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IMHO, I think the bigger issue is that people don’t understand statistics. They see a poll that says Trump has a 25% of winning, then when Trump wins, they think the poll is wrong. That’s not how statistics works.
That means if you held the same close election four times, Trump would win one.
People mock the polls, but I wonder how many of those people actually took a basic GE statistics 101 glass.
For random events, that's true. But we are able to poll people before the event to see how it will turn out. With a big enough sample size, you're able to get pretty close to actual results. After all, the election itself is just one big poll, not a die roll.
I say this as someone who went to school for this stuff and does a lot of surveying and statistics daily.
This doesn’t work when you’re comparing things that are going to be neck and neck. In order forecast with very high confidence, with something that is neck and neck, you need a huuuuge sample size and absolutely perfect surveying conditions.
The reason polls have been a toss up lately isn’t because the polling is bad. The problem is that the big races were also ways going to be nail biters, and we’re looking at the odds that a race will be 1% one way or another.
The good polls have been pretty damn close to the final vote percentages numbers. The problem is that the variance needed to swing a win right or left is absolutely minuscule. We’re often talking about percentages that are less than 2%, or less than 1%.
I'm not mocking polls here. I'm saying that if you have a sizeable population of people that refuse to participate in them, even if you get to a statistically significant number of people, the poll will be off. trump was also found to have been paying for polls that were slanted towards him to be put out there.
So, if a candidate is using bad polls to flood the zone with bad results, and then on top of that you have a statistically significant number of people who refuse to participate in said polling, your data is corrupted, is it not? This is exactly how people can use statistics to lie to people.