4 ms·
There are two possible explanations for why US polling stopped tracking US election results in 2004 and now underestimates conservative vote margins. Either co
by bleepblorp 6y ago
There are two possible explanations for why US polling stopped tracking US election results in 2004 and now underestimates conservative vote margins.
Either conservatives have started lying to pollsters about their voting intentions or conservative officials started manipulating the vote totals in their favor.
Take your pick as to which possible explanation is most palatable and/or most probable.
- ars 6y agoThere are way more explanations than that. For example pollsters might simply not be talking to conservatives. If you don't have a representative sample of the population your poll will be inaccurate.
- bleepblorp 6y agoThe importance of representative sampling is taught in undergraduate statistics courses. Do you have any reason to believe that pollsters and other statisticians are so ignorant of their own field not to understand this?
- ars 6y agoYes, I suspect most pollsters are Democrats, and are not aware of how they come across to Republicans. So they think they have a representative sample, but they really don't. It can be explained simply by pollsters mainly living in large cities, and not really understanding rural Americans.
- kenjackson 6y agoWhy did this just start happening relatively recently?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoBecause polling response rates fell off a cliff over the past decade or two, leaving a sample population much different than was historically available. (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2012/05/15/assessing-the-representativeness-of-public-opinion-surveys/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2012/05/15/assessing-th...)
- kenjackson 6y agoIs that because of cell phones or some other reason?
- rayiner 6y agoRead up on how political polling works. It’s very hard to get a representative sample or even to know what a representative sample looks like.
- SilasX 6y agoYou're saying that, because a failure mode is taught in school, it must be a solved problem in the real world?
- rayiner 6y agoIt’s because liberals started calling all Republicans racist around that time.
- jachee 6y agoIf the non-racist Republicans would actively foster better race relations and reforming an inherently racist system, as well as denouncing and ostracizing the actually-racist Republicans, maybe they wouldn't all get painted with the same brush. But that would start costing them elections, so instead they coddle and abet the worst of them. What do you call 9 people staying quiet when a tenth is being blatantly racist? Ten racists. Take it from me, I saw it in action growing up white in Mississippi.