Public Polling Has It All Wrong (Again)

ExpressLane said:
Trump will talk about things he HAS done before. Harris will talk about what she WILL do on day one but day one was ~1300 days ago.
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Trump will ramble and insult and lie. And lie. And lie.

He's the old addled one now. This will be a repeat of the 1st debate, but w/ a role reversal.
 
ExpressLane said:
Actually just the opposite. I'm pretty confident of a win. I'm also confident Kamala won't do well in the debate next week. She has an impossible task of claiming the successes of the Harris/Biden administration while distancing herself from the failures of the Harris/Biden administration.
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Not all Americans are blind to the problems that Trump left for the Dems to face. You idiots think Trump left us in a land of milk and honey. She can laud the work they did to repair Trump's damage to NATO. They reestablished good relationships with our long-term allies that Trump ruined.
The US has to do a dance around Israel, maintaining our long-term relations and trying to get them to quit massive death and destruction in Palestine. Biden is doing it well. Mr. Bluster, Trump, would have buffooned it into a mess.
Trump stopped Congress from passing a bill that the left and right agreed to that would have helped at the border. Trump wanted to make it uglier so he could use it against the Dems. That tells you how serious he is about fixing things.
Trump is on the wrong side of women's choice, the environment, Russia ,guns and world relationships. He is an idiot in handling the economy.
Trump is an agent of conflict and a messy world. He is a felon on bail awaiting sentencing. He has about 60 more felonies to face.
 
ExpressLane said:

Public Polling Has It All Wrong (Again)​


If the November election was held today, public polling would drastically underestimate Trump’s performance and, to a lesser extent, the Republican Party’s as a whole.

I’m not a poll truther. On the contrary, I’m a Republican campaign consultant and pollster who has consumed thousands of pages of data. My biggest takeaway? The survey environment is plagued by a large response bias problem that low-budget public surveys refuse to fix.

The basic science behind a poll is simple: if we interview 800 Pennsylvania voters, each answer should be within three points of the whole universe 95 percent of the time. For example, if a survey of 800 Pennsylvania voters showed Trump at 48%, then his actual support could be as low as 45% or as high as 51%.

But this foundation assumes every respondent is equally likely to take a given survey, which is false. Pollsters have two tools to help them adjust for this reality.

The first is quotas. Pollsters dictate how many individuals of a certain group they want in their survey. I want X percent men and Y% women. I want X percent white people and Y% Black. Nearly every pollster uses quotas for geography, age, and race. The major debate is about setting quotas for things like education level and, most controversially, political party affiliation.

The argument in favor of quotas relies on historical voter turnout to model future turnout. Opponents of restrictive quotas argue that a poll may miss changes in group dynamics or the collapse of a particular group. This debate was less of an issue 20 years ago when everyone had landlines and response rates across all groups were fairly high. Today, with extremely low response rates, the response bias has become very pronounced.

For example, in a recent internal statewide survey in a large state, people with a graduate degree were five and half times more likely to answer the survey than those without a degree, while people with a bachelor’s degree were three times more likely.

This doesn’t take into account a fascinating response bias developing around population density. Pollsters often divide geography into urban, suburban, and rural segments by population density. In recent surveys, there has been a pronounced drop-off in rural, white, working-class responses, with some of the quotas being filled in by suburban and urban white working-class voters who are much more likely to be Democratic in orientation.

Requiring quotas on education helped to fix the polling challenges that arose in 2016 and made public polls more reliable. But Kamala Harris’s appointment to the Democratic nomination has supercharged a key group of voters that can have a big impact on polling: wealthy, educated, white Democratic voters. These voters are crawling across broken glass to respond to political surveys.

In the past, top-level quotas set for the whole survey might help to mitigate this problem but many public pollsters cannot afford to set stratification quotas for all the necessary subgroups. For example, top-level quotas will produce a survey group with 43% Democrats and 40% with a college degree, but you really need to set quotas for how many college-educated people are in the Democratic subgroup or you will not fix the response bias problem. This sort of nuanced stratification is very expensive and most public pollsters aren’t willing or able to pony up.

