I literally do not know anyone who says that Biden is doing a good job... and most of my friends are Democrats.
Biden is getting polling results that consistently show things like... Hispanic approval dropping to something insane like 20%, and black approval rating dropping to 28%, etc... etc... etc... and yet, 538 continues to show Biden above 41% approval rating. Like this one... approval among young people... 18 to 34, dropped to 27%: https://www.newsweek.com/jo...y-falls-poll-1708434 That's an absolutely HORRIBLE approval rating.
Is 538 just completely full of **** ? I don't understand their "weights..." maybe I'm just jaded, but they seem to be heavily relying on the polling that shows Biden over 43%... which is completely absurd.
Google results from various political bias evaluating websites rate it at 'center left', that it reports factual information but uses 'loaded' words in an attempt to influence the reader.
So, if those websites rate it 'center left', my view would be that it is much farther left than that, due to the pervasive left bias of most internet 'rating' websites.
From my own experience, watching Senate committee hearings and then checking the various 'news' analysis of said hearing, I would rate them LEft wing, vs Mother Jones as LEFT wing.
Now, I'd assume Likely Voters for the midterm are going to skew Republican. It seems 538 assumes the same thing, so if you look at LV, they appear to adjust the weight up 2% for the 538 number. I think this is flawed because people will say they're likely to vote, but won't actually show up on election day. Meaning, the lower number is a more accurate number than 538 is giving it. But fine, they have a methodology. Where I take bigger issue is they also seem to adjust Registered Voters up 1%. I don't think there is any logical reason to do that. They also adjust All Adults down 1%, but I don't think that really makes up for the other adjustment.
So I would think the real number is around 2% lower than Nate's number.
Now, I'd assume Likely Voters for the midterm are going to skew Republican. It seems 538 assumes the same thing, so if you look at LV, they appear to adjust the weight up 2% for the 538 number. I think this is flawed because people will say they're likely to vote, but won't actually show up on election day. Meaning, the lower number is a more accurate number than 538 is giving it. But fine, they have a methodology. Where I take bigger issue is they also seem to adjust Registered Voters up 1%. I don't think there is any logical reason to do that. They also adjust All Adults down 1%, but I don't think that really makes up for the other adjustment.
So I would think the real number is around 2% lower than Nate's number.
It seems as though they are constantly adjusting the weights to keep it just above Trump's ratings... which seems to be a really important factor for a lot of people. Biden is below Trump's approval ratings right now, but Trump was under investigation by the FBI for committing treason, which we know now was a completely made-up story. Not sure how history will look at this... but it's frustrating that people are pulling out all the stops for Biden, but were totally against Trump. I know this isn't just "my perspective." Having worked in Government, I know that the left generally rules most agencies and departments, and slow-rolled everything Trump tried to push, while they expedited like flies on **** anything that Biden pushed out.
I know also from working in the market research industry (which dabbled in polling), that polls could be easily manipulated to get a desired results based on wording. I can't imagine that with everything going on... that Biden's polling is this high. Literally, we had none of these problems under Trump, but he was still viewed as an ******* , and his polling was exceptionally low. We have Biden, who can't even complete most sentences and reads the cut lines on the teleprompter, who's failed at literally everything his administration has attempted to fix... most of which was as a result of previous failures he committed... and his polling seems to match Trump's.
Remember the Hillary vs Trump polls? They all had her leading by 12% or so. But then if you looked at the details of who was polled it stated they polled 12% more Democrat voters. They told you the poll was skewed but nobody looked at the details. What you saw on the news was "Hillary leads by 12%". After the election they were all surprised how the polls had failed when the answer was there all along.
I literally do not know anyone who says that Biden is doing a good job...
Is 538 just completely full of **** ?.
Three answers:
1.) Yes. 538 is indeed full of **** .
2.) You can almost always find a poll somewhere to comport with whatever you want to believe.
3.) If you can't find a poll you want you can always get someone to conduct a poll to provide you with whatever narrative you want to push, ("push poll" pun intended).
Ok, what the hell. I'll toss in a fourth answer closely related to #1 just for good measure:
4.) Nate Silver is an idiot who should have stuck to doing baseball statistics.
