Buh-bye Alex Salmond…
That makes sense.
But Mr. Salmond seemed to suggest that the campaign for a sovereign Scotland was far from over. “The position is this: We lost the referendum vote, but can still carry the political initiative,” he said. “More importantly, Scotland can still emerge as the real winner.”
His decision to step down, after earlier suggestions that he would stay on whatever the outcome of Thursday’s referendum, reflected the deep disappointment within the vocal, enthusiastic pro-independence movement on Friday.
And what of the pollsters who got it wrong? Will they resign, too? I doubt it.
It has been my experience, over the many years I’ve been following polls, that they get it right much more often than wrong—that is, if the “they” is an average. In this case, my impression before the referendum was that the “No”s would win by a few points. They won by a few more than predicted, but in the days before the vote the polls were volatile and close, causing instability in the financial markets.
But the actual vote wasn’t really close at all. Whose fault, and why, did the pollsters get it so wrong?:
And Andrew Cooper, a pollster who previously worked for Number 10 and is currently a part of the Better Together campaign, warned that intimidation by Yes activists could have skewed the polls.
Mr Cooper said: “A lot of concern among pollsters that Yes campaign thuggishness may have created a spiral of silence among No-leaners.
“Lots of anecdotes of people taking down No posters for fear of broken windows. No such anecdotes [regarding] Yes posters.”
Funny thing (and not funny ha-ha) how it’s those on the left who tend to be the intimidators, although they are usually busy accusing the right of the same.
I’m not sure one should blame the pollsters. The last poll I saw shows a slight No lead with 14% undecided. Given that the undecided vote tends to break for the known vs the unknown, such as the incumbent, the numbers as presented certainly fall with the error range with the outcome. It is the press who do not understand statistics who are the problem, not the pollsters.
Breaking more than a few left windows would seem to be in order all around. Just to get a little balance in the endless war of intimidation.
vanderleun,
Especially since the left has now come to dislike the broken windows theory. Maybe they will have a change of heart when their own windos are at stake.
I lived in Aberdeen for 15 years. Anyone who put up a No poster would have had a brick through their window within 24 hours.
“Funny thing (and not funny ha-ha) how it’s those on the left who tend to be the intimidators, although they are usually busy accusing the right of the same.”
Nothing like “Projection” of one’s own inner feelings onto an innocent outsider.
What I’ve never been able to figure out is how one breaks that cycle. It’s just like this NFL dust up, to here all the Libs, the football players are all guilty of domestic abuse. Someone actually looked at the facts and it appears those in the NFL have a domestic abuse rate of 1/2 the general population. Now mind you domestic abuse should not be tolerated or swept under the rug in any case. But it just seems like the internal rage of the Dems far outpaces the actual facts.
It is like their view of Nixon. To a man/woman they think Nixon was the most corrupt president that ever held the office and the erased white house tape proves this.
And maybe he was, I don’t have a firm conviction on that. But he didn’t contest the 1960 election even-though it was corrupt and when asked to he resigned because it was better for the country. So it wasn’t simply about him.
But when you ask these Nixon haters about the hard dives critical to the IRS scandal that conveniently keep being destroyed or the scrubbing of the Benghazi documents they don’t seem able to see those actions are magnitudes greater indication of corruption than what Nixon did. And do we really think either O or Hill would resign for the good of the country?
Their bias makes no sense to me when the actions are compared side by side without the (R) and (D) association. But then maybe I’m doing my own projection here. Don’t know.
In the US, it’s known as The Bradley Effect, iirc after the LA mayor, Tom Bradley, a black. He got elected with less margin than the polls anticipated. Theory is that the anti-Bradley voters–for whatever reason–feared being thought of as racist if they said they would vote against him.
Nobody trusts “confidential answers” any longer.
Their bias makes no sense to me when the actions are compared side by side without the (R) and (D) association. But then maybe I’m doing my own projection here.
That’s because you’re thinking of it with the wrong filters, as if it was an academic or political debate.
It’s more like a war, with one side being patriots and you being on the traitor or foreign occupation side. Or like a religion, where one kills to convert. Then it makes more sense because that’s how they actually look at it and feel about it.