Daily Kos Pollster Made Up Numbers 546
jamie found a story up on Daily Kos revealing that the polling firm they had contracted with for 18 months, Research 2000 or R2K, apparently made up or at least manually tweaked its polling results. The blog published a preliminary report by a team of statistics gurus (Mark Grebner, Michael Weissman, and Jonathan Weissman), and it is an exemplar of clarity and concision. The team reports, "We do not know exactly how the weekly R2K results were created, but we are confident they could not accurately describe random polls." Daily Kos will be filing a lawsuit against its former pollster. "For the past year and a half, Daily Kos has been featuring weekly poll results from the Research 2000 (R2K) organization. These polls were often praised for their 'transparency,' since they included detailed cross-tabs on sub-populations and a clear description of the random dialing technique. However, on June 6, 2010, FiveThirtyEight.com rated R2K as among the least accurate pollsters in predicting election results. Daily Kos then terminated the relationship. One of us (MG) wondered if odd patterns he had noticed in R2K's reports might be connected with R2K's mediocre track record, prompting our investigation of whether the reports could represent proper random polling. ... This posting is a careful initial report of our findings, not intended to be a full formal analysis but rather to alert people not to rely on R2K's results."
To be fair... (Score:3, Informative)
It would be like trusting Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or anything ever aired on "Air America" before it went bankrupt.
Slightly misleading headline? (Score:4, Informative)
Those who aren't used to phrases used with "political" centric organizations might mistake the title as saying someone who is on Daily Kos' payroll flubbed the numbers, rather than a company working on contract with them.
Polling (Score:3, Informative)
For me, the surprising part of this isn't so much that R2K made up poll results, but that the results actually were noticably less accurate than traditional polling, which I like to think of as representing a broad cross-section of people who still have landlines with no caller ID for some reason (or are desperate enough to talk to another human being that they'll answer their landline anyway).
R2K not alone in this. (Score:5, Informative)
misleading headline... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Give them credit. (Score:3, Informative)
"Republicans right now are citing our polls more than Democrats because it's in their interest to do so," Scott Rasmussen said. "I would not consider myself a political conservative -- that implies an alignment with Washington politics that I don't think I have." [washington...endent.com]
Can't really argue when it comes from the guy who started the company.
Re:To be fair... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, I do. And now They're suing the pants off of R2K. [fivethirtyeight.com]
If this was the National Review Online, or Free Republic, or what have you, there would be a huge push to cover this up and blame the "liberal media"(whatever the hell THAT is) for any accusations that they did something wrong.
Re:Give them credit. (Score:4, Informative)
Apparently the situation with Rasmussen is complicated, but this [fivethirtyeight.com] seems to be a fairly decent starting place (that's not just some activist blogger).
You Are Not a Republican (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Mark Twain said it best (Score:1, Informative)
For actual details on how you can tell that stuff was just made up, start reading here: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/06/breaking-daily-kos-to-sue-research-2000.html
Re:Give them credit. (Score:5, Informative)
Remember: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Slightly misleading headline? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Commence Right-Wing Yank-Fest (Score:3, Informative)
I know, I know, sarcasm, but I just couldn't help think of this:
http://livefeed.hollywoodreporter.com/2009/12/fox-news-120-have-opinion-on-climate-research-pic.html [hollywoodreporter.com]
Re:Slightly misleading headline? (Score:3, Informative)
Unless Kos is plural, since it's not the name of an ancient person, they'll need to add an apostrophe and an s. "Daily Kos's Pollster Made Up Numbers".
Re:Slightly misleading headline? (Score:3, Informative)
It's technically correct (the best kind of correct) that you can show possession with simply an apostrophe for singular nouns ending in an 'ess' sound.
The trick is you have to be consistent about it. (You can't start with "Daily Kos' pollster" and later use "Daily Kos's editor".)
It's more of a guideline than a rule to use the succeeding 's.'
However, I will say that leaving the 's' off would likely be a depreciated style if this was a standards documentation.
Re:the truth is, polling sucks (Score:3, Informative)
Daily Kos wasn't trying to manipulate anything -- notice that they fired R2K once fivethirtyeight's statistics showed them to be least accurate at predicting election results, long before there was any evidence of fraud?