Silver's claims to practice "analytical rigor" but, at a very basic level, he doesn't really know what a poll is. In his conception and demonstrated practice, polls of opinion and sentiment aren't a snapshot of the present as informed by the past, but rather a prescient view into the future. Not a measurement, but a prediction. This is why political polls now routinely include such ridiculous qualifiers as "likely voters" and "registered voters"
[This message has been edited by randye (edited 05-21-2022).]
Election outcomes can be difficult to predict. A recent example is the 2016 US presidential election, in which Hillary Clinton lost five states that had been predicted to go for her, and with them the White House. Most election polls ask people about their own voting intentions: whether they will vote and, if so, for which candidate. We show that, compared with own-intention questions, social-circle questions that ask participants about the voting intentions of their social contacts improved predictions of voting in the 2016 US and 2017 French presidential elections. Responses to social-circle questions predicted election outcomes on national, state and individual levels, helped to explain last-minute changes in people’s voting intentions and provided information about the dynamics of echo chambers among supporters of different candidates.
Silver's claims to practice "analytical rigor" but, at a very basic level, he doesn't really know what a poll is. In his conception and demonstrated practice, polls of opinion and sentiment aren't a snapshot of the present as informed by the past, but rather a prescient view into the future. Not a measurement, but a prediction. This is why political polls now routinely include such ridiculous qualifiers as "likely voters" and "registered voters"
I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I realize that people sometimes are unable to control their ideology and emotions. I just got a grade back from one of my classes. I don't mean to sound like a piece of crap, but I ended up with an A- in one of my classes. I've always gotten a 4.0 in all of my degree seeking programs except my earliest college classes I took when I was 18 and had dropped out. This is for a law degree that I'm pursuing. The teacher took a ton of points off my final paper because I discussed Rowe v. Wade. I had written and submitted my paper at least 2 weeks before this whole leak happened. It was totally unintentional. I wasn't even being political about it... the paper was about privacy law. I only mentioned Rowe v. Wade because that court decision was the catalyst for what would become the Privacy Act of 1974... since the decision was based on the right of privacy. It's the only reason why I mentioned it. Teacher really took this badly... between the time I submitted my paper and she graded it, the whole leaked court decision happened. Ugh...
quote
Originally posted by rinselberg:
Don't forget the "Hidden Trump Voter" phenomenon.
"Asking about social circles improves election predictions" Galesic, et al; nature human behavior; February 26, 2018.
Well, if I'm being really introspective... most of my friends are Democrats. Of my Democrat friends, none of them like Biden, but they hate Trump more. I don't know where these rabid / fervent supporters on Twitter come from, because I've never met a single one. I have friends that are borderline communist who even tell me every chance they get how Government is good, and the U.S. is responsible for the failure of Communist countries because of our embargoes, etc. They don't like Biden either. So I wouldn't be shocked if Biden gets primaried... I've never seen anything like that in my lifetime, but I guess we'll see.
None of my friends, except maybe one, would vote for Trump as their "first choice." They all prefer Ron DeSantis (which includes all the ones who aren't from Florida either). Me personally, I am even more committed to Trump. I know that may warrant an eye-roll... but Trump likely has everything already planned out. He remembers everything (like an elephant) that wronged him... every agency that stone-walled him, every department that tried to thwart his actions... and he's already got a plan to go in and totally reshape everything. I really like Ron DeSantis... but he would be coming in new, and likely would want to separate himself somewhat from Trump... which means he's going to have first term blues all over again.
Trump on the other hand, will have had 4 years to contemplate his "revenge," if you will. Not trying to be a jerk, but with the abject failure we've seen over the past 4 years, I don't think most Democrats are going to immediately jump on the "Trump is the end of the world" bandwagon again when literally things were quite good under his administration. You compare the last 1-1/2 years today, to Trump's... it's night and day difference ... success and failure.
So maybe you're right... but I really have no idea what's going on right now. The world is crazy.
I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I realize that people sometimes are unable to control their ideology and emotions.
I don't know where Silvers' personal politics are but, just like the two forum Leftists that have posted in this thread, Silver does clearly hold to the dumb idea that there is "predictive science" to opinion polls.
Leftists share that belief because like Herbert Marcuse, a Leftist philosopher of the Frankfurt School, who posited that if you understand economics, you can actually write down what will happen in the future with as much confidence as you write down the history of the past, they desperately cling to fortune telling pseudoscience as a replacement for their innate inability to objectively evaluate data simply for what it is and not for what they wish for it to be.
