I was being ironic. I find it amusing that SDMB holds posters to higher standards than the President of the United States.
Talk about grading your President on a curve, geez.
Yes, Alanis.
Unfortunately, these polls are relying on sample sizes which are skewed tremendously leftward with far more Democrats than Republicans and as such, they are unlikely to be good predictors of actual Election Day turnout. Do the pollsters themselves actually believe in their own sample sizes though? At least one appears not to.
nterviewed last month by conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt, Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac polling operation was particularly squeamish about sampling under tough questioning from Hewitt about a poll which Quinnipiac had released showing Democrats with a 9 percentage point advantage in the state of Florida.
In the conversation, Brown defended Quinnipiac’s sampling techniques but admitted that he did not believe that Democrats would outnumber Republicans to that degree in Florida come November. Pressed by Hewitt, the pollster said he believed that was a “probably unlikely” scenario. Instead, Brown kept saying that he thought his poll was an accurate snapshot of reality at the time.
Oh, and guess what? That Quinnipiac poll WAS skewed. By 7 points!
http://www.cnn.com/election/2012/results/state/FL/president
The final Dem advantage was only 2 points.
Didn’t you learn your lesson about that *last *time? :dubious:
Who cares? The polls are there to predict percentages, not turnout. The percentages were accurate- the deniers’ whining about turnout was just bullshit. They stood by their polling, and in general the polling was dead-on. It doesn’t matter what the pollsters said about turnout- polls predict election results, not turnout.
The things is, I’m pretty sure you were told then why this reasoning was wrong. As it turns out, the demographic share of minorities (including African-Americans) voting in Presidential elections has pretty much increased linearly for decades. Even if you thought 2008 represented a bump for Obama and thought for some reason he wouldn’t get that bump again, it would still have been right on trend to see much higher minority turnout than 8 years prior.
Moreover, some of the pollsters were doing statistical work to sample those demographic adjustments that other pollsters relied on. And, as it turns out, they did a pretty good job.
They weren’t just guessing about the proportions and happened to get it right. They had good reasons. Reasons which were patiently explained last year. A more thorough engagement with those reasons might have been fruitful.
Reminder: on Election Day, the polls were right and you were wrong. They were not skewed. And yes, despite yet another round of excuses, the “reasoning” used to prop up the skewed theory was always asinine. What happened was that Republicans needed to believe they were going to win, so they came up with a theory that let them go on believing that, facts be damned. Along the way they persuaded that minority voters lost enthusiasm for Obama because, dunno. Pollsters didn’t want to make guarantees? Tough shit- their job is to model what they think is likely, not to make guarantees so you can try to screw them later.
Oh God, so, so weak. One poll? The polls, together, as they always are, gave the right answer. It doesn’t matter if one poll didn’t- just go with Nate Silver or Sam Wang, and you’re almost certain to be right. The unskewed denier crap was bullshit, and you bought that load of bullshit. Quit making excuses for it- they were just dead wrong, without good reason, and so were you.
“Even though I was wrong, I was actually right!”
Yeah, I can’t figure out why no one takes you seriously, either.
I haven’t denied being wrong. Just trying to explain that I didn’t pull the idea out of my ass. I had my own views about what the makeup of the electorate was likely to be, and I thought that Gallup and Rasmussen were right, whereas the media polls were wrong.
And let’s not forget, YOU all thought the polls were skewed too(Gallup and Rasmussen). You were right. But let’s not pretend that thinking polls are wrong is somehow living in Idiotland.
“You guys, I was toootally using reasoning when I copied that guy who said all the polls were wrong and a long trend in minority voting was going to reverse itself when a guy who is a member of a minority group was running for president against a candidate from a Republican party that was very hostile to minorities!”
Actually, I’m finding it hard to take you seriously, since your comprehension skills are so poor. The internet seems to have created a lot of people who pretend to be smart because they’ve gotten good at what amounts to taking an open-book test. Saves people the trouble of actually thinking.
All of your ideas come out of your ass. Because that’s where your head lives.
Now I’m really starting to wonder if you’re even as smart as I thought you were. You seem to lack comprehension of what the word “reasoning” means.
If you think the way the world works is that people who are wrong must not have thought hard about an issue, and the people who were right did, then you’re not thinking.
No, we looked at analyses (like Silver’s) that took ALL polls (except for a few total BS outliers from shoddy firms) into account. We were completely right and you were totally wrong. Why do you insist on making excuses for yourself? Are you preparing to do it again? Those turds you latched onto were crap, through and through… why not just accept it?
Could you find it in you to pretend in this way? Please?
I’m very familiar with reasoning. That’s how I know the skewed polls theory wasn’t reasoning. It was wishful thinking. The difference is that reasoning is altered as new facts are incorporated, but with wishful thinking the outcome never changes. Reasoning is a process and every step is checked. Wishful thinking is just blind hope - like the hope that the “everybody’s disappointed in Obama” narrative was true, or that that narrative would depress turnout and put Romney in office. There were a lot of different reasons to reject the skewed polls theory, and you insisted they were all wrong (and played the “Gosh, what will happen to Nate Silver if he’s wrong?” game). They were not. Silver was on the money, and Sam Wong, who was even more confident in an Obama win with a simpler model, was even more accurate. The skewed polls theory went up in smoke because people who believed in it never had facts or logic on their side. They proceeded from a dumb assumption through a series of errors and reached a conclusion that was nowhere near reality.
I’m not denying anything. I’m having trouble believing that this concept of thinking and being wrong is so alien to you.
It’s the pretending that your thinking was well-reasoned at the time. It wasn’t. I’m sure I’ve made the same mistake, but hopefully, after the fact, I realized my thinking was idiotic. You should do the same- your thinking, at the time, was stupid.
That’s not true. The conventional wisdom was that Obama would win less of the vote than he did in 2008 because he was no longer “special” and was relying on a mostly negative campaign. However, the polling models assumed that the electorate would look pretty much like it did in 2008. This, as I pointed out, was a pretty big deal, and I challenged other posters to predict with confidence that indeed the electorate would look pretty much the same, which like the pollsters, was an issue most chose to not deal with. I also complained that despite the historic levels of Democratic turnout predicted by the polls, the media wasn’t commenting on such a historic outcome. You would think that would be a big story. it was in 2008. But the media had no confidence in that being the same for 2012.
On this issue at least, you are clearly wrong. I did think about it, and I thought about it hard. I did tons of research. And I was still wrong. It happens. But to insist that I just thoughtlessly made an argument with nothing to back it up is ridiculous. And 100% wrong.