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Well played. That made me laugh.

The ones where our candidates are behind are complete shit and paid propaganda.

Yes, this is sarcasm.

DU has many members, people saying they believe polls are accurate might not be the same people saying they were inaccurate a month ago.

We tend to take it to extremes, however.

But I am keenly interested in polling trends (movement, not averages), and so far, the movement seems to be trending in our favor.

and dislike them when they do not.

And before long, the pollsters will move the baseline and we will be behind again.

Its all based on turnout models, and they just diddle the numbers to get the result they want.

Still garbage.

For the record.

states.

Other than that, I pretty much take them as background noise...

A tool to get a snapshot of the electorate in particular time and place that we can neither ignore or completely rely on because the art portion of them is in a lot of flux.

Some of the hate is seemingly based on a tenuous grasp of probabilities that causes some folks to think 100% at some point in the odds despite them being below 100% and sometimes by quite a bit.

Like any other they have their pros and cons as well as uses and misuses.

Overall, they are not super accurate but they are the best way to get an idea of the general public’s opinion on issues and candidates outside of actual voting.

IOW it is good to pay attention to them but don’t take them as the gospel truth.

Last edited Sat Jul 27, 2024, 08:48 AM - Edit history (1)

The election is months away. It's all non predictive. It's all just a snapshot. It's all within the margins of error. It all shows a statistical tie. Pretty much the same as before with some slight movement. They go up, they go down, bla bla bla. Totally non predictive of what will happen on election day. Polls, age, debates, VP picks, and campaign tricks don't matter. Doesn't hurt to have more "enthusiasm" but at the end of the day it is a referendum mainly on the GOVERNING STRENGTH of the White House party.

Nope. It’s going to be a match of character, charisma and experience between Harris and Trump. Which Harris wins easily.

But I think it was the right decision.

Polls can be volatile.

Altogether, I tend to trust polls. Even the bad ones that Biden had.

I just hope they don't force Kamala off the ballot if polls don't look good.

Polls are only as good as their sample size and sampling methodology. Even if there is no intentional bias, getting good sample populations can be difficult at the best of times, and I have no doubt that some polls (and consequently poll aggregates) are being deliberately manipulated.

despite off expressed disdain ...

When polls shows the Democrat leading people are all over it. But if it shows a Republican leading then they don't believe the poll. And for what it's worth the aggregate of polls right now shows that it's pretty much a dead heat. Myself I continue to maintain it it will be a very close election decided one way or the other by a few thousand votes in a few swing states.

Polls that challenge their views are questioned or outright rejected.

One sees this happening here often on many topics.

"Confirmation bias, people’s tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with their existing beliefs. This biased approach to decision making is largely unintentional, and it results in a person ignoring information that is inconsistent with their beliefs. These beliefs can include a person’s expectations in a given situation and their predictions about a particular outcome....

People give special treatment to information that supports their personal beliefs. "

https://www.britannica.com/science/confirmation-bias

The actual numbers may be off but the trends are great.

I take them with a grain of salt, whether the number is good or bad for us. I don’t believe they’re purposely throwing the numbers, but since 2016 it seems like they’ve had a hard time with accuracy. This probably has something to do with people not answering their unknown numbers as well as groups telling the pollsters false info.

Then a few days ago they turned sour again. Wonder why.

and that's why I tell people to not be lulled by them and to always work as hard as you can for getting out the vote etc. How many more people would have gotten out in 2016 if there weren't polls around saying Hillary was comfortably ahead by an average across polls of nearly 4%? Instead we had voter turnout for 2016 as a percentage of eligible voters at a 20 year low.

They tend to encourage or discourage, depending on what the reader wants to hear. Any given poll might be accurate, or not. That’s not good enough for me.

If it shows 70-30, OK, the preference is clear, even if it is off by ten in either direction. But if it shows 49-48, that might be accurate, or it might not. It indicates that things are close, but it could also be off by five points or more either way. All a poll like that tells me is that I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. Chances are, I already figured out that much.

The WSJ just came out with a poll showing Kamala trailing TSF by 2 points. I just do the math and that poll tells me that Kamala is leading by 4 points.

Why is it that when elections are over, the vast majority of the polls overestimated the Republican?

How the fuck can I believe in polls when I look back at history when Gallup was the king of polls and had Romney winning the election over Obama. Gallup, the #1 polling organization, used bad data in its formula. Imagine that.

Polls are used for propaganda and TSF has been caught paying polls to benefit him.

Has TSF stopped paying people to do favorable polls for him? How many polls are being paid off by TSF?

When the final poll of polls comes out at the end of the election cycle, right before the election. I will take Kamala Harris for 100 dollars for charity to beat the poll of polls. Anyone who wants to show how much they believe in polls can PM me to work out the details. No margin of error bullshit. If the final polling says Kamala wins by 1 point and she wins by 2, I win the bet.

And the accuracy gets worse the farther out from the election you go.

A snip:
"Analyzing the polls in seven-day batches, they found a steady decline in accuracy the farther from an election the poll was conducted, with only about half proving to be accurate 10 weeks before an election. This makes sense, since unforeseen events occur—such as former FBI director James Comey announcing an investigation into Clinton’s emails just a week before the 2016 presidential election. Yet most polls, even weeks out, reported the industry standard 95% confidence interval."

Exit polling can determine if the vote count matches what voters are saying.

I believe it was the 2020 election, the one where Susan Collins was up for reelection. Exit polling showed anomalies in 3 states, Florida, Kentucky, and Maine. The one thing in common in those 3 states was the predominant use of ES&S voting machines.

Before, they weren’t. Maybe something actually has changed, but I still don’t think polls are terribly reliable at this point.

good news is welcome.

But feel free to chide the community.

Polls where you are winning are certainly more palatable but they are stil meaningless

I do find it interesting that these polls haven't given Trump a post-debate bump, a post-convention bump, or a post-assassination attempt bump.

In fact, it seems he can hardly reach 50% on any vaguely reliable poll, ever. Hm. What's up with that? I think he's reached the top of what he can achieve in polling, meaning it's likely he's not nearly as popular as people claim, and that they aren't polling properly to begin with.