Silver's, Leftist's and the "media chatterati's", faith in polls as "predictive science", ( “you can actually write down what will happen in the future, with as much confidence as you write down the history of the past. Because it’s science!”), has been thoroughly debunked time and time again, (i.e. Silver's complete screw up of predicting the 2010 elections in the U.K.; a somewhat accurate prediction of the 2012 results in the U.S.; and then a wildly wrong prediction of the 2016 elections that he bizarrely continues to attempt to explain away by claiming that he was "slightly less overconfident about a Donald Trump loss than everybody else".
[This message has been edited by randye (edited 05-22-2022).]
Originally posted by randye: I don't know where Silvers' personal politics are but, just like the two forum Leftists that have posted in this thread, Silver does clearly hold to the dumb idea that there is "predictive science" to opinion polls.
Leftists share that belief because like Herbert Marcuse, a Leftist philosopher of the Frankfurt School, who posited that if you understand economics, you can actually write down what will happen in the future with as much confidence as you write down the history of the past, they desperately cling to fortune telling pseudoscience as a replacement for their innate inability to objectively evaluate data simply for what it is and not for what they wish for it to be.
Silver's, Leftist's and the "media chatterati's", faith in polls as "predictive science", ( “you can actually write down what will happen in the future, with as much confidence as you write down the history of the past. Because it’s science!”), has been thoroughly debunked time and time again, (i.e. Silver's complete screw up of predicting the 2010 elections in the U.K.; a somewhat accurate prediction of the 2012 results in the U.S.; and then a wildly wrong prediction of the 2016 elections that he bizarrely continues to attempt to explain away by claiming that he was "slightly less overconfident about a Donald Trump loss than everybody else".
It’s patently ridiculous to conflate the idea that opinion polls may give an indication of what to expect in an election with the idea that someone can predict the future based on the past. It’s a fun science-fiction concept (and was Asimov’s basis for the wonderful Foundation series), but it’s nothing more than that. I’ve never spoken with any person ever who has believed this.
You’ve done very well in taking down your own straw man, though. Good job!
Originally posted by randye: I don't know where Silvers' personal politics are but, just like the two forum Leftists that have posted in this thread, Silver does clearly hold to the dumb idea that there is "predictive science" to opinion polls. Leftists share that belief because like Herbert Marcuse . . .
Polls are polls. Nothing more, nothing less. There's a lot to consider in conjunction with polls, in terms of how they are designed and administered, and in terms of how the pollsters and polling groups evolve their methodologies.
"Herbert Marcuse" . . . yada, yada, yada.
It's so emblematic of forum member randye. His ceaseless attempts to "put words" in other forum members' mouths (or keyboards) and "put thoughts" in other forum members' minds. What a dump truck load of bafflegab, was that previous message from forum member randye, in the phony-baloney way that he has of constantly agitating about "forum Leftists" [sic].
Can anyone say "Straw Man" argument?
He is trying to fob off Herbert Marcuse as a straw man for "theBDub" and "rinselberg".
FAIL!
[This message has been edited by rinselberg (edited 05-23-2022).]
It’s patently ridiculous to conflate the idea that opinion polls may give an indication of what to expect in an election....
..
Now, I'd assume Likely Voters for the midterm are going to skew Republican. It seems 538 assumes the same thing,
I think this is flawed because people will say they're likely to vote, but won't actually show up on election day. Meaning, the lower number is a more accurate number than 538 is giving it.
But fine, they have a methodology.
quote
Originally posted by rinselberg:
Polls are polls. Nothing more, nothing less.....
..
"Asking about social circles improves election predictions"
It's hilarious watching you two struggle trying to backpedal away from your own previous posts, but.....
Leftists gotta Leftist....and love them some of their "Marcusian pseudoscience"
[This message has been edited by randye (edited 05-23-2022).]
Polls are polls. Nothing more, nothing less. There's a lot to consider in conjunction with polls, in terms of how they are designed and administered, and in terms of how the pollsters and polling groups evolve their methodologies.
<snip>
You realize those are two different ideas in one paragraph? "Polls are polls. Nothing more, nothing less." Ok, then you say "There's a lot to consider in conjunction with polls,..." If they are nothing more then why is there a lot to consider?
