Nobody's met a pollster but everyone has faith in the polls... Usually for Science people need evidence that is well-cited. It seems strange people forego this requirement when it comes to election "science"
> Nobody's met a pollster but everyone has faith in the polls...
I refuse to believe relativity until Einstein gives me a personal audience. Gravity, for that matter, is wholly unbelievable unless Galileo will sit with me under a tree. This is how the scientific method works: you must personally meet the scientist in order to believe anything they say. :)
But seriously, I have no idea what point you're trying to make here. I've met geneticists but have never met a virologist. Does that mean I should have more belief in the existence of DNA than in the germ theory?
My point was that you can get down to the bottom of where the data was collected, and you can repeat the experiments for yourself and hopefully get the same results. These days, people are putting a lot of faith into the polls, but the polls are not conducted by district but are conducted by "statewide random polling" which is about as useful in a country with an electoral system such as the US as the popular vote count. That is, not at all.
> My point was that you can get down to the bottom of where the data was collected, and you can repeat the experiments for yourself and hopefully get the same results.
Running the actual experiment requires a real election. Polls were more accurate in 2018 than in 2016, but we haven't yet had a presidential election with updated methodology. And presidential elections are different from midterms.
Again, of course you can construct a polling methodology that gives a pre-determined desired result (including the exact results of any particular election). This is called fitting a parameter.
And, again, the fact that you can tweak the weights on 2016 polling data so that the polls predict the right result is literally just a mathematical fact. And an uninteresting fact at that.
But you can't run a real experiment to test the the effectiveness of a new sampling method without actually holding an election.
I'm not even making any particular claim about the accuracy of polls this year.
I'm literally just saying that the fact that you can fit a model to give a historically correct answer on historical data that used one sampling method doesn't necessarily tell you the accuracy of a forecast that uses a different sampling method.
TBH, if we were talking about an advertising campaign, this wouldn't even need to be said out loud (or, if it did, the team member who didn't understand would be PIP'd ASAP).
> but the polls are not conducted by district but are conducted by "statewide random polling" which is about as useful in a country with an electoral system such as the US as the popular vote count. That is, not at all.
That's just false. Nearly every state allocates its electoral college votes based upon the state's popular vote. Hypothetical 100% accurate polling of the state's popular vote will absolutely tell you who gets the EC votes in at least 48 states. No?
Re: the distribution of the popular vote within each state, high-quality state polls DO weight for geography. But, again, you don't need to know
Aha, thanks, I was a little fuzzy on the "winner-take-all" bit of each individual state. I thought it was allocated some other way, but you are correct, it is just the states' popular vote. Based on how _off_ the numbers were last time 'round, I have a feeling a lot of people simply don't report their choices to polling, so there is a bias in who voices their vote and who does not, and it does not seem like there is a reasonable method to account for this discrepancy. In short, people who are vocal about their choice represent a small set of all people who are actually voting. Rather than being humble and saying there's a 70% margin of error, we have bombastic reports of landslides in either direction fairly consistently. Something about it just seems disingenuous.
