The Problems With Polls (nybooks.com) 129
Political polling, once hailed as a revolutionary tool for democracy, is facing a crisis of confidence amid high-profile failures and fundamental critiques. Data scientist G. Elliott Morris, Nate Silver's successor at FiveThirtyEight, has defended polling's relevance in a new book, arguing it remains crucial for revealing public opinion despite challenges like plummeting response rates and rising costs.
But critics, including political scientist Lindsay Rogers and sociologist Leo Bogart, have long questioned polling's ability to capture the complexities of public sentiment, arguing it reduces nuanced political matters to simplistic yes/no questions and potentially records opinions that don't exist outside the survey context. Social media platforms, promising to transform democracy by facilitating constant public feedback, have further complicated the polling landscape. The story adds: Today that product remains overwhelmingly popular: polls saturate election coverage, turn politics into a spectator sport, and provide an illusion of control over complex, unpredictable, and fundamentally fickle social forces. That isn't to say that polls don't have uses beyond entertainment: they can be a great asset to campaigns, helping candidates refine their messages and target their resources; they can provide breakdowns of election results that are far more illuminating than the overall vote count; and they can give us a sense -- a vague and sometimes misleading sense -- of what 300 million people or more think about an issue. But, pace Morris, the time for celebrating polls as a bastion of democracy or as a means of bringing elites closer to voters is surely over. The polling industry continues to boom. Democracy isn't faring quite so well.
Silicon Valley ultimately peddled the same feel-good story about democracy as the polling industry: that the powerful are unresponsive to the wider public because they cannot hear their voices, and if only they could hear them, then of course they would listen and act. The virtue of this diagnosis is that structural inequalities in wealth and power are left intact -- all that matters in democracy is that everyone has a voice, regardless of background. In a very narrow, technical sense, their innovations have made this a reality. But the result is a loud, opinionated, and impotent public sphere, coarsened by social and economic divisions and made all the more disillusioned by the discovery that, in politics, it takes more than a voice to be heard.
But critics, including political scientist Lindsay Rogers and sociologist Leo Bogart, have long questioned polling's ability to capture the complexities of public sentiment, arguing it reduces nuanced political matters to simplistic yes/no questions and potentially records opinions that don't exist outside the survey context. Social media platforms, promising to transform democracy by facilitating constant public feedback, have further complicated the polling landscape. The story adds: Today that product remains overwhelmingly popular: polls saturate election coverage, turn politics into a spectator sport, and provide an illusion of control over complex, unpredictable, and fundamentally fickle social forces. That isn't to say that polls don't have uses beyond entertainment: they can be a great asset to campaigns, helping candidates refine their messages and target their resources; they can provide breakdowns of election results that are far more illuminating than the overall vote count; and they can give us a sense -- a vague and sometimes misleading sense -- of what 300 million people or more think about an issue. But, pace Morris, the time for celebrating polls as a bastion of democracy or as a means of bringing elites closer to voters is surely over. The polling industry continues to boom. Democracy isn't faring quite so well.
Silicon Valley ultimately peddled the same feel-good story about democracy as the polling industry: that the powerful are unresponsive to the wider public because they cannot hear their voices, and if only they could hear them, then of course they would listen and act. The virtue of this diagnosis is that structural inequalities in wealth and power are left intact -- all that matters in democracy is that everyone has a voice, regardless of background. In a very narrow, technical sense, their innovations have made this a reality. But the result is a loud, opinionated, and impotent public sphere, coarsened by social and economic divisions and made all the more disillusioned by the discovery that, in politics, it takes more than a voice to be heard.
Polls (Score:1)
Who still has landlines and answers unknown numbers on their cell phones? Boomers and elderly.
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This 100%.
My phone is set that all unknown numbers go to voicemail. I'll never be part of a poll.
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I can't believe you even have voicemail activated, tbh
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Why..don't you want to get messages from friends? And if something important is there, like medical related they'll leave a message that I'd want to get.
I'm surprised to hear someone doesn't use voicemail....
