mamooth
Diamond Member
It's normal in elections for each side to declare that polls they don't like are inaccurate, but this year is something special. One side, the conservatives, has hopped on the conspiracy train to crazytown. They're making up crazy stories about past polls being wrong, about the awful Rasmussen polls being right, about Democrats being oversampled, all to support a nutty conspiracy theory about deliberately rigged polls. It's not a very good conspiracy theory, given how it shows ignorance of how polls work.
Reputable pollsters -- that is, more or less everyone but Rasmussen -- don't aim samples at groups or massage the data with bizarre turnout models. The good pollsters simply take a large sample along lines to match census demographics. Party affiliation doesn't enter into the sample choice into in any way. There is no list of Democratic or Republican people or districts that pollsters decide to call. That's just barking lunacy.
Pollsters call their random samples, then they _ask_ about party affiliation. If the polls reported more Democrats, that simply means more random respondants self-identified as Democrats. Sorry conservatives, but it really is that simple. The news for conservatives is worse than they're willing to believe, in that there's been a shift to more people self-identifying as Democrats.
Alas, that's just reality, so it won't matter to the true believers here. They've got their conspiracy theory giving them false hope, so they're clinging to it. And like any good conspiracy, it's impossible to disprove it. After the election outcome matches the polls, the conspiracists will declare it "proves" how the dirty liberal poll-rigging plot was successful in shifting public opinion.
Reputable pollsters -- that is, more or less everyone but Rasmussen -- don't aim samples at groups or massage the data with bizarre turnout models. The good pollsters simply take a large sample along lines to match census demographics. Party affiliation doesn't enter into the sample choice into in any way. There is no list of Democratic or Republican people or districts that pollsters decide to call. That's just barking lunacy.
Pollsters call their random samples, then they _ask_ about party affiliation. If the polls reported more Democrats, that simply means more random respondants self-identified as Democrats. Sorry conservatives, but it really is that simple. The news for conservatives is worse than they're willing to believe, in that there's been a shift to more people self-identifying as Democrats.
Alas, that's just reality, so it won't matter to the true believers here. They've got their conspiracy theory giving them false hope, so they're clinging to it. And like any good conspiracy, it's impossible to disprove it. After the election outcome matches the polls, the conspiracists will declare it "proves" how the dirty liberal poll-rigging plot was successful in shifting public opinion.
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