The problem is when a "poll" is used as confirmation bias. MSM won't publish a poll that goes against it's narrative and they have the loudest soap box at the moment. Polls have turned into way, way more than a simple set of unbiased questions. They are used as a weapon to sway public opinion by couching bias as a poll.
You realize those are two different ideas in one paragraph? "Polls are polls. Nothing more, nothing less." Ok, then you say "There's a lot to consider in conjunction with polls,..." If they are nothing more then why is there a lot to consider?
The problem is when a "poll" is used as confirmation bias. MSM won't publish a poll that goes against it's narrative and they have the loudest soap box at the moment. Polls have turned into way, way more than a simple set of unbiased questions. They are used as a weapon to sway public opinion by couching bias as a poll.
The Hudini does have a point here. My words of "Polls are polls. Nothing more, nothing less," is best stricken from the record. The rest of my (previous) message, I think, can stand.
Herbert Marcuse and I go "way back." I used to call him "Herb." When we were together at the Frankfurt school.
Yeah. "Right."
I'm not really "that" into polls. I read about them or look at them on TV from time to time. I don't need any polls to see through forum member randye's barely disguised personal attacks on other forum members. Instead of addressing the topic in a straightforward manner, he went out of his way to call "theBDub" and "rinselberg" dumb. He contorted himself using a Straw Man style of argument to do that.
It's a good thing that randye didn't say that "rinselberg wouldn't know the Frankfurt school from a frankfurter." If he had said that, I might have reported it to Cliff Pennock. And Cliff Pennock might have put him on probation again, for 24 hours. That's what happened not too long ago, in some other thread that was active.
"Believe it or not."
[This message has been edited by rinselberg (edited 05-23-2022).]
Originally posted by randye: It's hilarious watching you two struggle trying to backpedal away from your own previous posts, but.....
Leftists gotta Leftist....and love them some of their "Marcusian pseudoscience"
Neither rinselberg nor myself mentioned any pseudoscience about fortune telling. We did not mention Herbert Marcuse, who you have chosen to argue your straw man against. We did not mention anything about “writing down the future with as much confidence as you write down the history of the past.” That was you.
I just want to point out that, yet again, the topic at hand was actually being discussed civilly before another member came in.
Yet again, another member loosely skirts past forum rules of calling someone out by not referring to them by name, even though everyone knows who they’re referring to.
Yet again, another member calls out members as being “leftists” then disparages “leftists” with ideas that aren’t even tied to “leftists.”
Yet again, another member takes a thread a step closer to the trash can by being apparently unable to engage in civil discourse.
Apparently all it takes for some members to think another is being civil is simply not calling people by their handle or name, so if anyone assumes who I’m talking about in this comment, that’s all on them.
Originally posted by randye: It's hilarious watching you two struggle trying to backpedal away from your own previous posts, but.....
Backpedaling? Does anyone see any backpedaling in this thread? Does anyone see "theBDub" or "rinselberg" trying to take back any of what they already said?
I started one of my remarks with "Polls are polls. Nothing more, nothing less." And then, in response to Hudini, I said that was a sentence that was "best stricken from the record." I don't think that striking those words represents a material change to the substance of what I've said within this thread, when you put all of my remarks together as one.
If that barely discernible quantum of backpedaling is "hilarious", I struggle to imagine how forum member randye would describe his reaction to any material (significant) backpedaling—a phenomenon that is nowhere to be seen in this thread, up to this point.
Would he say it's totally hilarious? Solar system-scale hilarious? Would he be able to say anything at all, in such a state of hyper hilarity?
Yet again, another member loosely skirts past forum rules of calling someone out by not referring to them by name, even though everyone knows who they’re referring to.
Yet again, another member takes a thread a step closer to the trash can by being apparently unable to engage in civil discourse.
quote
Originally posted by theBDub:
Trolls gotta troll....and liars gotta lie.
[This message has been edited by randye (edited 05-25-2022).]
There is a scene in “Hail, Caesar!” the Coen brothers’ black, Golden Age Hollywood satire, in which a confused George Clooney, playing a dumbed-down 1950s version of himself, awakes after being kidnapped by a group of ineptly idealistic communist screenwriters and is exposed, for the first time, to a materialist view of history.
First explained in a relatively cogent if jargony manner by a fictionalized Herbert Marcuse, a real-life philosopher of the Frankfurt School, this thesis is then repeated with rather more hapless confidence by one of the kidnappers: “See, if you understand economics, you can actually write down what will happen in the future with as much confidence as you write down the history of the past. Because it’s science! It’s not make-believe.”