Re:misleading headline... (Score:1, Informative)
That's pretty much not what happened. The Daily Kos published the poll results without review or oversight - until a third party found the pollster to be unreliable and a fourth party found the particular polls published by the Daily Kos to be flawed.
So yeah, I'd lump the Daily Kos in among the culprits for failing to properly review the material they were publishing.
Re:Give them credit. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:You Are Not a Republican (Score:3, Informative)
Seriously though, yeah, Google Confirmation Bias is an incredibly fun game to play.
Re:I am not sure who those "teabaggers" are... (Score:2, Informative)
Too damn bad: [blogspot.com]
But what do you expect from people who start holding anti-tax protests after Obama signed the largest middle class tax cut in history? What do you expect from the kind of geniuses that hold up signs saying "Keep Your Government Hands off My Medicare".
Re:I am not sure who those "teabaggers" are... (Score:2, Informative)
I saw participants referring to themselves as teabaggers in the beginning, and the idiotic right wing commentators at Faux News picked it up and ran with it before they figured out what it meant. Which is hilarious because the initial Tea Party events were sponsored by Faux News.
Re:To be fair... (Score:3, Informative)
You need to travel. What passes for centrist in this country, and much of what is called liberal by know-nothings, is considered rather right wing in most of the rest of the western world.
Re:Mark Twain said it best (Score:4, Informative)
The pollster was subscribed to by DailyKos, among hundreds of other news organizations, and the results were skewed IN FAVOR OF RIGHT-WING CAUSES, not left-wing, so the assumption that DailyKos was somehow complicit in this is absolutely not true. (And I've rarely, if ever, read DailyKos, so I have no personal interest in defending them.. the headline is just grossly misleading).
Re:To be fair... (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. Now that teabaggers know what the term means, they call themselves tea partiers. But back in the day, they carried teabags around and called themselves teabaggers.
Here's an article backing up that fact, but I warn you, it is from that den of liberal iniquity, Billy Buckley's The National Review, so take it with the grain of salt that any reading of The National Review requires.
http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=Mjk1YmRjNzIxNmUwMTI0ZWYxZWU4OWU2MzFiOWJmNDE= [nationalreview.com]
Re:Mark Twain said it best (Score:4, Informative)
That was Strategic Vision [fivethirtyeight.com], not R2K.
(Hey, I'd be much happier if people named products with distinguishable proper names rather than generic sounding word combinations and worse yet, acronyms, so you have my sympathies for getting them mixed up.)
Re:To be fair... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:To be fair... (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong.
The first big day for this movement was Tax Day, April 15. And organizers had a gimmick. They asked people to send a tea bag to the Oval Office. One of the exhortations was “Tea Bag the Fools in D.C.” A protester was spotted with a sign saying, “Tea Bag the Liberal Dems Before They Tea Bag You.” So, conservatives started it: started with this terminology. But others ran with it and ran with it.
--
http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=Mjk1YmRjNzIxNmUwMTI0ZWYxZWU4OWU2MzFiOWJmNDE= [nationalreview.com]
Re:Are you for some reason surprised? (Score:3, Informative)
But my point is that there aren't equal numbers. Slashdot has always leaned one way--left. In this one case where a left-wing site is the topic of discussion, the accusation is being made that Slashdot is a conservative site.
By the way, the Kos supporters with mod points are out in full force abusing the -1 Overrated moderation.
Re:To be fair... (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, that proves nothing other than some people are as ignorant as yourself. That article was written in December, 2009. And the author apparently didn't know anything about the Tea Parties that had been happening for almost three years - he seems under the (mistaken, or intentionally misleading) assumption it had something to do with Obama's election.
Here's [youtube.com] some insight [latimes.com] from some of the progenitor tea parties.
Re:To be fair... (Score:2, Informative)
Nice (second attempt) at this revisionist history, but you are the one that has it wrong.
Nope, that proves nothing other than some people are as ignorant as yourself. That article was written in December, 2009. And the author apparently didn't know anything about the Tea Parties that had been happening for almost three years - he seems under the (mistaken, or intentionally misleading) assumption it had something to do with Obama's election.
