mozz

The elephant will do damage to the whole fuckin world if he gets elected, including but not limited to wielding the military in a way that I bet will cause disasters we didn't even really have on the radar as possibilities before they arrived.

So don't worry. Being close up to the carnage probably won't make it any worse, and being far away wouldn't make it any safer.

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.

On this, we 100% agree.

Okay, just curious.

I mean, yes, it should be a shockingly easy question to answer and I'm happy that you're against them. I've just gotten in the habit of asking people who display one view that's surprising to me if they hold other surprising views which might not appear initially to be correlated. Most of the time, they do, which is a very interesting result to me.

The news media is a for-profit industry with a fiduciary duty to shareholders to sell the news as a commodity.

Absolutely true, and it's one of the major problems with it in this country, because that's the wrong model for it, and it more or less can't exist in any other form.

It's one among many reasons I regard the OP article with some sadness and suspicion; because I do not expect anything moral or objective (let alone noble) to come out of the US news industry the majority of the time.

But yes, if you can tell me what race specifically, it would take two seconds to find a poll for you.

Sure thing.

• New York's 26th Congressional District on April 30, 2024.
• New York's 3rd Congressional District on February 13, 2024.
• Utah’s 2nd Congressional District on November 21, 2023.
• Rhode Island's 1st Congressional District on November 7, 2023.
• Virginia's 4th Congressional District on February 21, 2023

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.

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.

That's me, I love strawmen and said a whole bunch about what your argument even was, and I hate science. You got me.

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.

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.

If you've been following the polling there is nothing different or unique about this one.

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?

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.