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Back when I used to check my voice mail, I would see the friend who left me a voice mail, before I checked my voice mail. I don't hear well, and I have no patience for voice mail. Just send me a text.
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Many people refuse to participate in polls and just hang up, and Republicans are more likely to do so than Democrats.
Bias in refuseniks skewed the 2016 pews, predicting Hillary would win, and skewed the 2020 polls, predicting an easy Biden win when it turned out to be a squeaker.
Pollsters try to compensate for the bias, but it's hard to get it correct.
Re: Polls (Score:3)
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Re:Polls (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup.
In the current atmosphere, where expressing conservative values can cause you to lose your livelihood....I doubt many people of that slant will talk to any strangers about their views on politics.
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Yup.
In the current atmosphere, where expressing conservative values can cause you to lose your livelihood....I doubt many people of that slant will talk to any strangers about their views on politics.
Yes sir, this one right here. When you work with laboratories and universities there are no end to busybodies who will root you out and find a reason, any reason, to get you gone or to make your life difficult enough that you leave on your own.
All you have to do is read social media where people with openly conservative takes get dogpiled by the brigades of REEEEEE! people.
My current employer dumping people over indulging in wrong-think was a driver for deleting nearly all of my social media accounts a few
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I guess I was lucky enough to have the foresight to never have created accounts or participated in social media to begin with....
Congrats to you on ditching the problem!!!
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Well, a well known place where this exists is Hollywood, CA.
Re: Polls (Score:2)
Re: Polls (Score:2)
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You know, never thought of it that way, but that makes a whole lot of sense. I'm left of center, but that's besides the point. Any time I post something that's a bit to the right, I get hate responses from the left. Any time it's a bit on the left, I get hate replies from the right. I guess I should just succumb to group think and move way over to the left or right. At least I'd cut my list of enemies in half.
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>Many people refuse to participate in polls and just hang up, and Republicans are more likely to do so than Democrats.
I thought it was the other way around? I do know that in the U.S., there are far more people who identify as Democrats over Republicans, and as a result a poll that tried for an equal amount of Democrats and Republicans in the sample pool is considered a biased, "bad" poll. It gets more nuanced than that as well, because Democrats are less likely to actually get out and vote, so their the
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That is true for older voters.
However, for. the under 30 crowd it is democrats who are more likely to vote and not respond to polls.
Polls have consistently underestimated Trump's support by four to six percent and since Dobbs polls have consistently underestimated democratic support by five to ten percent.
The way polls have dealt with the fact that they aren't taking random samples is that pollsters are doing is taking the demographics of the respondents and then skewing the responses of the various demog
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Depends on the group...there are reports that the very young, like Gen Z'ers....are leaning much more conservative...especially the males.
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I would hope that pollsters have a bit more information about the number they're calling as opposed to just going through the white pages. You know, age, sex (yes, please), geographic location, etc. A good poll may take it into account that ...
under 30 crowd it is democrats who are more likely to vote and not respond to polls.
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Many people refuse to participate in polls and just hang up, and Republicans are more likely to do so than Democrats.
Bias in refuseniks skewed the 2016 pews, predicting Hillary would win, and skewed the 2020 polls, predicting an easy Biden win when it turned out to be a squeaker.
Pollsters try to compensate for the bias, but it's hard to get it correct.
Seniors are more likely to have landlines than younger demographics.
Seniors are more likely to answer a call from an unknown number than younger demographics (whether on a landline or a cell phone).
Seniors are more likely to vote Republican than younger demographics.
Therefore, Republicans are more likely to answer polls.
My analysis comes to the opposite conclusion as does yours. (Or your flat statement that lacks any any supporting analysis, anyway.)
My understanding as to why Trump outperformed the polls
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You raise an interesting question How can we actually *know* that significantly more Republicans refuse to answer polls than Democrats, other than it *feels right*? Because if we had a method for knowing the size of that effect, we can compensate for it. It's not really any different from the fact that if you asks some random eligible voter who he is going to vote for there's a 33% to 50% chance he won't even vote.