"A fictionalized Herbert Marcuse..." Imagine that.
I am presenting the Internet page link to this critique of Nate Silver, who's been referenced (a lot) in this thread. I would be surprised if it were not this same article that was in randye's mind when he faced the "Herbert Marcuse card" (so to speak) in the course of this discussion.
[This message has been edited by rinselberg (edited 05-25-2022).]
It's a rough article to read, even if short... it spends more time blasting Nate than it does actually talking about context. But I have my opinions... here's what I think the problem is...
I think OVERALL... it's really difficult for people to separate their personal feelings / ideologies from their work. Many people go into the line of work that they do BECAUSE of their ideologies... so expecting people to separate their emotions from their work becomes basically impossible.
At one point, prior to the Trump presidency (but leaning into it), I began digging into all of these polls and wanted to identify what questions were being asked. I found that in MOST cases, the questions that resulted in unfavorable polling to Trump had very leading questions. I honestly can't remember... but if I had to make one up on the fly, it would look something like this:
"In your opinion, from 1 to Most True, to 5 Mostly False, do you believe Donald J. Trump as a billionaire will have your best interests in mind?"
They'll ask like 4-5 questions just like this, which have clear bias, before they ask the question,
"If the presidential election was held today, would you be more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton, or Donald J. Trump, or other?"
By the time the respondents get to that last question, they're already at least to some extent, swayed against Trump... e.g., the entire poll seems to be about Trump, rather than a totally non-partisan series of questions asking things like, "Which candidate do you think best represents your values, press 1 for Hillary Clinton, press 2 for Donald J Trump, press 3 for other."
When you actually dig in and look at the polls... a poll like the one I mentioned above (that was very Trump-centric), the goal... maybe if unintentional, is so super-focused on Trump that it creates a negative perspective. Same as if there was a poll done about Hillary in such a way. The people creating these polls are unable to separate their biases, and that's why these polls end up being inaccurate. Because while you may be able to derive "emotion" from someone during a poll taking, it doesn't really translate into a vote. After they're done with the poll, and they start to watch the same news sources that got them fired up in the first place, they're going to go right back to how they originally wanted to vote.
I don't think Nate's problem so much is the predictive analysis, but in fact that the polling he's getting is basically garbage to begin with.
This is the "finish line" of how successful polls were in the 2016 election...
In the "overestimates Trump" category turned out to be correct... so we could really shift the line somewhere.
I would really like to see an analysis of polling between those that were most successful, and least successful, and determine what the differences were in questioning, audience, and diversity of location for those that were polled.
As Randye said, a lot of these polls also over-polled Democrat voters. My Democrat friends would tell me that this is because there are simply more Democrats in the country. That may be slightly true, but it's only true in places like California and New York. It does not translate similarly to other states in the union. My personal opinion, for those polled, there should be an appropriate relation between the number of electoral votes a state has, to the number of random callers they poll (until they have the successful number for ratio) in each state. That would be a more accurate representation. It would still need to be ranked by "Likely Voters," "Actual Voters," etc...
I say this because a lot of polls will just get a random 3,000 respondents in the country, and the majority of them will end up being people in California or New York... which, because we have an electoral college... is NOT a good representation of polling.
Originally posted by 82-T/A [At Work]: It's a rough article to read, even if short... it spends more time blasting Nate than it does actually talking about context. But I have my opinions... here's what I think the problem is...
I think OVERALL... it's really difficult for people to separate their personal feelings / ideologies from their work. Many people go into the line of work that they do BECAUSE of their ideologies... so expecting people to separate their emotions from their work becomes basically impossible.
At one point, prior to the Trump presidency (but leaning into it), I began digging into all of these polls and wanted to identify what questions were being asked. I found that in MOST cases, the questions that resulted in unfavorable polling to Trump had very leading questions. I honestly can't remember... but if I had to make one up on the fly, it would look something like this:
"In your opinion, from 1 to Most True, to 5 Mostly False, do you believe Donald J. Trump as a billionaire will have your best interests in mind?"
They'll ask like 4-5 questions just like this, which have clear bias, before they ask the question,
"If the presidential election was held today, would you be more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton, or Donald J. Trump, or other?"