Here's an article [latimes.com], and a video from an early tea party [youtube.com] where nobody called themselves "teabaggers" (yea, it came from the snarky left, apparently in fear of a grass-roots conservative movement).
Re:I am not sure who those "teabaggers" are... (Score:4, Informative)
Did you know the original Teabaggers were protesting the fact that the wealthy British lowered taxes on their own tea below the taxes on the colonial tea?
That's a pretty inaccurate depiction of the Tea Act and why the colonists opposed it. In essence, the British government was protecting it's own favored company (East India Company), in favor of other traders (and smugglers, because tea carried a hefty tax). So actually the colonists favored free trade instead of crony capitalism (or fascism, if you prefer), and when the British government tried to pass laws that provided monopolies for East India, the colonists rebelled.
I think that's a pretty good analogy with motivations of the modern-day Tea Party protesters.
Re:To be fair... (Score:4, Informative)
And none of that changes my original point, which was that it is used as a pejorative term to attack people rather than engage in debate, and therefore is usually used by people whose ability to engage in an interesting discussion is less developed than their desire to mock those who think differently.
Re:To be fair... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually no. They carried the very signs that started all of this:
http://washingtonindependent.com/69660/correcting-jay-nordlinger [washington...endent.com]
In January of 09, they had a Facebook page that had some back and forth discussion about the 'alternate' meaning of teabag with some surprised disdain when they were informed as to what the term meant. They were apparently unaware at that point.
This is from the rally in DC on April 15th of 2009:
http://washingtonindependent.com/31868/scenes-from-the-new-american-tea-party [washington...endent.com]
One final little tidbit...the debate by conservatives as to whether or not to wear the title with pride ;)
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/12/to-teabag-or-not-thats-still-the-question-for-conservatives.php [talkingpointsmemo.com]
Re:To be fair... (Score:2, Informative)
1913 isn't really a fair data point to use, considering that that was the year that federal income taxes were first explicitly allowed by the Constitution. Insight can be had by realizing that by the time that federal income tax was 4 years old, the top rate had grown to 67% (though most of this was to fund WW1).
However, any discussion of top marginal tax rates is incomplete and even disingenuous without considering how much you had to earn in order to qualify for that top bracket. A graph like the one at http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/2007/11/03/nytimes-historical-tax-rates-by-income-group/ [visualizingeconomics.com] is necessary to accurately convey the change in tax structure over time. The super-rich elite truly have had it easier in recent decades, but during the 90's most of the population was subject to more progressive taxation than during the 60's.
Re:I am not sure who those "teabaggers" are... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:To be fair... (Score:2, Informative)
1) monitor product safety, especially food and drugs, 2) protect the environment, and 3) fund scientific research for which there is no immediate commercial application.
We would have lots of money to do that if we (and by "we", I don't actually mean "you and I", I mean the Republicrats) weren't spending it foolishly elsewhere. But look at where we are now. We are spending so much so-called stimulus money that even the Europeans are looking at us and saying "Uh, no thanks, we'd rather cut back our spending than try to keep up with you". And surprise, surprise, the Democrats are getting ready to raise taxes again. Not just on those rich folks they demonized during the elections either; they are coming after your paycheck and mine.
#4) prosecute businesses that engage in anti-competitive monopolistic behavior.
Hell yeah. I don't like big government interfering in business, but a healthy free-market system requires a free market, which a monopoly certainly isn't. If there is need for a limited government role there, fine.
Re:I am not sure who those "teabaggers" are... (Score:2, Informative)
By your standards the democrats are in favor of restarting the holocaust, using hamas as the new nazis. After all, some are (just read dailykos for a bit).
And generally, none of them say anything when hamas makes statements about restarting the holocaust. And everytime anyone suggests that maybe hamas should be taught a lesson "democrats" (let's throw everyone in one basket like you so seem to enjoy) rant on and on about how "victimized" those poor genocidal maniacs are.
And let's not pretend that the lunatics of, say dailykos or democratic underground, don't know perfectly well that what they're saying about gazans is simply a lie.