All polls weight their results by how likely a respondent is to actually turn out and also by
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Absolutely - sample bias is a big difficulty in polling. Good polsters know how to measure their sampling error, and to compensate accordingly, but they'll never get it completely right, and can easily overcompensate sometimes.
However, the bigger issue with polling is that people just read too much into them. A voting intention poll does not necessarily tell you who people actually intend to vote, it only tells you who people say they intend to vote for when asked the question. These aren't necessarily the
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Also for every legitimate poll there may be 5 to 10 fake polls, or push polls, or polls in the mail from a campaign. Ie, polls designed to push ideas instead of learning ideas. Ie, "Do you think Senator Foobar's plan to make Christianity illegal is good for the country?"
I responded to one poll, maybe 20 years ago. The second question on there I couldn't answer with one of the caller's yes or no answers, I tried to explain the complexity of the question and how I felt only to be presented with "So you're
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Exactly. Any modern polls have to deal with incredible selection bias issues. And that means that any poll numbers require extensive data manipulation or extrapolation based on the small numbers of folks who do reply, leaving themselves open to criticism about methodology, massaging data, etc.
I honestly believe that anything less than hooking random unwilling people up to lie detectors is mostly useless guesswork, or will have a variance of +/-10%, at which point they're useless results anyway.
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If it were that simple, polls would have shown Trump winning in 2016.
Re: Polls (Score:3, Informative)
Re: Polls (Score:2)
Polls predict states, states determine the electoral college, and the electoral college determines the winner. (Winning the popular vote is as meaningful as being the tallest candidate, which is to say, it's completely irrelevant.)
A major contributor to polling issues in 2016 was that some Trump supporters chose to lie to the pollsters, telling the pollsters they were voting for Hillary to mess with the campaign.
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"A major contributor to polling issues in 2016 was that some Trump supporters chose to lie to the pollsters, telling the pollsters they were voting for Hillary to mess with the campaign."
Oh, come on. I'm not a never Trump voter and *NOT* a Republican, but this is just not the case. Many chose not to be part of the poll due to their position being perceived as "socially undesirable" and some did chose to "lie", but not for the 'evil' motives you want to attribute to it. Again, to be for Trump was to being
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>> Polls do not predict the electoral college.
They can if they poll each state separately. Those polls are not frequently reported (other than for swing states) because it would take longer to report than a 10 second sound bite and it doesn't serve the media's interest of creating a horse race that's too close to call.
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Anecdotally...
I have a landline because mobile reception in my house is fickle. I am 54. I hang up on pollsters as soon as I identify that they are one.
If that's typical, Gen-X isn't part of this crap either. We have a secret ballot for a reason, and IMO it's because politics are personal.
The only thing that ever comes into my landline is people who are stuck in the past (doctors, lawyers, banks) and spam. I also use it because my mobile does not accept voicemails, and the landline does.
And that's about how
Re: Polls (Score:2)
Have you heard about WiFi assist? That might allow you to get rid of your landline... it uses your home wifi when cell coverage is lacking.
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I get polls on my cell phone so why does it matter?
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Who still has landlines and answers unknown numbers on their cell phones? Boomers and elderly.
I see this parroted a lot but at least in my personal circle it is not true. My parents are 70, no landline, they have their phones set to send all unrecognized calls to voicemail. Mother-in-law lives with us, and she has the same setup. Family friends in their 70s and 80s also mostly don't have land lines and don't answer calls from numbers they don't recognize. It might surprise some people, but these old folks also use computers normally, have tablets and other electronic gadgets and know how to use/conf
Tools of the Corrupt (Score:4, Insightful)
Political polling, once hailed as a revolutionary tool for democracy..
Oh for fucks sake, who’s SELLING that bullshit? The ones profiting off political polls?
Polls are nothing more than an extension of “media”. Always have been. And media is both biased and corrupted by Government. If you struggle to believe that, watch Good Morning, Vietnam again. Then realize that movie had fuck-all to do with a funny radio DJ and everything to do with Government and media censorship.
The lies and clickbait are bad enough, but the censorship issue goes above and beyond. And yeah, that problem is THAT old. I believe today’s political polls and results about as much as I believe the politicians buying and selling them. So should you.
