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and the poll has an overall margin of error of plus-minus 3.1 percentage points.
Did you have a point? That's a standard sample size for polls.
1000 people with 89% contacted via cell phone isn't going to be representative of the US voting population. How many people do you know under 45 that answer random numbers?
I mean, it's better than them using land lines like they used to. And, if they did it properly, then their calls should have caller ID saying it's the polling service. Also, they should leave a message to get called back.
I don't know if they did any of that, but it would be the right way to do it.
You can thank boomers for effectively destroying phone calls as a form of telecommunication
Man, what a weird thing to blame on a specific Boogeyman generation.
Pretty sure there were/are other people besides boomers involved in spam calls, creating text message systems, and other things that have led to a decline in voice calls.
Might as well blame them for literally everything that happened after the 1960s when they became adults.
We're used to that as a "low number" because it's easy to get.
But you know what?
That's a fucking giant sample size, it's more than enough for American voters, and while you can poll more, it quickly starts to dilute the worth.
Like, they're calling random people, it ain't like they're walking down the street asking everyone and taking the first 1,000 to respond, which explained why it wasn't 1,000 respondents...
But this?
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24564257-240126-nbc-april-2024-poll-4-21-2024-release
Bruh, it's a legitimate poll, you don't have to "just ask questions" when it takes to clicks from the webpage you were already on....
But the other guy is right. There's a problem with polling now because many people don't answer the phone. It doesn't matter how many people you have in the sample if it's biased.
In this case it's clearly biased against people who don't answer random numbers. The "not answering" cohort may be correlated with other population groups like people with higher education and higher earnings. The survey may be systematically missing this chunk of the population, making the results biased too.
Higher educated democrats not surveyed -> the survey misses their opinions -> the survey is wrong when the results come in at election time.
Mate, it used to be cold calling landlines...
Shit is getting more accurate, not less.
Like, do you think more and better communication makes it harder to get reliable polling? You think doctors, lawyers, and rocket scientists were answering every phone call during dinner when it was landlines?
And the switch to cell phones was like, a decade ago?
Why is it now a problem?
Like, what is your version of what's happening that polls aren't reliable now?
Are you saying polls have been broke? Because polls were right in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. And not a lot has changed...
So do you think this year "the media" is somehow doing a psyop campaign and rhats why people aren't hyped about Biden? Because, newsflash, we weren't last election either.
So I'm really struggling to understand why out of the goddamn blue everyone and their brother who has never even walked down a hallway in college where statistical analysis was studied in the last decade suddenly became experts.
This is the exact same bullshit the Republicans started as. Now they're running trump.
You’re arguing that just because it may have been worse a long time ago (which you haven’t proven, btw), that today’s problems shouldn’t matter.
This is, obviously, absurd.
While there may have been improvements over past methods, that’s no excuse not to solve the issues we face with current methodologies. Don’t be silly.
Didn't they explain?
I admit I’m a bit surprised that we’re having a debate over whether or not selection bias is a thing (it most certainly is).
And it always has been....
Yet every election going back decades was within the margin of error of polls.
Statistics are not new. They've been around for a very very long time.
I admit, I only took one graduate level statistical analysis course, so maybe you've got more experience.
But it really sounds like a bunch of people who don't know anything about science complaining about science because they don't like the results....
Do you know who else does that?
But that's always been the case...
And polls are normally right
People think they're bad now, because Hillary and the media said if she was projected by less then the margin of error, then she won those states and we can count on them.
Which is stupid, and was only done because they thought she was more popular and resulted in just enough people staying home that trump won....
How does that mean now when the polls are even worse, that we should ignore the polls and carry on with false confidence?
It doesn't make any any logical sense.
No, this particular user thinks polls are bod because younger voters, who are more likely to vote for Democrats, are not going to pick up calls from random numbers. They were very clear. Why are you inventing arguments that were never mentioned in the discussion?
When was that not true?
Edit:
Agreeing to that was literally the first thing I said mate...
I'm not "inventing" arguments, you're just ignoring explanations.
That's probably why this doesn't make sense to you
I didn't ask you for any explanations. Don't take too much responsibility on yourself and play the lecturer. You failed to understand what they were trying to say, I tried to help. That's it. I'm not here for your explanations, you have neither expertise nor credibility to teach others.
No, I understood and typed a long reply going into depth how polls are the same they've always been, and they've been in margin of error of results for modern political history.
You missed the literal first sentence, apparently didn't understand the test, and now are taking it personally.
You missed something, it's not a big deal. But if you get upset at people correcting you, you'll never learn anything.
Have a nice life, I won't be spending anymore time on you.
Thank you.
They are talking about couple percent lead one way or another. When there is 3.1% standard deviation. In short, it is in the noise.
3.1% is not the standard deviation
It is 1/sqrt(1000), which I think is std or close to it
You know just enough statistics to be confidently incorrect
Why don’t you educate me? This is for sure not 95% confidence interval nor 3 sigma. This might be 80% but this is close enough to one sigma.
The reason why I said it is std, is because suppose that you have a single person instead of 1000. If we expect the actual numbers to be about 50% for Biden or Trump, then with one person you get 100% or 0%, which is +/-50% error over 50% median. Which gives std of 1. After that, std decreases as 1/sqrt(1000).
I understand that I might miss there small factors, but I could not be that far from correct answer. Where do I went wrong?