view the rest of the comments
politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
I wouldn't say "antiquated" so much as "broken."
The concept of polling is perfectly reasonable and sound. But today, it's just physically hard to do. You've got to reach a representational sample, but if you're under 50, you're probably not answering unknown numbers calling your cellphone.
This results in oversampling of populations you can actually reach, such as older Americans with landlines, and then trying to weight the results with other information sources, like demographics data.
The more weighting you have to do, the more opportunities there are for problems to creep in.
If we could solve the sampling problem, polling would be easier and more reliable.
I live in a swing state, in a purple county, which has recently flipped back to blue. Last week polls were saying it was likely to go red.
I get multiple texts and phone calls from pollsters and have never answered any of them. I doubt anyone in my age group ot demographic are doing differently.
I truly believe that, like the economy, polling on paper is so divorced from the reality on the ground that it is useless.
Same here. I never answer political calls, and my phone automatically flags the texts as spam and hides them.
If they did the polling with a quick tap-to-answer UI and there were reassurances that they won't sell your info so you get even more solicitations, that might work better for the present day. This whole business with calling people is so 1950s.
Oh, definitely. All I'm saying is that the concept of polling is sound, but the current situation "on the ground" makes polling damn near impossible, and that probably won't be a permanent state of affairs. Pollsters have run into new technology that broke their methodology before, and figured out ways around it.
But yeah, right now? Polls are pretty goddamn unreliable.
as a concept, sure, polls can show things. i think they are a bad idea tho. they just give azzholes time to shape their words so they can win. anyone in office who actually is trying to do their job properly is going to use their knowledge and desire to do good work. what if polls show that to be “losing?” how does it help society in anyway? i don’t see benefit, only harm (or nothing).
plus pollsters clog up phones and so on. just more marketers, people blabbing and asking questions for a paycheck. seriously, i see zip good about polls, esp political polls.
To get a poll representative of a population, you need an SRS -- simple random sample. The people you poll are chosen completely at random from an unbiased list.
That's incredibly difficult to do when the person chosen can decline. And as far as getting an unbiased list, good luck. Landlines are lol. Texting doesn't work either.
I think when everyone had landlines it was probably less biased. But with the state of technology today and the country becoming more diverse? It might be falling apart. They need a new methodology.
They were far fewer scam callers in the landline days, too, so it made sense to actually answer your phone.
Why doesn't texting work? I feel like I might respond to a text
The general impression I get is that most people don't. I actually got one myself the other day, and I actually answered because I didn't want to make sampling problems worse.
polling is a scoursge. it doesn’t benefit society. notice how everything went well with broken polls. voting itself is the only poll that matters.
Oh yay! Those races don't get enough national attention, it's a relief to see them get fucked.