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this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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New York Times doing its thing again
Presenting the poll results for registered voters, with candidates limited to Biden or Trump with no RFK involved, both of which are decisions which will swing things towards Trump and away from reality, is a decision that I'm hard pressed to explain any other way than that they're looking for the worst numbers they can present.
It's not even like the answers to the more accurate question were even any better for Biden. To me they look more or less the same (i.e. serious trouble for Biden). My only explanation is that a lot of these likely voters don't know their ass from their elbow (e.g.
Oooooh
This is interesting.
Look at the question "What one issue is most important in deciding your vote this November?"
It leads off with:
... and then, way down below, is "The state of democracy/corruption" (with 6% still bucking the trend to vote for it), and "The Middle East/Israel/Palestinians" (2%).
Lo and behold, a whole lot of people voted for one of the first two options, and also tended to answer questions about how they felt about the economy overall, and whether they felt overall happy with how things were going, accordingly.
I would be interested to see how this poll was presented exactly (especially whether written or verbal, and what order for the questions), and what the numbers would be if there was a similar weight of questioning and emphasis given to "The state of democracy/corruption" as a major issue. Maybe the results would be the same. Maybe not. I'd be interested to see it.
(Edit: Someone else sussed it out better than I did; their methodology was actually much worse and more explicitly slanted than that.)
I know you're not necessarily making this argument but you mention that the most important issue for voters includes...
In Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin the margin in 2020 was less than 2%. Michigan and Nevada were under 3%.
It's a small number, yes, but this argument that it "won't matter because people vote on domestic issues" ignores these thin margins, imo. It really might matter more than people think.
I didn't go into it at any length but I think the number of people who, in the actual election, will have the Gaza war impact the way they vote is way higher than 2%. About 13% of Democrats voted "uncommitted" in the Michigan primary, which presumably they wouldn't have done because of crime, immigration, or whatever other "non-most-important" issues according to this poll.
I think hanging out on Lemmy can give you the impression that more people overall care about Palestine than the number that actually do. But the number definitely isn't 2%. I'm not at all saying that the real number is 2% and so it doesn't matter; I'm saying the number is definitely higher than 2% and so this poll is random-phone-number-calling-barking-questions-at-people uninformative garbage.
Gotcha! Definitely agree about Lemmy being an echo chamber for this type of stuff but I also doubt it's only 2%. Michigan is a good example, even if it was 2% it doesn't mean it's equally spread across states.
Also it would be a bit of a mistake to assume only the "most important" issue would impact voting choice, or more importantly, the choice to not vote
Yeah. That whole massive list of "most important" issues which were apparently listed out verbally to people, over the phone, by a bored call center employee, and the list's suspicious inclusion of multiple versions of "economic issues" with suspicious particular trigger words right at the beginning (where, purely by coincidence I'm sure, a lot of people decided their most important issues were), all form part of an overall picture of big parts of this poll not really meaning anything, let alone the foofaraw that the New York Times seems to want to make it into down to the resolution of individual percentage points.
Have you tried the article?
If that doesn't answer your questions, it links to the poll questions and breakdowns...
But it seems like you just don't believe in polls, which is weird because I honestly can't remember presidential polling not getting in the margin of error of the real result.
This is the same shit that happened in 2016 and 202:
If you're somehow actually a Biden supporter, these polls should have you working harder to do the only thing that can help him beat Trump:
Pull him to the left.
Or you could spend the run up to the election telling people not to listen to polls and instead...
I dunno? Read tea leaves? What is exactly is your alternative?
Pretend we're ostriches and stick our heads in the sand? We won't be able to see any warning signs but you're gonna ignore them anyways. So sure, you go first and the rest of us will stick our heads in the sand right after you, promise.
Just you go first.
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%.)
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/
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.
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.
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.