Post by Farmduck on Oct 9, 2020 21:58:46 GMT 10
DISCLAIMER: I'm not an American. I don't care who wins. I'm constantly stunned that a country of 300+ million people seems unable to produce quality candidates under the age of 70. OK, that's out of the way.
I'm starting to see a lot of pundits drag out the "hurr, durr, muh polls is wrong, Hillary 2016" line now. I think they are inconveniently overlooking a couple of points:
- aside from the winner of the electoral college - mainly because of the results in 3 or 4 States - the polls actually got nearly everything else right. They even predicted HRC to win the popular vote by about 2 points, which she did. Don't confuse certain media people being over-confident on the basis of polls with any flaw in the polls themselves.
- the polling companies are multi-million dollar companies who got a lot of flak after 2016. Don't you think they would have reviewed their own performances and addressed any flaws in their processes since then?
- At this stage in 2016, polls had HRC up by 4-5 points. Now they have Biden up by 8-10. If the polls are as "wrong" as they were in 2016, this would not only produce a Biden win but also include some GOP Senate losses.
- Ignore any "Left/Dem/Poll" bias. Even Fox and Rasmussen, usually both the most Trump-favourable pollsters, have Biden up by 8-12 points.
- Margin of error? No. The MOE in most of these polls is 2-3% In 2106, it only needed a few States to perform at the fringe of this MOE to change the expected result. Even if we apply that same variation now, Biden is still up by 5 points.
I'm starting to see a lot of pundits drag out the "hurr, durr, muh polls is wrong, Hillary 2016" line now. I think they are inconveniently overlooking a couple of points:
- aside from the winner of the electoral college - mainly because of the results in 3 or 4 States - the polls actually got nearly everything else right. They even predicted HRC to win the popular vote by about 2 points, which she did. Don't confuse certain media people being over-confident on the basis of polls with any flaw in the polls themselves.
- the polling companies are multi-million dollar companies who got a lot of flak after 2016. Don't you think they would have reviewed their own performances and addressed any flaws in their processes since then?
- At this stage in 2016, polls had HRC up by 4-5 points. Now they have Biden up by 8-10. If the polls are as "wrong" as they were in 2016, this would not only produce a Biden win but also include some GOP Senate losses.
- Ignore any "Left/Dem/Poll" bias. Even Fox and Rasmussen, usually both the most Trump-favourable pollsters, have Biden up by 8-12 points.
- Margin of error? No. The MOE in most of these polls is 2-3% In 2106, it only needed a few States to perform at the fringe of this MOE to change the expected result. Even if we apply that same variation now, Biden is still up by 5 points.