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."
Re:To be fair... (Score:3, Funny)
Financially or intellectually bankrupt?
Gee (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Obligatory (Score:3, Funny)
Everyone knows that 78.49% of statistics are made up.
And that the other 23% are erroneous.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:R2K not alone in this. (Score:3, Funny)
You're just making those numbers up, aren't you?
Re:Give them credit. (Score:1, Funny)
This [dailykos.com], although I can't promise it's reliable, as it comes from the Daily Kos.
Re:R2K not alone in this. (Score:3, Funny)
I can't decide whether this is just being funny, or if it's insightful, or interesting. But, I'm pretty sure it's 50% funny, 20% insightful, and 30% interesting. +/- 3%
Re:R2K not alone in this. (Score:4, Funny)
And if Diebold scored it:
24% Funny
10% Insightful
15% Interesting
51% Republican
Considering... (Score:1, Funny)
Considering they call me up while I'm eating dinner, I find the average polling person to be mean.
Re:To be fair... (Score:5, Funny)
On matters of opinion and ideology, well, it's a political blog. What exactly is an "accurate" opinion?
"Mine."
Re:To be fair... (Score:3, Funny)
Actually, Rush is pretty accurate. He's just (admittedly) biased. It's the bias that gets you - what he's typically saying is not factually inaccurate.
If he were publishing statistics, on the other hand, the bias would be a problem. Thus the Daily Kos credibility comes into question...
Re:To be fair... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:To be fair... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:To be fair... (Score:2, Funny)
Oh, puh-lease. You guys have no fucking chance. Puff and strut now, big boy, but know going into this election cycle your team's major talking points are cutting off unemployment benefits and gutting social security. That's going to play well in this economy, don't you think?
Idiots like you blame the Democrats, but the real Americans know who got them in this mess, and who is trying to keep them there to score points against 'the other guys.' It won't work, in fact, this next election is going to be a slaughter. The southern regional minority party of hate and fear is dead. Its corpse is still shambling around looking for brains, but we'll put it down soon, don't you fear.
Re:To be fair... (Score:3, Funny)
What is "leadership or sense of urgency"?
Should he be down there trying to clean the gulf with his fucking kidneys?
I think there are a lot of people who forget that Obama wasn't facing off in the last election against Aquaman, but for the record John McCain wouldn't be using telekinetic powers to summon a posse of dolphins to plug the leak in the gulf either. It's either that or else we've somehow come to think that knee-jerk, blustery statements/actions that don't address the real problem (like the Patriot act or the invasion of Iraq) are a good thing.