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Polls are dogshit.
But poll movements are worth tracking as long as the dogshit quality remains consistent.
True but what the poster said is important: polls do not work well in close races because they don't sample correctly. The average poll respondent is older, whiter, and more conservative than the average voter. So you end up with a skewed sample. Plus you sample so few of the other voters that you can't make a guess as to what they think.
No younger people answer the phone for pollsters, so this is hard to fix. They are probably going to have to start paying people to answer surveys. I know I won't answer them for 15 or 20 minutes for free.
That's not my point. My point is that the poll movements are almost always correct, because pollsters are at least consistent with how biased they are / errors in sampling.
Fox News had Trump leading Biden a few weeks ago. Today, Biden is ahead of Trump. We don't know where the "truth" lies, but we can 100% conclude that the typical American has lost a bit of favor on Trump in the past few weeks.
Not 100%. Nothing in Statistics is ever 100% because of error. But it's a good guess.
Any reputable polling group will adjust for that. Granted, fewer and fewer people are answering their phones and taking these polls, but basic demographics are a well-known and pretty easy to adjust for thing. Most polls take a lot of that information for that reason
Yes
People here and on Reddit really think that polls are made with just a few calls and then some average/extrapolation and that’s it.
Meanwhile it’s an entire field with a lot of complex math and people with more knowledge about it than everyone in this comment section combined.
And then the classic “polls are shit, they always get it wrong”. By definition polls are correct because they just represent an objective data set. Then they translate it into a phrase that we humans can (somewhat) understand but people then take it wrongly.
They read “Poll X says candidate Y will win” when instead they should read “According to the data obtained for Poll X, candidate Y has a Z% chance of winning with a confidence level of W%”. And that isn’t wrong unless someone wants to find the mistake in the math.