With Kamala Harris as the nominee, politically engaged, wealthy, educated, white voters are taking up too many spots in the Democratic quotas, pushing out downscale, lower-turnout Democrats who are much more likely to be undecided or Trump voters. Whereas a college-educated Democrat might be 95% for Harris, a non-college one might be 88%. That seven-point gap matters and is not reflected in public polling.

Don’t take just my word for it. POLITICO reported that even Democratic pollsters are admitting their internal (read expensive) surveys are much less optimistic than public polling, and they are also worried about this blue mirage.

Fixing this problem is not easy or cheap, but one possible solution is to look at vote history. Looking at prior high-turnout elections, we can estimate how much of the electorate will be made up of reliable voters who have voted in 100 percent of the last four general elections. For example, in Pennsylvania, we might expect 52 percent of the electorate to be composed of these voters, but polling samples following the Biden-Harris switcheroo show an electorate with 60 percent-plus of these high-frequency voters.

This matters because of an oddity in party and vote history. Right now, support for Harris has a slight correlation to prior vote history where high-turnout Democrats have a higher incidence rate of support for her than low-turnout Democrats. Conversely, the correlation on the GOP side for Trump support is somewhat flat if not the inverse. Very reliable and consistent voters (who tend to be more educated Republicans) are less likely to support Trump while less reliable voters are more likely.

This trend existed previously, but it was supercharged after Joe Biden dropped out and Kamala Harris assumed the Democratic mantle. The result is a blue polling mirage that is more Democratic than Election Day will be.

This brings us to the second tool pollsters use, which is weighting a survey. When you weight a survey you treat interviews unequally to make the data more representative of the expected electorate. For example, if the survey electorate contains only 40 percent of people without a college degree but you expect likely turnout at 51%, you can increase the value of the non-college responses and decrease the value of the college responses to accommodate the disparity.

While weighting can be useful on the margins, it has significant limitations because you are using a very small group to extrapolate to a larger group. The classic example of this is Black voters. African Americans tend to be underrepresented in Pennsylvania statewide surveys if quotas are not used. If you weight 50 Black interviews with a margin of error of 13.5 percent to equal 80 interviews, you end up with a lot of risk and an unreliable result.

Many public polls right now are likely oversampling highly educated Democrats, and very high likelihood to turnout voters. They are not capturing the full electorate and while this may fix itself with rising response rates throughout the fall as we approach the election, it is a real problem for the polling industry to address.

So as the fall progresses, keep an eye on the public polling because it is likely once again to significantly understate the support for President Trump and Republicans...
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The polls underestimate Trump's support in 2016 and in 2020 and they are making the same mistakes in 2024.
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Maybe, are you hopeful?
 
ExpressLane said:
Actually just the opposite. I'm pretty confident of a win. I'm also confident Kamala won't do well in the debate next week. She has an impossible task of claiming the successes of the Harris/Biden administration while distancing herself from the failures of the Harris/Biden administration.
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And you will use that false confidence to claim it was stolen if you lose.
 
ExpressLane said:
They did not reflect the Trump voters in Battle ground states correctly in 2016 or 2020.
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They didn't exactly reflect the results; they never do. They have margins of error and in 2016 Hillary lost in those margins. Biden had a lead outside the margins which his numbers reflected, winning by a nationwide margin of seven million votes and capturing the battlegrounds the polls said he would.
 
martin said:
They didn't exactly reflect the results; they never do. They have margins of error and in 2016 Hillary lost in those margins. Biden had a lead outside the margins which his numbers reflected, winning by a nationwide margin of seven million votes and capturing the battlegrounds the polls said he would.
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Clinton leads Trump by 15 percentage points, 52% to 37%, among likely voters – with 10% supporting neither candidate. That’s a huge jump from the same poll’s findings in July, when it had Clinton at 45% to Trump’s 41%.