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Indeed. I go into some detail into a comment below about this. Basically there are the scientific polls, which are usually guarded as trade secrets by organizations wealthy enough to conduct them, and then there are the profit-maximizing / ad sales polls that are "farmed" by gaming which method produces the most clicks. For a lot of intuitive reasons, the latter almost always produces statistical ties, because it keeps the
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Polls are nothing more than an extension of âoemediaâ. Always have been.
I was under the impression that politicians tend to pay attention (in some cases) to clear trends in the polls. I think you can see that with presidential candidates reorienting their stance.
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I'm not sure yard signs are a good source either, because in order to place a yard sign, you have to care enough to evangelize for your candidate. I suspect that the vast majority of voters don't bother campaigning for who they vote for. The "swing voters" who will ultimately decide the election by definition won't have signs on their lawn saying who they support. If they did, they wouldn't be a swing voter.
That being said, I will say that I've noticed that there are no Harris/Walz signs out there. Anywhere
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Yes, I agree in 2024 polls are political propaganda.. Polls showing Harris-Walz ticket being tied to Trump-Vance nationally are laughable, anyone can simply take a drive in any swing state and look at the lawn signs to see that is not even close.
The problem with polling isn't accuracy, because they tend to be pretty damn accurate (particularly more so than your lawn sign study).
The problem is that they frame issues as A v B, Trump v Harris, pro-life v pro-choice.
But peoples views and positions are much more nuanced than that. Presenting things as polls frames issues as having only two real viable positions and pushes people to join one of the camps.
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Re:Tools of the Corrupt (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, I agree in 2024 polls are political propaganda.. Polls showing Harris-Walz ticket being tied to Trump-Vance nationally are laughable, anyone can simply take a drive in any swing state and look at the lawn signs to see that is not even close.
If it were that simple, elections could be predicted by yard sign shipments more accurately than your drive through rural bfe, but they can't, it's not.
Also polls can have the inverse effect of driving people to vote when their team is behind. When your team is behind in the polls it drives people to get out and vote. Being ahead in the pools encourages people to stay home because they're winning anyway. Voting sucks or we'd all do it every time. There is a scary low fraction of registered voters that actually vote. What polls don't do is change anyone's mind. Duh.
If all you want is a bullshit measure that confirms your feelings, save the gas and console yourself with some crap like all your [good] friends are voting for your team too, so it must be the most winningest.
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If all you want is a bullshit measure that confirms your feelings, save the gas and console yourself with some crap like all your [good] friends are voting for your team too, so it must be the most winningest.
Realize which party controls most of the liberal media, and you’ll understand they have ZERO reason to be honest in the polls. I already have my bullshit measure. It’s called the media convincing me that the worst-rated VP in American history, is suddenly “tied” with Trump.
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worst-rated VP in American history
Gee, wonder what your source for that piece of "information" is.
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anyone can simply take a drive in any swing state and look at the lawn signs to see that is not even close.
You cannot tell from the rate of occurrence of lawn signs because Trump supporters attack, harass, and intimidate those who install signs supporting Harris [apnews.com], which has a chilling effect.
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Yes, I agree in 2024 polls are political propaganda.. Polls showing Harris-Walz ticket being tied to Trump-Vance nationally are laughable, anyone can simply take a drive in any swing state and look at the lawn signs to see that is not even close.
For a slightly different take on this, I am a conservative and will vote for Trump and live in a sort of inner suburb. Wasn't really my choice, but whatever. I don't have any signs in my yard because it is an open invitation for people to fuck with my car, egg my house and vandalize stuff. One of the neighbors yelled at the last campaign guy who was going door to door handing out literature for the local conservative candidates, he was a very respectful black man who had idiot young white women explaining t
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extremely activist and unhinged crowd to hate on conservatives currently in the US
We get the same bullshit on the liberal side from the unhinged "conservatives". I don't have a "Harris" sign in my yard for the exact same reasons. I don't need the jackass with the ten-foot-wide "Trump won 2020. You know it and I know it." sign in his yard fucking with my stuff.