By the time the respondents get to that last question, they're already at least to some extent, swayed against Trump... e.g., the entire poll seems to be about Trump, rather than a totally non-partisan series of questions asking things like, "Which candidate do you think best represents your values, press 1 for Hillary Clinton, press 2 for Donald J Trump, press 3 for other."
When you actually dig in and look at the polls... a poll like the one I mentioned above (that was very Trump-centric), the goal... maybe if unintentional, is so super-focused on Trump that it creates a negative perspective. Same as if there was a poll done about Hillary in such a way. The people creating these polls are unable to separate their biases, and that's why these polls end up being inaccurate. Because while you may be able to derive "emotion" from someone during a poll taking, it doesn't really translate into a vote. After they're done with the poll, and they start to watch the same news sources that got them fired up in the first place, they're going to go right back to how they originally wanted to vote.
I don't think Nate's problem so much is the predictive analysis, but in fact that the polling he's getting is basically garbage to begin with.
This is the "finish line" of how successful polls were in the 2016 election...
In the "overestimates Trump" category turned out to be correct... so we could really shift the line somewhere.
I would really like to see an analysis of polling between those that were most successful, and least successful, and determine what the differences were in questioning, audience, and diversity of location for those that were polled.
As Randye said, a lot of these polls also over-polled Democrat voters. My Democrat friends would tell me that this is because there are simply more Democrats in the country. That may be slightly true, but it's only true in places like California and New York. It does not translate similarly to other states in the union. My personal opinion, for those polled, there should be an appropriate relation between the number of electoral votes a state has, to the number of random callers they poll (until they have the successful number for ratio) in each state. That would be a more accurate representation. It would still need to be ranked by "Likely Voters," "Actual Voters," etc...
I say this because a lot of polls will just get a random 3,000 respondents in the country, and the majority of them will end up being people in California or New York... which, because we have an electoral college... is NOT a good representation of polling.
Just my thoughts.
I agree with you with regards to how polling it performed. The questions can lead to a certain answer. If they’re put on by a news organization, it’s might be a younger liberal person putting the poll together. It could be unintentional bias, or it could be intentional if performed by a partisan group.
The polling method also matters. You ask people on Twitter, it’s not a representative sample. You call landlines, it’s not representative. That’s pretty obvious, but in truth it’s hard to get a nonpartisan but consistent approach.
I would argue with you though, that polling done for the sake of getting an idea of how the country supports someone can still be done with random sampling. The location just needs to be normalized against electoral votes to take that forward with accuracy to elections. As long as it’s state by state, that should be fine.
I agree with you with regards to how polling it performed. The questions can lead to a certain answer. If they’re put on by a news organization, it’s might be a younger liberal person putting the poll together. It could be unintentional bias, or it could be intentional if performed by a partisan group.
The polling method also matters. You ask people on Twitter, it’s not a representative sample. You call landlines, it’s not representative. That’s pretty obvious, but in truth it’s hard to get a nonpartisan but consistent approach.
I would argue with you though, that polling done for the sake of getting an idea of how the country supports someone can still be done with random sampling. The location just needs to be normalized against electoral votes to take that forward with accuracy to elections. As long as it’s state by state, that should be fine.
Yeah, that's what I was suggesting at the end, "...normalized against electoral votes to take that forward with accuracy to elections." I'm not aware of this being done right now, but I do think it should be.
As for bias... the problem with bias is that many people don't even realize they have a bias to begin with. It can go far more than a young liberal proposing questions for the next round of polling, and believing that Trump is simply a horrible person and they more or less want to ask a question to determine that... it gets into how questions are phrased and the order in which they're in. I'm sure there are people who feel that they can leverage polling as a tool to guide public opinion... but to a greater extent, it simply has to do with unconscious bias in how the questions are written. I still think that's occurring today... likely in defense of Biden.
I'm just having a hard time believing that Biden's polling is legitimately as high as it is today, and reflective of what people truly believe. Alternately... he's more or less tied with Trump within 1% of polling for the same time in his presidency. By Trump's first year and a half, the economy was screaming like a super-sonic jet. Money was flowing... things were fantastic. People were buying homes, and the proverbial "wage gap" was decreasing DESPITE the fact that billionaires and millionaires were moving in droves to the United States. Things were going so well, but at the time, the country TRULY believed that Trump had colluded with our enemies to usurp the presidency and most in the country had started to believe that Trump had stolen the election. We now know that none of that is true... but with all those factors, compared to Biden's situation... trying my hardest not to be political, but basically everything has been chaos and failure... and he's still tied with Trump... I just don't believe it.
