On the topic of election polls, I recently listened to a very interesting NPR talk about polling that might shed some light on some of the interesting polls we've been seeing. Apparently this particular election is a horrible year for polling, previous elections had a large number of people that responded to polls, but due to the recent outbreak of cell phone usage and cell phone only people the amount of people that are actually reached and respond to polls has dropped an absurd amount. According to the statistics by the guy from the stat's center that they were listening too, current response numbers have dropped from about 80% of all people questioned responding 8 years ago down to around 8% of people polled actually responding. He also noted that in general for election polls about the amount of responses that they need is around 10%. This bias also hits younger voters double; since they are much more often the ones that are cell phone only and thus are not actually polled often (and accounts at least somewhat for differences of candidates with strong younger bases).
He went on to emphasize that at least for all of the polls that were passing through his statistical gathering organization for this particular election year, very few of them actually had enough data of the right kinds to have any real connections to what the final elections are going to look like, which is really messing up the presses since in the vast majority of past elections the polls have had enough data to be somewhat accurate, to the point that press organizations have come to depend on them.
The big takeaway was that unlike past elections (and future elections too most likely, he mentioned many people working to solve the problem currently) in this particular election polls really have very little connection to the actual way people are going to vote, even less so than usual, and he begged people to only take them at the barest of guidelines to the way things are actually going to turn out, if that.
Just thought it was something interesting that I should share.
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Topic: Murrican Politics Megathread 2016: There Will Be Hell Toupée (Read 1588475 times)