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Trump Leads in 5 Key States, as Young and Nonwhite Voters Express Discontent With Biden
(www.nytimes.com)
this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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politics
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I dislike doubting polls, but there's just some odd stuff in here.
This is a poll of just the 5 key states, but this part of their methodology gives me significant pause as well: "To further ensure that the results reflect the entire voting population, not just those willing to take a poll, we give more weight to respondents from demographic groups underrepresented among survey respondents, like people without a college degree. "
Emphasis mine. There could be a huge skew. And these results don't make sense. The other NYT poll from several months ago was also incredibly unusual and had very weird findings -- to the point that the Guardian wrote something was very fucky with the results.
This isn't to say this can't be what's going on, but we need corroboration from other polling groups. And it isn't summer yet, which makes polls rather inaccurate too.
TLDR: Something's fucky, we need more information and to monitor this.
EDIT: I just want to use my bully pulpit here to say that my criticisms by no means disprove the poll results. There's oddities, but that doesn't make the results an impossibility. Don't only give credence to criticism of polls. If someone has reasons they believe the poll is accurate, you should give equal attention to it. At the end of the day, we don't know what the actual truth is, and we won't until the election is over. Just remember that we don't want to just win, we want to dominate. We want massive margins. And that means we need to see wins even in less than accurate polls.
If you've been following the polling there is nothing different or unique about this one. It's consistent with pretty much all polling over the past 400 days. Biden is losing. Polling is definitely still broken, but it's consistent. There is no fuckery.
Biden needs to be up by 4-12 in those states if he wants to win.
See my posts in !data_vizualisations@lemmy.world . I make a map of the offset in polling Biden needs to win a given state based on the fact that polls consistently overestimate how well Biden will do, and underestimate how well Trump will do.
When you see these poll numbers, you should subtract 4 for Biden, and add 8 for Trump. That was the offsets we observed from the 2020 election.
So keeping in mind data you already have about Trump, Biden, polling and it's departure from real election results, it's not even a question. Mortgage you house and out all your money on Trump to win. You have a differential polling error of 12 points in a Biden Trump head to head. Biden needs to be in the mid to high fifties across the board to have a chance.
He's in the low forties.
If you don't end up clicking the link: Relative polling error for Biden V Trump, 2020.
They posted their methodology and to me, as an unqualified lay person, it's clearly shit, and there's no reason to think it'll yield anything even resembling an accurate picture of how people are going to vote in the election. It's not surprising to me that recent polls in general tend to be as inaccurate as you're saying they are.
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?
So like, if you know the above statement to be true, that's exactly where you should stop in your reasoning. This is something that I find Americans to be guilty if constantly, which is to have the humility to understand that they shouldn't have an opinion, and the proceed to arrogantly have the opinion they just acknowledged they shouldn't have. I think it's a deeply human thing, that we evolved to have to deal with missing information and so our brain fills in gaps and gives us convincing narratives. However, you have to resist the tendency when you know you really don't know: and even more so when your beliefs go against what the data is.
If you can find me some sources of data on special elections, I'll happily analyze it for you. I think it would be interesting if nothing else to see the offset. I'm not on my desktop machine, but I'll give you some sources for data since you asked.
Surely as a qualified non lay person you'll be able to do a detailed takedown of all the criticism I arrived at for the poll's methodology from like 2 minutes of looking, instead of just making a broad assertion that if the polling was wrong by a certain amount in a previous year we should add that amount to this year's polling to arrive at reality, and that's all that's needed and then this year's corrected poll will always be accurate.
Because to me, that sounds initially plausible but then when you look at it for a little bit longer you say, oh wait hang on, if that was all that was needed the professional pollsters could just do that, and their answers would always be right. And you wouldn't need to look closely at the methodology at all, just trust that "it's a poll" means it's automatically equal to every other poll (once you apply the magic correction factor.)
To me that sounds, on close scientific examination, like a bunch of crap once you think about it for a little bit. But what do I know. I'm unqualified. I'll wait for you to educate me.
I think the right answer is to do what you described, in the aggregate. Don't do it on a pollster to pollster basis, do it at the state level, across all polls. You don't do this as a pollster because that isn't really what you are trying to to model with a poll, and polls being wrong or uncertain is just a part of the game.
So it's important to not conflate polling with the meta-analysis of polling.
I'm not so much interested in polls or polling but in being able to use them as a source of data to model outcomes that individually they may not be able to to predict. Ultimately a poll needs to be based on the data it samples from to be valid. If there is something fundamentally flawed in the assumptions that form the basis of this, there isn't that much you can do to fix it with updates to methods.
the -4, 8 spread is the prior I'm walking into this election year with. That inspire of their pollsters best efforts to come up with a unbiased sample, they can't predict the election outcome is fine. We can deal with that in the aggregate. This is very similar to Nate Silvers approach.
On this, we 100% agree.