3 ms·

Can you elaborate on what doesn't make sense?

ZeroGravitas 9y ago
Oversampling is a standard thing to do with polling. There's a confused conspiracy theory that it means "adding extra votes to the Democrat column". This doesn't even stand up to the most cursory of examinations, as if that was really happening then people would say "they're intentionally fudging the results to favor the Democrats" and kick up a fuss about it. Instead they say "oversampling Democrats", in the hope that people who don't know what that is will think it sounds like cheating while not actually looking like idiots to people who do know what it means. A classic dogwhistle approach to say two things to two audiences. You claim to know what it is, yet you say it's an "issue" (which it isn't) and you say that at the end of a sentence claiming that there's a "shy voter" factor leading to an undercount of Trump support. Oversampling has no logical connection here unless you mean it in the "Democrats are cheating in the polls" meaning. You claim that you mean it in the actual statistical meaning. The two obvious explanations are that you don't know what it is and have been fooled by all the chatter around it, or that you're trying to fool others despite knowing it's nonsense. I think you don't know what it is, that's why I provided the explanatory link a couple of comment above. Also, the polls did not materially undercount Trump voters. The polls were more accurate than at the last election. Some people badly mapped the accurately predicted 3 million popular vote win to electoral college results, but that's a different thing than polls being bad, Trump voters not wanting to admit who they were voting for, or being intentionally skewed. On a state by state basis polls were wrong in both directions, for various reasons, but that cancelled out overall.
- samdoidge 9y ago
  Ok, so when you were telling me 'that's not what oversampling means', you meant 'I disagree with what you are saying'. I would be more inclined to debate if you approached the disagreement in a more open fashion. Your partisan paragraphs further make me think I will be wasting my time here, so let's just say we have different views on the polls :).

Oversampling is a standard thing to do with polling. There's a confused conspiracy theory that it means "adding extra votes to the Democrat column". This doesn't even stand up to the most cursory of examinations, as if that was really happening then people would say "they're intentionally fudging the results to favor the Democrats" and kick up a fuss about it. Instead they say "oversampling Democrats", in the hope that people who don't know what that is will think it sounds like cheating while not actually looking like idiots to people who do know what it means. A classic dogwhistle approach to say two things to two audiences. You claim to know what it is, yet you say it's an "issue" (which it isn't) and you say that at the end of a sentence claiming that there's a "shy voter" factor leading to an undercount of Trump support. Oversampling has no logical connection here unless you mean it in the "Democrats are cheating in the polls" meaning. You claim that you mean it in the actual statistical meaning. The two obvious explanations are that you don't know what it is and have been fooled by all the chatter around it, or that you're trying to fool others despite knowing it's nonsense. I think you don't know what it is, that's why I provided the explanatory link a couple of comment above. Also, the polls did not materially undercount Trump voters. The polls were more accurate than at the last election. Some people badly mapped the accurately predicted 3 million popular vote win to electoral college results, but that's a different thing than polls being bad, Trump voters not wanting to admit who they were voting for, or being intentionally skewed. On a state by state basis polls were wrong in both directions, for various reasons, but that cancelled out overall.

samdoidge 9y ago
Ok, so when you were telling me 'that's not what oversampling means', you meant 'I disagree with what you are saying'. I would be more inclined to debate if you approached the disagreement in a more open fashion. Your partisan paragraphs further make me think I will be wasting my time here, so let's just say we have different views on the polls :).