Trump won Wisconsin
 
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ExpressLane said:
Clinton leads Trump by 15 percentage points, 52% to 37%, among likely voters – with 10% supporting neither candidate. That’s a huge jump from the same poll’s findings in July, when it had Clinton at 45% to Trump’s 41%.


Trump won Wisconsin
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Any reason you picked a single state poll taken a month before the election? At the time of the election Hillary had a lead in Wisconsin of between four and five points, and was on a downward trend following the Comey announcement days before that new emails had been uncovered and were being investigated. Adding to this, and overriding the entire election, was the fact that Hillary never achieved the kind of likability it can take to survive a bad news cycle. Anyway, the polls missed in 2016, you're right, but they usually don't miss. If they did we wouldn't pay them the attention we do.
 
martin said:
They didn't exactly reflect the results; they never do. They have margins of error and in 2016 Hillary lost in those margins. Biden had a lead outside the margins which his numbers reflected, winning by a nationwide margin of seven million votes and capturing the battlegrounds the polls said he would.
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Search Results​

Clinton up by 12 points over Trump in ABC News tracking ...​

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ABC7 New York
https://abc7ny.com › poll-politics-hillary-clinton-donald...




Oct 23, 2016 — Hillary Clinton has vaulted to a double-digit lead in the inaugural ABC News 2016 election tracking poll, boosted by broad disapproval of Donald Trump.
 
martin said:
Any reason you picked a single state poll taken a month before the election? At the time of the election Hillary had a lead in Wisconsin of between four and five points, and was on a downward trend following the Comey announcement days before that new emails had been uncovered and were being investigated. Adding to this, and overriding the entire election, was the fact that Hillary never achieved the kind of likability it can take to survive a bad news cycle. Anyway, the polls missed in 2016, you're right, but they usually don't miss. If they did we wouldn't pay them the attention we do.
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No particular reason it happened in other Battle ground states also. And stop whining about Comey giving Hilary a break and not indicating her. The polls had Biden with a huge lead in 2020 and predicted his coat tails bringing a huge lead to Congress also. He barely won with around 44k votes spread over 3 states. Trump under polls for a number of reasons. You really should read the article.
 
ExpressLane said:
No particular reason it happened in other Battle ground states also. And stop whining about Comey giving Hilary a break and not indicating her. The polls had Biden with a huge lead in 2020 and predicted his coat tails bringing a huge lead to Congress also. He barely won with around 44k votes spread over 3 states. Trump under polls for a number of reasons. You really should read the article.
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I read it, 100 percent un-sourced opinion. The mention of Comey is a factual reference to a last minute blemish on Hillary that may have had zero effect on the election. What do you think? Whining is Trump's domain.
 
martin said:
I read it, 100 percent un-sourced opinion. The mention of Comey is a factual reference to a last minute blemish on Hillary that may have had zero effect on the election. What do you think? Whining is Trump's domain.
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Trump under polls because some Trump supporters a reluctant to speak with pollsters. Democrats are so aggressive at calling people racist misogynistic MAGA Nazis. No one wants to get labeled. From personal experience this is the first time that I have even posted a pro Trump sign in my yard. I didn't want to possibly offend my neighbors. But we cannot have another progressive Democrat in charge. We must control our border and vett the people coming into our country. So now I have two Trump signs. My neighbor has since put out a pro Trump sign also.

abcnews.go.com

Polling isn't broken, but pollsters still face Trump-era challenges

After two presidential election cycles with large polling error, pollsters are trying to reach more Republicans and gauge turnout in 2024.
abcnews.go.com abcnews.go.com

These difficulties helped contribute to larger-than-average polling errors in the 2020 presidential election, four years after pollsters also had a worse-than-typical year in 2016 (although for primarily different reasons). Despite enjoying notably more accurate results in the 2018 and 2022 midterms, pollsters this year are once again contending with a common denominator of the 2016 and 2020 cycles: now-former President Donald Trump, who is this year's presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
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Go to it, you'll show 'em. On Trump's polls, the fact remains the 2020 polls closely matched the voting.
 
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