Polling fails (Score:2)
People have all sorts of reasons for being deceptive, so at the very least you need a massive poll to average that crap out.
People being polled want to influence the results to change perception to influence those easily influenced and will find pollsters who use unethical methods to get the desired polling results.
Different polling methods inherently select subpopulations with average deviances from the general population.
You need to find a way to get a large random sample that isn't accidentally selecting
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* You can get very different answers to essentially the same question depending on factors such as the precise wording of the question or the context in which it is asked. The reasons for the difference are not always obvious even in hindsight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] - Yes, Prime Minister, from the UK in the 1980s.
Re:Polling fails different answers (Score:2)
Classic Yes Primeminister sketch on polls.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Weird (Score:5, Insightful)
I was watching Nate Silver in an interview recently, and he just said it plainly... people who answer polls are "weird." That is, they're less and less representative of the voting population every year. I wonder if you'd be better off sending the questionnaire through the regular mail and having them answer that way. You could argue that people without a fixed address wouldn't be polled, but I think they vote less anyway.
It seems like Twitter and TikTok are where "journalists" turn to but those are the worst. They're performative spaces where people say what they think other people on the platform want to hear, not what they actually think.
Politicians need to know what people are thinking, but there are other ways to find out. If someone from a political party comes door to door, I still talk to them. They can ask me questions and I'll tell them why I'm voting a certain way. Of course if they were recording me, I'd tell them to F-off. What's really damaging democracy is that we have a new wave of people who think freedom of speech is bad. If people are afraid to say what's bothering them out of fear of being ostracized or losing their job, that's what keeps the so called "elites" out of touch with real people.
Seriously, we spent so long under the boot of the church, and being told you can't say that because it's "blasphemy" but these days the list of scientifically proven things you can't say without repercussions is longer and longer. This won't last forever, but I'm afraid of what the backlash against it is going to look like. It's going to be violent.
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Re:Weird (Score:5, Interesting)
What's really damaging democracy is that we have a new wave of people who think freedom of speech is bad.
I'd modify this to say that the new wave think that free speech is Ok - but only for them, and without consequence. They want to say their piece, and not be held accountable for it. And everyone else can just STFU.
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These people were always there, since the dawn of time. The problem is that, 1000 years ago, the village buffoon was just a village buffoon. Today that same guy will have a platform and millions of village buffoons will form a voting block and demand that he leads their kingdom.
Democracy died with the internet's birth because every voter can find the loud minority that best fits his world view and starts shouting with them. Sadly, a democracy can not exist when campaigns are just shouting fights between clo
Re: Weird (Score:2)
We (voters) don't need polls, campaign staff workers 'need' polls.
Reporters report on polls because the only alternative to reporting on polls would be to instead cover what politicians say, which is incredibly repetitive and boring. By reporting on polling numbers, the election takes on a sporting event-like appeal to readers/viewers.
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Even limiting ourselves to postwar times, you got the Red Scare and HUAC, J. Edgar Hoover's wire crews listening to everyone who ever expressed an opinion to the left of Genghis Khan, Nixon's "ratfucking" slander machine, violent Southern racists (as always), National Guards deployed because teenagers with hair longer than a millimeter were waving si
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Yep. Most of them refer to it now as some form of "misinformation".
Here's some examples of recent "ruling class" disgust with freedom of speech:
John Kerry at the WEF [youtube.com]
Hillary Clinton for book interview..."lose total control" [youtube.com]
Tim Walz on free speech (3:17 in). [youtu.be]
Yes, these links are on YT from conservative shows, but the videos are NOT generated they are real.
It's strange I remember seeing these a lot a few weeks ago...and they now seem t
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If people are afraid to say what's bothering them out of fear of being ostracized or losing their job, that's what keeps the so called "elites" out of touch with real people.
Freedom of Speech has never been about freedom from consequence of stating your opinion. It's about freedom of punishment from the government. Congrats you're not in jail, that doesn't mean other people should be forced to stay around a toxic thundercunt who tattoos a swastika on their forehead. My freedoms are to not associate with those people, not employ them. If you're afraid of being ostracized for your opinion then it's a good indication that your opinion is worth keeping to yourself.
