A new set of Times/Siena polls, including one with The Philadelphia Inquirer, reveal an erosion of support for the president among young and nonwhite voters upset about the economy and Gaza.
Read tea leaves? What is exactly is your alternative?
Other people in other threads have found more of the fucky things about this poll; it was a phone poll which 2% of people answered the phone for, which made no attempt to correct for “what ideological mentalities are likely to answer the phone to random numbers”, and then on top of that explicitly made adjustments like increasing the weight of non-college-educated people for some pretty dubious reason.
Polls sound great. The fact that the election is even within 10 points, or 20, should lead to alarm in the Biden camp, and cause some deep soul searching for what went so wrong in the American system that we could be talking about electing Lex Luthor mayor and people are taking it seriously as an idea and it’s even a question of who is going to win the election. I think education and media are the main culprits. Concrete things Biden is doing are not unrelated, exactly (especially on aid for Israel), but they honestly don’t seem to make all that much difference, and a lot of people who are voicing concerns about him seem totally unaware of concrete things he’s been doing.
I’m by no means saying don’t be alarmed. I think we should be very alarmed. But yes, also, I think we should call out bullshit polls when they are as clearly bullshit as this one is (as part of examining the reasons why a respectable news outlet would even be reporting a close poll between Biden and Trump as anything other than the absolute looming catastrophe that it objectively is.)
If you’re somehow actually a Biden supporter, these polls should have you working harder
That’s actually a really good point – I’ll try to come up with some concrete things I can do to help Biden win sometimes later today. I just went to verify that I’m registered to vote (I still am), and I think maybe a good thing politically overall would be a little informational thing about who to vote for in Congress. Presumably some little tool already exists that can tell if your congresspeople have been voting for aid for Israel, inform your voting accordingly instead of just blindly checking the D box, things like that, but I don’t know all that much about it.
IDK, I’ll see what I can come up with later on today if I have some time. It’s a good reminder that talking on the internet without some sort of action isn’t always a good investment of time.
The fact that the election is even within 10 points, or 20, should lead to alarm in the Biden camp,
But…
It’s within 1 or points…
Unless… Are you ignoring everything but popular vote polls across the whole country?
If you’re doing that and not understanding why it’s a bad idea, then that explains why you think polls are bad, but you’re still wrong. Your just looking at polls that don’t matter because those are the ones you agree with
Me: Explains in detail what’s suspect about this specific poll, while still expressing overall alarm at the state of Biden being in trouble in the election
You:
You know what, I don’t even want to summarize it. This is why letting shills or bad faith people participate in the discussion in the first place is a bad idea. I could be using this time to talk with other people who are above-board about what they think, who read and respond to what’s actually said, instead of me investing even a single minute in writing up a message “actually that’s not what I said or even remotely close to it, and you’re just misrepresenting me to make a bizarrely slanted attack on Biden and his supporters, which is your job apparently.”
Feel free to read what I actually said, and respond to it, otherwise please piss off.
Lemmy is a small place man, the people who constantly rant against science if it doesn’t back up their opinions stick out. Especially when it’s a topic someone knows about like statistical analysis.
This isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%.)
Other people in other threads have found more of the fucky things about this poll; it was a phone poll which 2% of people answered the phone for, which made no attempt to correct for “what ideological mentalities are likely to answer the phone to random numbers”, and then on top of that explicitly made adjustments like increasing the weight of non-college-educated people for some pretty dubious reason.
Polls sound great. The fact that the election is even within 10 points, or 20, should lead to alarm in the Biden camp, and cause some deep soul searching for what went so wrong in the American system that we could be talking about electing Lex Luthor mayor and people are taking it seriously as an idea and it’s even a question of who is going to win the election. I think education and media are the main culprits. Concrete things Biden is doing are not unrelated, exactly (especially on aid for Israel), but they honestly don’t seem to make all that much difference, and a lot of people who are voicing concerns about him seem totally unaware of concrete things he’s been doing.
I’m by no means saying don’t be alarmed. I think we should be very alarmed. But yes, also, I think we should call out bullshit polls when they are as clearly bullshit as this one is (as part of examining the reasons why a respectable news outlet would even be reporting a close poll between Biden and Trump as anything other than the absolute looming catastrophe that it objectively is.)
That’s actually a really good point – I’ll try to come up with some concrete things I can do to help Biden win sometimes later today. I just went to verify that I’m registered to vote (I still am), and I think maybe a good thing politically overall would be a little informational thing about who to vote for in Congress. Presumably some little tool already exists that can tell if your congresspeople have been voting for aid for Israel, inform your voting accordingly instead of just blindly checking the D box, things like that, but I don’t know all that much about it.
IDK, I’ll see what I can come up with later on today if I have some time. It’s a good reminder that talking on the internet without some sort of action isn’t always a good investment of time.
But…
It’s within 1 or points…
Unless… Are you ignoring everything but popular vote polls across the whole country?
If you’re doing that and not understanding why it’s a bad idea, then that explains why you think polls are bad, but you’re still wrong. Your just looking at polls that don’t matter because those are the ones you agree with
Me: Explains in detail what’s suspect about this specific poll, while still expressing overall alarm at the state of Biden being in trouble in the election
You:
You know what, I don’t even want to summarize it. This is why letting shills or bad faith people participate in the discussion in the first place is a bad idea. I could be using this time to talk with other people who are above-board about what they think, who read and respond to what’s actually said, instead of me investing even a single minute in writing up a message “actually that’s not what I said or even remotely close to it, and you’re just misrepresenting me to make a bizarrely slanted attack on Biden and his supporters, which is your job apparently.”
Feel free to read what I actually said, and respond to it, otherwise please piss off.
Instead you just did a straw man?
Lemmy is a small place man, the people who constantly rant against science if it doesn’t back up their opinions stick out. Especially when it’s a topic someone knows about like statistical analysis.
This isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation…
That’s me, I love strawmen and said a whole bunch about what your argument even was, and I hate science. You got me.
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.
This is the only question there:
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.
Sure thing.
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.
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%.)