168
votes
Accepted
Why was the Economist model so sure Trump was going to lose compared to other models?
In comparison to the 538 model, the economist model uses less "fat tails".
538 uses a t-distribution to account for "black swan" events: things that, although they are unlikely, ...
- 124k
81
votes
What is the purpose of polls published by the organization that they are asking about which have leading/confusing questions?
One purpose of the type of poll that you linked to is to develop a list of potential donors and campaign volunteers and supporters. The one-sided nature of the poll language serves to a) motivate the ...
- 1,913
57
votes
Accepted
Was the November 2019 polling about the Democratic Party's lead over Trump trustworthy?
Fully-specified polls are perfectly trustworthy in terms of what polls actually indicate. Their topline results are not very reliable.
Most people think of polls in various incorrect ways. The most ...
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56
votes
Help me understand the context behind the "It's okay to be white" question in a recent Rasmussen Poll, and what if anything might these results show?
I am not sure how much "context" you want out of a poll question.
This is the poll:
1* Do you agree or disagree with this statement: “It’s OK to be white.”
2* Do you agree or disagree ...
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48
votes
Accepted
In the 538 Election Forecast, what is the difference between States that are: "the closest races" and "close to the tipping point"?
To demonstrate the difference, I'm going to use the result of the 2008 election as an example.
A close race is a race where the difference between the two candidates is small. In 2008, Missouri was ...
- 28k
42
votes
Accepted
What's the point of US presidential polls that poll people in general rather than dividing them by state?
Initial Considerations
why do so many polls simply aggregate the voters rather than segment
into states? Is a generic population based poll that interesting?
One reason to do a national poll is that ...
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37
votes
What is the purpose of polls published by the organization that they are asking about which have leading/confusing questions?
I tend to group polls into one of two types:
scientific polls that intend to reflect accurately what the population or whichever subgroup it is interested in thinks/believes/desires/knows
proof-of-...
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34
votes
Accepted
Phenomenon where politically incorrect candidates do better in actual elections than in polls?
One term for this effect is "Social Desirability bias"
Social desirability bias is a social science research term that describes the tendency of survey respondents to answer questions in a ...
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32
votes
Accepted
Are there any US polls of whether Trump prosecution is considered politically motivated?
People poll about everything related to politics so of course there are polls about this. And it should also be noted that people can think that the charges are politically motivated and that he did ...
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30
votes
Was the November 2019 polling about the Democratic Party's lead over Trump trustworthy?
Don't mistake polled sentiments for election results.
In all likelihood, the next presidential election in the US will be decided by a few swing states. It will not matter how much the Democrats win ...
- 116k
28
votes
Are opinion polls always representative of the extreme opinions?
The survey/poll participants not being all equally likely to answer is a well-known problem called participation bias aka non-response bias. A typical example:
A study of nonrespondents from the ...
28
votes
In the 538 Election Forecast, what is the difference between States that are: "the closest races" and "close to the tipping point"?
There are some nuances particular to FiveThirtyEight's model. Their dashboard works by simulating a large number of elections, and then presents a sample of 100 of these simulations.
The states with ...
CDJB♦
- 109k
26
votes
Help me understand the context behind the "It's okay to be white" question in a recent Rasmussen Poll, and what if anything might these results show?
"Its Ok To Be White" is a white supremacist slogan
It has been used as a racist saying going back more than 5 years.
As citations:
Campuses confront spread of 'It's OK to Be White' posters (...
- 2,548
24
votes
Accepted
How can we estimate the real support of the war among Russian citizens?
The following isn't an answer telling us what Russian public opinion with regards to the "special military operation" is. It is listing some approaches that have been tried and info that ...
- 92.8k
20
votes
What is the purpose of polls published by the organization that they are asking about which have leading/confusing questions?
Depending on how you became aware of the poll, this may be an example of a push poll. This is a poll where there is no intention of doing anything useful with the results, but where the true goal of ...
- 597
20
votes
Help me understand the context behind the "It's okay to be white" question in a recent Rasmussen Poll, and what if anything might these results show?
The existence, not the result, of the poll is the message
what if anything at all might these poll results show?
It doesn't really matter what percentages were reported in the poll. Adams is ...
- 954
19
votes
Help me understand the context behind the "It's okay to be white" question in a recent Rasmussen Poll, and what if anything might these results show?
The context is simple. Currently in the US, there is a political debate that is acting as a proxy for what some call culture war. Radical US conservatives have one particular world view that embodies ...
- 373
18
votes
Why are there no polls of Tom Steyer yet?
If you look at the date ranges on those "most recent polls" (at the time this question was asked) you will find that they almost all started before July 9th.
The Hill/Harris X poll started July 12th. ...
- 3,979
18
votes
Help me understand the context behind the "It's okay to be white" question in a recent Rasmussen Poll, and what if anything might these results show?
Julian Sanchez recently described the context behind this situation in a thread on Twitter (I've reformatted it slightly into paragraphs and not tweets):
It seems like a bunch of folks were ...
- 2,628
18
votes
Accepted
What explanations can be offered for the extreme see-sawing in Montana's senate race polling?
Pollster Quality
A major premise of 538 is that all polls are not equally informative. Different polling organizations use different methodologies, and that creates biases within the polls.
So just ...
- 2,668
15
votes
Was the November 2019 polling about the Democratic Party's lead over Trump trustworthy?
In addition to the caveat about the Electoral College, polls can change pretty fast. Just on Oct 30, another predicted Trump would win the popular vote, against an unnamed Democratic nominee, by a ...
15
votes
How can poll results be verified?
The general solution is multiple, independent polling organizations. If the results of multiple polls are roughly consistent with each other, they can be considered as reliable as possible given the ...
- 11.9k
15
votes
Why is polling data for Northern Ireland so differently displayed on national polling sites?
Northern Ireland politics is pretty much separate from the politics of Great Britain.
Opinion polls are not synchronised, because you can't use the same poll questions for NI and GB, and the two sets ...
- 10.9k
13
votes
How can we estimate the real support of the war among Russian citizens?
There's a clever method to do this, called list experiment. Here's the description:
In the list experiment, respondents were asked whether they personally supported none, one, two, three, or four of ...
- 37.8k
12
votes
Accepted
Why are two trend-lines shown with Biden's poll results?
What's going on is that there are two weekly polls of the Democratic race, one by Politico/Morning Consult and one by Economist/YouGov. The Economist/YouGov poll shows consistently lower support for ...
- 11.2k
12
votes
Accepted
How can we estimate the real support of continued resistance among Ukrainian citizens?
The most recent poll results conducted by Gallup (a widely known, independent organization not based in Ukraine) are below. They indicate that the majority of Ukrainians want to fight to liberate all ...
- 12.6k
12
votes
Accepted
Did polls adjust their methodology after overestimating Democrat's shares in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections in the Rust Belt?
Apparently some pollsters are trying to compensate:
In its post-2020 report, AAPOR cited nonresponse bias as one of the potential reasons for the cycle's larger polling error, possibly because ...
11
votes
Are opinion polls always representative of the extreme opinions?
Defining an opinion poll as "an assessment of public opinion obtained by questioning a representative sample," the answer to your question is no. Opinion polls are not always overly representative of ...
- 487
9
votes
Accepted
How do US pollsters select people for their polls?
It really depends on the pollster. Generally, a random sample is taken of the population, using methods such as random telephone number generation, and this sample is then weighted to correct for ...
CDJB♦
- 109k
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