That's not fear,
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I actually get occasional polls that way. Some of them are from the VA, asking about how good or bad my experience was at a recent appointment, and I generally remember to fill them out and send them back. The others are from the political party I'm registered with. Those are trying to learn what their membership thinks about various issues and/or candidates. I fill them out and send th
The REAL problems (Score:2)
Problem 2 is people lie on purpose to make the candidate they don't want feel safe and spend less money and put in less effort.
Problem 3 is that it's biased towards people who have unlimited time to waste talking on the phone or will take a long political survey for a $5 gift card, aka slightly more Democrats than Republicans.
Problem 4, and this is 99% of the problem, they
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Backwards (Score:2)
The fact that polling can be, and is, used to influence results and consensus instead of simply monitoring them as often as not is a pretty damning in and of itself.
Anyone who 'trusts' the results from a poll which can be easily manipulated by any number of factors is a fool, and frankly, that's why they're still used.
Likely voters (Score:2)
Huh. Likely voters? Bascially, boomers. All of us need to fix that. Get out and vote, or they will keep taking and taking until they're gone.
You don't sow, you don't reap.
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The problem is perverse incentives, not science. (Score:2)
What that usually looks like is dead-heat horse race elections, with slight emphasis one way or another depending on who
maybe ... (Score:2)
Political polling, once hailed as a revolutionary tool for democracy, is facing a crisis of confidence
... that's just part of democracy itself facing a crisis of confidence. polls are biased just the same as media, there's no mystery there. at the end money talks and all governments rule overwhelmingly for the elites, the "demos" has no real "kratos" at all. this can only hold while there is hope and trust, meaning money flows, business blooms and everything is good and nice enough to keep the populace happy and content. it's been decades, but we might be facing new challenges and it would seem that such a
2016 really proved the point (Score:3)
No one was admitting to supporting Trump because many Trump voters were afraid to do so for various reasons. My coworkers in a rich, blue region were shocked at how well Trump did. I wasn't. I warned them that most of the USA outside of rich, blue metro regions was not doing well. After watching Bernie Sanders get shated six ways to Sunday, a lot of Trump voters kept their mouths shut.
Partly because a lot of people sympathetic to Sanders actually voted for Trump in the end since pre-sellout Sanders was basically a left-wing version of Trump on core blue collar issues (including immigration control and protecting jobs).
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Sadly, I think the only effective polling strategy today is to sit down and talk to people and listen. Unfortunately we all feel like the other half are bat-shit crazy stupid morons without a functioning brain cell.
It pains me when smart people make dumb arguments with conviction. It pains me that people hold vile opinions of others based solely on political party. But, I get the divide. It has been around for a long time simmering. Some current turns baffle and worry me, but this too shall pass.
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It's like the way people think Germany elected Hitler, but that never happened - not even close.
I wouldn't join a any club... (Score:2)
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There is more incentive to be dishonest than there is to be honest. When a pollster, somehow, gets through to me, I'm answering questions based on what feedback I want their candidate to have, not on what the pollster is asking.
Will you vote for Kamala Harris? No, I don't like her position on (x, y, z). In fact I wouldn't vote for trump if I had a gun to my head, I'd definitely ask for the bullet. But the democrat party doesn't get a free pass to assume I'm in their corner and support all of their policies,
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Pollsters (Score:2)
The last poll taker who came to my house asked "What's the most important issue to you - jobs, the environment, education, or housing?" "None of those" was my response. "Well, which one is the most important to you?" What the hell kind of poll is that?
Better question (Score:2)
A better question would be why are those the only options?
If you want a poll to reflect opinion, you let the takers state their opinion.
If you want to game the results, you limit the options.
Statistics (Score:2)
Contrasting polls
1) Polls of 3,000 (or even 1,000) persons are a joke. For a state like Pennsylvania: 6,915,283 likely voters, 9,090,962 registered, 10,353,548 eligible. Statistical noise. And that's assuming a random sample (polls are "Self-Selecting Populations"). See those error bars? Double them.
