Your Democratic Primary Candidate Power Rankings: Post 'em here.

[Heffalump_and_Roo]

@RTFirefly

So I’m thinking arithmetic errors crept in somewhere.

I took out the Zogby and Harris polls. Then I went back to your numbers about Warren and Biden to back into your numbers. I used the Democratic voters numbers for the IBD and Ipsos polls when I was supposed to use the total voters numbers, it seems.

The numbers match up pretty closely to your numbers except Yang’s. But meh, once the Emerson 8 ages out, the point is pretty moot, so I can’t care enough to chase it down.

@RTFirefly

The point is, I have a pretty rigorous and transparent process here, one that I went out of my way to ‘me-proof,’ so to speak. So yeah, I resent innuendos like

When a question about the numbers being displayed out of order gets a response of post #110:

@RTFirefly

Personal prejudice.

I think it’s fair to question what else in the process is affected by personal prejudice. Just because anyone can replicate your numbers doesn’t mean that anyone will or should. Duplicating effort is a waste of tme. I did it because I thought it might be interesting, which it was.

Among other things, it was interesting to me how the poll questions or the format of the poll or the methodology of the poll has the possibility of changing the direction of the results. In some of the polls, there are a LOT of questions about everything. The featured question of the candidates is buried in the middle, and sometimes not all of the candidates are listed. That gives the people with name recognition even more likelihood of showing up in a poll than someone without it. If there’s that much time to ask so many questions, it seems like there should be enough time to ask about all the candidates that RCP features. I didn’t study it closely, but I think I ran across some polls that didn’t.

@RTFirefly

OTOH, I’m more amused than anything else by your suggestion that I had a thumb on the scales for Cory Booker, a politician that I quite honestly have a hard time working up an iota of interest in.

It’s not about Cory Booker. It’s about the assumption that anyone cares if he shows up in the numbers enough to make special rules about it. Would special rules be made up equally for other candidates that you have personal prejudice against if there wasn’t one already?

@RTFirefly

This is an important point, so thanks for making it. Polls have sampling error, and while taking the average of 6-8 polls causes a certain amount of that to cancel out, it doesn’t make it entirely go away.

If we look at the numbers to date, there’s plenty of evidence of that, too. Biden dropped from 29.8 to 26.5 one week, then was back up to 28.5 the week after. Warren went from 16.8 to 19.0 - woohoo, breakthrough!, from a Warren fan’s perspective, right? - but down to 17.6 the week after. Between 8/14 and 8/21, Sanders went from 17.1 to 15.2; his fans are finally moving to Warren, right? Oops, next week he was back to 16.9, and until this week, he’d never been below 16.0 since. Maybe his drop to 15.3 this week is real, maybe it’s just statistical noise; we don’t know until we see more polls.

So yeah, reading anything in to Yang’s increase from 2.9 to 3.1 is a bad idea.

By that logic, none of the polls’ movements are worth examining from week to week. All of the polls’ changes are within the margin of error in any given week and if even the aggregate creates some sampling error and directionality can change week to week until the race is over, then there’s not much to say about any changes week to week.

I was amused that when Warren overtook Biden for a week in a couple polls, you made a point about it, but when Yang overtook Harris in the Emerson poll, you made it a special point to note that it was within the margin of error.

@RTFirefly

[Statistical nitpick]
One point difference, five point MOE. Coulda said ‘essentially tied with Yang’, same message but accurate.
[/statistical nitpick]

But since all of this is mostly just speculation and entertainment, it’s all good.