It was done intentionally. I guess you missed the message.
Your intentional self description along with your impotent attempt to try to provoke me was not missed at all.
I have the advantage of having successfully raised two children of my own and I have six grandchildren, three of them adolescents, so jejune rhetoric like you have displayed in this thread and others is familiar to me.
I also see that, despite your anemic denials, you're STILL a dedicated true believer in your fortune telling pseudoscience of opinion polls:
quote
Originally posted by theBDub:
...polling done for the sake of getting an idea of how the country supports someone can still be done with random sampling.
The location just needs to be normalized against electoral votes to take that forward with accuracy to elections.
Nate Silver and his fellow racketeers sure as hell tapped into a willing and eager clientele of Leftist rubes who can't discern emotions and opinions from objective facts and data to happily buy their fortune telling snake oil.
Leftist gotta Leftist
[This message has been edited by randye (edited 05-26-2022).]
Your intentional self description along with your impotent attempt to try to provoke me was not missed at all.
I have the advantage of having successfully raised two children of my own and I have six grandchildren, three of them adolescents, so jejune rhetoric like you have displayed in this thread and others is familiar to me.
I also see that, despite your anemic denials, you're STILL a dedicated true believer in your fortune telling pseudoscience of opinion polls:
Nate Silver and his fellow racketeers sure as hell tapped into a willing and eager clientele of Leftist rubes who [i]can't discern emotions and opinions from objective facts and data to happily buy their [b]fortune telling snake oil.
Leftist gotta Leftist
Keep clutching your pearls over some weird fetish on Leftists believing in fortune-telling. Opinion polls are an indication of what people have opinions on. People vote based on similar opinions. It's not a 1:1 and isn't used as such, no matter how much you try and falsely claim that we believe in fortune-telling. It's an indication, not a fool-proof "future history." You're yelling at a wall.
quote
Originally posted by 82-T/A [At Work]:
Yeah, that's what I was suggesting at the end, "...normalized against electoral votes to take that forward with accuracy to elections." I'm not aware of this being done right now, but I do think it should be.
As for bias... the problem with bias is that many people don't even realize they have a bias to begin with. It can go far more than a young liberal proposing questions for the next round of polling, and believing that Trump is simply a horrible person and they more or less want to ask a question to determine that... it gets into how questions are phrased and the order in which they're in. I'm sure there are people who feel that they can leverage polling as a tool to guide public opinion... but to a greater extent, it simply has to do with unconscious bias in how the questions are written. I still think that's occurring today... likely in defense of Biden.
I'm just having a hard time believing that Biden's polling is legitimately as high as it is today, and reflective of what people truly believe. Alternately... he's more or less tied with Trump within 1% of polling for the same time in his presidency. By Trump's first year and a half, the economy was screaming like a super-sonic jet. Money was flowing... things were fantastic. People were buying homes, and the proverbial "wage gap" was decreasing DESPITE the fact that billionaires and millionaires were moving in droves to the United States. Things were going so well, but at the time, the country TRULY believed that Trump had colluded with our enemies to usurp the presidency and most in the country had started to believe that Trump had stolen the election. We now know that none of that is true... but with all those factors, compared to Biden's situation... trying my hardest not to be political, but basically everything has been chaos and failure... and he's still tied with Trump... I just don't believe it.
For normalization, doesn't it just have to be at the state level?
What I'm getting at is that approval rating is distinct from election polling. Election polling does (usually) get at least granular enough for state-level data, which is enough to normalize on electoral votes. So it is done today. 538 does it as well. It's just a different section than approval ratings, and I don't think he does it except for during election cycles (but I could be wrong, honestly I don't follow polling at that closely).
Completely agreed on unconscious bias. That's what I'm driving at as well - we're on the same page there.
I think somewhere around 30-35% approval is right. That's low. It doesn't get much worse than that. And many people will answer the question on a relative basis, not "do I fully support him," but "do I think he's doing better than I think the alternative choice would be doing right now?" And they can easily convince themselves of any answer with that question, regardless of how far removed from reality it might be.