2) Poll of 21,000 out of 1.2M Teamsters is statisticly significant. Both in absolute sense (21,000 people) and relative sense (1.75 %).
Yeah, let's blame polls (Score:2)
We should definitely blame polls for their failure to identify winners in statistically tied, winner-take-all races, where a few states will end up dictating the total outcome.
The real problem is the format of the elections. We should be using ranked choice voting and run-offs. The winners should never really be a surprise to us, and their capacity to make sweeping changes without popular support should thus be limited by their ability to remain in power with a less faithful electorate.
other electoral systems [Re:Yeah, let's blame ...] (Score:2)
The real problem is the format of the elections. We should be using ranked choice voting and run-offs.
This is insightful.
The current winner-take-all elections drive us to binary choice polarization.
Agree, ranked choice would be better. I'm a fan of approval voting [electionscience.org], another balloting system that solves the electoral process devolving into a choice between only two alternatives, but ranked choice would be better than what we have.
(Approval voting has one advantage that vote counting is simple, and that no changes are needed to the voting technology. All you need to do is remove the current constraint "Vote f
Bad Options (Score:2)
Polls with loaded questions are just sales tools
Polls with leading questions are to skew the results
People that answer political polls are usually people that want to tell you how to live
All polls without a Cowboy Neal option are not worth answering
Blame phone call spam (Score:2)
Who is paying? (Score:3)
A good poll won't just ask your opinion, they will ask how firm that opinion is and then they will ask a lot of demographic questions to try and figure out how representative you are of the target population. For an election the target population is the people who will show up on election day. So pollsters for an internal political party poll will ask "Are you eligible to vote?", "Did you vote in the last election?", "Are you currently registered to vote", "Do you know where to vote?", "How likely are you to vote?"
A good poll will go out of their way to find people in demographics that don't answer the phone. They will double check that socially embarrassing opinions are correctly captured by asking "do you agree with any of the 5 following statements" where one of those statements is the socially less acceptable one and then asking further questions to infer if the polled person likely agreed with the target statement. This is particularly important in countries with repressive regimes.
Polling when done right is still disciplined science. Most polls though are total garbage.
Misuse (Score:2)
Polls can still be very useful, the issue is the misuse of many of them. Many polls now are built for misuse and outrage. For example, a poll asking people in the country is headed in the right direction makes for great headlines, but doesn't actually tell anyone anything. Do they think it is headed in the wrong direction because it is headed to the left or right? Too many polls are built for headlines instead of for actual gathering data.
The political parties have actual polls (Score:2)
The slop guy's like Nate silver pass around isn't very useful for anything. You might just kind of barely get an idea of a general trend and if the public really really hates a politician, like they do with say JD Vance, you'll know that. But the internal polling from the parties is what matters.
The downside to it is it's extr
Who answers phones anymore? (Score:2)
The only people I know who answer phones, are the elderly. These are certainly not representative of the population's views on things.
Remember slashdot polls? (Score:2)
Remember when they were *fun*?
First, they became dumb, then they disappeared. The two things are not unrelated. To make polls engaging, worth the effort, they need to be well done. And doing them well, requires spending money and effort.
This may be part of the larger polling issue. Polls are too commonplace, and too much like spam. People aren't interested in answering leading questions or being part of someone's political agenda. So yeah, they avoid pollsters.
Time for a new strategy. The telephone is a dyi
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To make polls engaging, worth the effort, they need to be well done.
I think even "bad" Slashdot polls can be quite engaging, depending on the imagination of the people responding. Distance, in multiples of my height, from my birthplace [slashdot.org] is my all-time favorite poll, featuring such contributions as this one [slashdot.org] and this one [slashdot.org]. Also you can generate a cut-out-and-keep list of Slashdotters who didn't understand dimensional analysis in 2010.
The Iron Law of polling is... (Score:2)
"...all polls released to the public are for the purpose of manipulating, rather than informing, the public."
Likely Voters (Score:2)
You do a real sample and then you subjectively need to decide how that maps onto the population and then subjectively decide which of those people are likely to vote in a meaningful way.
