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Whither the polls? — 8 Comments

  1. It was unfortunetly predictable the the “Bradley effect” thing would be brought up. Anything to “prove” the “structurally racist” nature of the US.

  2. Obama’s Bolsters

    Obama’s bolsters lied to the pollsters and confounded the media spin.
    For they were not sure in there own hearts whether they wanted to win.
    It was only in the back of their minds what they’d think of his spiritual guide,
    an evasive zealot who seemed too much like a Dr. Jekyll or a Mr. Hyde!

    raving lunatic clip (The End of the Line)

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfNEfEBYIZs&eurl=http://sweetness-light.com/archive/a-message-of-hate-from-obamas-pastor-via-youtube

    xcript here

    http://sweetness-light.com/archive/a-message-of-hate-from-obamas-pastor-via-youtube

    rational but evasive clip (Hannity interview)

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8YmQUqj15g&feature=related

    from yesterday’s Sweetness and Light:

    “Though Wright and Obama do not often talk one-on-one often, the senator does check with his pastor before making any bold political moves.”

    http://sweetness-light.com/archive/obamas-mentor-gives-farrakhan-his-award

    “Obama’s connection to Wright first drew controversy in a February 2007 Rolling Stone article which described a speech in which Wright eloquently and forcefully spoke about racism against African-Americans.[4] Citing the article and fears that further controversy would harm the church, Obama scrapped plans of having Wright introduce him at his Presidential announcement”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Wright#Relationship_with_Barack_Obama

  3. Some will vote for a woman because

    1) it is time for a woman in the White House
    and
    2) the Presidency will benefit from a woman’s touch
    and
    3) it is past time to deal a defeat to sexist men and sexist Conservatives.

    Some will vote for Hillary because

    A) they are part of a rational minority which is the only hope for America
    and
    B) it’s Hillary’s turn, and therefore she deserves it.

  4. Polls are a statistic model of what the election will be – as such they are *not* the way one detects discrepancies. Is it unusual for them to be off that much in this way? Yes. Is it unheard of? No – in fact it isn’t even close to being something worth studying.

    There are all sorts of reason – bad sampling is *really* easy even when done 100% honest. You will run into people not wanting to answer one way yet when in a private anonymous setting voting that way. And then of course you have all the other problems with intentional skewing (loaded questions and such).

    Really, we are getting close to the point where many people are wanting the polls to elect somebody, not the actual election. If it wasn’t Diebold it would be the hand counts (the electronic machine was done because of complaints about hand counting). If you can count the actuall whole population (and we do in this case) then they trump the statistical models as the models are only meant to approximate them. And “margin of error” doesn’t mean what people think it means either – it is the margin of error from the full population that your sample represents which isn’t necessarily the full population of what you are studying (for instance, you could – though highly unlikely – randomly select 10,000 people from all over the US and have all them make under 10k a year and be on govt assistance – you will *not* get a worthwhile number out of that even though you were not stacking the books intentionally).

  5. I’m fascinated by the psychology of those doubting the polls. They reject the actual event, which produces hard data in terms of vote count, and prefer to believe the flaky data generated by some guy with a clipboard asking a trifling percentage of the electorate chosen by God knows what method?

    Perhaps neo could shed light on this. To me it seems like believing the fix was in to change the weather because yesterday’s forecast was not borne out.

  6. I should clarify. Above “polls” referred to the election, not to pollsters’ results.

    Sorry for the ambiguity.

  7. i think i said somewhere that I doubt the accuracy of polls.. to be clear, i meant the opinion or the pre-election polls.. not the actual votes on voting day.

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