Polling industry at Crossroads, after 2nd inaccurate snapshot of presidential re

6 comments

• nicespice

  •

  4 years ago

  Yeah, I didn’t even trust the polling at all this year. If it was simply a prediction of a Biden win, that would have been one thing, but a landslide was suspicious from the start.
  
  Wondering whether in the future, something else will become the main form of prediction. Google trends? Stock market charts?
• RandomMember

  •

  4 years ago

  @Meathead-
  
  It may be hard to comprehend for a semi-literate clod like yourself, but your candidate lost the election. Sites like 538 and The Economist provide simulations and don't do any polling; instead, they combine the results of other polls into predictions about the election outcome. Both got the qualitative features correct about which states were likely to flip: WI, MI, AZ, PA. Florida did not flip, but it was still within the margin of error.
  
  If you weren't such a semi-literate clod you might understand the value of the polling and simulations, even if support for Trump was stronger than expected in the last two cycles.
  
  What a relief it will be to never hear from Trump again.
• Hank Moody

  •

  4 years ago

  @scrub “nothing more than another form of voter suppression from the LEFT”
  
  Voter suppression? Seriously? Trump got 6 million more votes than he got in 2016. Trump got the second most votes in history ever. The most votes cast in an election ever. Do you know a single person who was ambivalent about the election? If this was voter suppression, it was a spectacularly shitty job of it. Pollsters’ reputations and future earnings are based on their success and it’s in their own financial best interests to get it right. Occam’s razor: the pollsters just fucked up There was no conspiracy.
• Hank Moody

  •

  4 years ago

  “What a relief it will be to never hear from Trump again.”
  
  Fat chance. He’s gotta keep his image up as that’s his source of income. Big difference now is his words have no power.
• Mate27

  •

  4 years ago

  https://tuscl.net/discussion.php?id=7429…
  
  As you can see The polls are followed by Randumbmember like some sort of religion. The outcome of this election seasoned was a victory against the establishment for the reasons you saw in the down vote, maintaining the Senate and gaining in the House. Ironic that the polls were more accurate in areas other than the Presidency. If the left continues down the path of passive radicalism, you’ll see a house and senate majority in two years, and with any hint at court packing the Trumpublicans will return to input term
  Limits.
  
  I know the TUSCL poll has always downvoted Randumbmember heavily by 2 to 1, because he smokes pole.
• JamesSD

  •

  4 years ago

  What's fascinating is the polls were awful in 2016, great in 2018 and mediocre in 2020. Is it just a Trump effect? Or are demographics and technology shifting?