All of those subjective variables can be tuned to get any outcome in most races.
Most pollsters stop playing propaganda games with their methodology as the race draws near so they can sell how close they were on Election Eve.
The "top five" pollsters are the ones who are most often close *and* don't have huge swings just befor
Moderators hate Funny? (Score:2)
Looked over some of the discussion and noticed a number of Funny comments not so moderated...
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You know what an opinion poll is, right? What's the most important issue on your mind? Who do you have faith in to handle that issue?
I have never heard of a modern poll that asks "Who are you voting for?" It's pointless.
Re: seriously? (Score:2)
It's been asked for decades, along with 'priority' questions...
Re: seriously? (Score:2)
Actually more decisions should be made by a just ruler - firm but fair. ;)
I'm going to suggest you take a moment and reflect on that statement. You really want to be governed by a dictator-like ruler, chosen by 50% plus one voters as "just, but fair"?
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More decisions should be made by policy referendum,
No. If you did this, we would be spending all of our time voting in referenda, and would either be voting out of ignorance, or would be way overloaded in research.
not by voting for a political party.
Agree here; the way party politics works (politicians vote in solidarity with their party or else they are ejected from their party and lose the support needed to win elections) is contraproductive to good government
Actually more decisions should be made by a just ruler - firm but fair. ;)
That begs the question. How do you select "a just ruler"?
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More decisions should be made by policy referendum,
No. If you did this, we would be spending all of our time voting in referenda, and would either be voting out of ignorance, or would be way overloaded in research.
No we wouldn't spend all our time voting, nobody is suggesting we vote on everything but there are plenty of decisions that could be voted on directly especially ethical ones like Abortion laws, instead of the current system where you stack bunch of judges on the supreme court to either to be for or against.
As for voting out of ignorance, you seem to give politicians more credit than I do. I don't think they are any smarter than the average voter, they are not put there because of their intelligence they ar
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No. If you did this, we would be spending all of our time voting in referenda, and would either be voting out of ignorance, or would be way overloaded in research.
The Swiss [swissinfo.ch] are much closer to direct democracy than most
well, with the addendum "closer" is not identical to "they have direct democracy". And despite Switzerland being 2% the population of the US, according to your link: "'In the city of Zürich,' says Ladner 'it has been calculated that a person would have to vote on something like 1,800 issues altogether if you take into account local, cantonal and national issues.' Ladner says this accounts for the desperately low turnout in many referenda and explains a certain amount of voting fatigue among the elector
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I'd much rather be "overloaded with research" than given two false choices. Current estimates in the USA are that 26% of the population is a first or second generation immigrant (14% are foreign born). So, we aren't that different from the Swiss.
In Switzerland 24% of the population are actually foreign citizens. Not Swiss citizens born outside Switzerland; not Swiss citizens with parents born elsewhere.
All democracies are republics.
A republic is a system where the head of state is not a monarch, and leaders are elected or appointed rather than inheriting power.
Close enough. The phrase "or appointed" is a bit ambiguous; it depends appointed by who, and for what purpose. If the leaders are appointed by the dictator for the purpose of making the dictator richer, for example, it's not a republic.
Some democracies have constitutional monarchies, where there is a monarch, but the real power lies with elected representatives and institutions.
If the "real" power is with the monarch and not with elected representatives, it is not a democracy and also not a r
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So what do we get under the current system, Prop A for the rich + stagnation, massive bureaucracy ?
Votes should not be yes/no questions they should be rank these options, and there should be financial rules in place like may only have certain level of debt.
It is kind of the problem with surveys as well they ask yes/no questions and you can't go int further detail. I do, do them when they call because I feel sorry for the surveyor it must be a terrible job ringing up people and having them hang up on you all
Re: "revolutionary tool for democracy" my a$$ (Score:2)
Good point, I've never heard the phrase "a strong democracy relies on polling", though people act like it's a valid substitute for actual voting, which democracy does rely on.
I've never had a poll change my opinion/position on a subject - ever. I won't change my opinion on, say, abortion, because 73% of poll respondents have a different opinion than I do, that's not what polls are for.
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