businesses off the ground. They are all young white men who don’t care about social issues, they just want to be millionaires and they think they will have lower taxes, regulations, or mandatory minimum wages to pay under Trump. Who am I to burst their bubble of incorrect notions of how economics works? They wouldn’t listen to me anyway, so it’s not really worth my time to try. They are all also putting their money in crypto in the hope that they will be able to sell the crypto for a lot of money in the future (i.e. speculation).
However I know that I don’t answer my phone when I can’t identify the number, unless I am expecting a call from someone I don’t know. Even so, I’ve twice spoken to pollsters this cycle, and told them I will not be participating in their poll. So do most of my friends. I’m almost 60 years old, so it’s not just a young persons thing to ignore unwanted calls. The only people I know of who does answer every phone call are my parents, who still use rotary phones.
What I would like to see in any polling data these days is how many total unique phone numbers they tried. If the poll results are “Out of 1000 random American’s polled, 47% are planning to vote for Trump.” I then want to know how many numbers they tried and got no answer or a refusal to participate. If they reached out to 1000 random phone numbers and reached 1500 people willing to take the poll, then the poll may be close to being accurate. If they tried to phone 150,000 numbers and only reached 1000 people willing to take part in the poll, then the numbers are probably highly skewed.
Internet polls are notoriously inaccurate because of selection bias. Only the people interested in an issue will take a poll about it. This was learned many years ago, and there was a term for it, Pharyngulation. Where PZ would be informed of an internet poll on some issue like separation of Church and State, advertise it, and the hoarde (TM) would descend on it to push the results in a humanist direction. Many members of the hoarde (TM) figured out how to vote many times (usually it just took clearing your internet cache). I think with the introduction of smart phones, and the ability of the user to know who is trying to reach them, the selection bias for phone polls has been increasing.
There is only one poll which really matters, the vote we cast on election day. Vote!