Question For You Poll Loving Leftists

[Weatherman2020]

Can you point to any evidence the polls are correct? Maybe they are. But where’s the evidence to back it up?

Meanwhile:

 

[johngaltshrugged]

Poll loving leftists is a perfect double entendre for a lot of them

 

[WTH_Progs?]

The evidence comes next week when we see polls are the same as their "news", "debates" social medias, TV and "fact" checks - Misinformation and no information.

 

[John T. Ford]

Can you point to any evidence the polls are correct? Maybe they are. But where’s the evidence to back it up?

Meanwhile:
View attachment 409678

Are you seriously asking Leftist for Evidence?

LMAO .... Leftist don't deal in facts.

 

[Weatherman2020]

Facebook followers:
Trump 30.6 million
Biden 3.4 million

Again, what evidence says Biden will win?

 

[Zorro!]

RealClearInvestigations: Help! Pollsters Have Fallen and They Can’t Get Up!.

“If you can’t predict something as simple as an election race, do you think these same polls are giving people the right answers on how people feel about Covid?”​

​

Weeks after the 2020 elections, several races have yet to be called, but a clear loser has emerged – pollsters. The polls understated the percentage of the Republican vote in 48 of 50 states, and 15 of the 16 Senate races.

At the national level, President Trump outperformed the polls significantly. Major surveys in the last week before the election, including Economist/YouGov, CNBC/Change Research, Quinnipiac, and NBC News/Wall Street Journal, all had Joe Biden winning in a landslide – by 10 percentage points or more. Biden’s actual margin of victory in the popular vote is less than four points.

The polls also underestimated Trump’s support in most swing states, where around 100,000 votes in a few battlegrounds account for Biden’s victory. In particular, Biden won Wisconsin by some 10,000 votes -- less than a single percentage point -- but polls from Reuters/Ipsos and the New York Times/Siena had him up double digits. An ABC News/Washington Post poll done in the Badger State the week before the election had Biden up 17 points.

Polling failures were also manifest in key Senate races. Republican incumbent Susan Collins was trailing in all 14 major polls conducted in the closely watched Maine contest. A Quinnipiac poll in September had Collins down a whopping 12 points. She won by nine. North Carolina’s GOP incumbent, Thom Tillis, ended up with a clear win despite trailing in the last five polls taken.

Testy Nate Silver Couldn't Find His Ass With Both Hands And a Compass
​

The polls also underestimated Trump’s support in most swing states, where around 100,000 votes in a few battlegrounds account for Biden’s victory. In particular, Biden won Wisconsin by some 10,000 votes -- less than a single percentage point -- but polls from Reuters/Ipsos and the New York Times/Siena had him up double digits. An ABC News/Washington Post poll done in the Badger State the week before the election had Biden up 17 points.

Polling failures were also manifest in key Senate races. Republican incumbent Susan Collins was trailing in all 14 major polls conducted in the closely watched Maine contest. A Quinnipiac poll in September had Collins down a whopping 12 points. She won by nine. North Carolina’s GOP incumbent, Thom Tillis, ended up with a clear win despite trailing in all the last five polls taken.

In the House, the final projection of polling experts at FiveThirtyEight showed Democrats expanding their majority. Instead, Republicans have picked up ten seats and are leading in several of the still-undecided races.

There’s simply no way to spin the terrible performance of pollsters this year. “Let's just call a spade a spade here: this was a bad polling error,” said New York Times’ polling reporter Nate Cohn. “It's comparable to 2016 in size, but pollsters don't have the excuses they did last time.”

The failures are particularly striking in how they echo those of 2016, which included leading election analysts as well as pollsters. On the eve of that election, the New York Times reported that state and national polls indicated Hillary Clinton had an 85% chance of beating Donald Trump; Reuters/Ipsos predicted she had a 90% chance of winning while election guru Larry Sabato estimated that Clinton would win 322 electoral votes.

These failures of have put pollsters, polling experts, and election analysts on the defensive. Appearing on a podcast the day after the 2020 election, FiveThirtyEight founder Testy Nate Silver was asked to address the online “rage.” Testy Silver rose to prominence on the left-wing blog The Daily Kos and worked with the Obama campaign, so when the polls turned out to be inaccurate, liberals felt betrayed. “If they’re coming after FiveThirtyEight, then the answer is f--k you, we did a good job!” Testy Silver retorted.

Although polls are often invoked because they give political commentary an unearned sense of mathematical certainty, polling is both an art and a science. Once the responses are in, pollsters will then balance the pool – “weighting” is the term of art for emphasizing certain demographics and characteristics among poll respondents, such as education, partisan affiliation, or race – to produce a sample more representative of the results they want. Weighting polls involves pollsters making subjective judgments.

The midterm polls were badly off in 2014, with multiple Senate surveys being off by 10 points or more.

The polling errors of the last four election cycles have all missed the same way: overstating support for Democrat candidates. Quinnipiac sent a sober statement in declining. “I’m not able to make even preliminary hypotheses about what exactly the issues are.

“In the end, the polling error in states was virtually identical to the miss from 2016,” Cohn observed in a recent post-election report.

Robert Cahaly of Trafalgar may need help dressing, but his polls have been highly accurate over the last several elections. The Fake News Media continues to dismiss him as an "Outlier".​

Some Republican pollsters made robust efforts to identify Trump voters, including Robert Cahaly of the Trafalgar Group, who proved to be the most accurate swing-state pollster in 2016.

Trafalgar does a lot of polling by text message and that its polls only involve a few direct and easy to answer questions. The goal is to be as unintrusive as possible and get quick, unguarded responses.

Cahaly finds the continued use of phone polling misguided. “These guys are VCR pollsters in a Netflix age,” he says.

Trafalgar’s 2020 results weren’t as accurate as in 2016, but, correctly predicting Trump victories Florida and North Carolina, missed GA, MI and PA.

Even though Trafalgar ended up with a better track record than most polling organizations, outside observers remain skeptical. Henry Olsen, a Washington Post columnist and polling expert concedes: “Cahaly’s basic insight is right. There are people who just are disinclined to answer polls. They are disproportionately Trump backers. … I think Cahaly had the wrong assumption about weighting or turnout, but the vast majority of more traditional pollsters just missed the boat entirely.”

Aside from Trafalagar, a handful of politically conservative pollsters in 2020, such as Rasmussen, Susquehanna Polling and Research, and Insider Advantage, all regularly produced polls that were noticeably more favorable to Trump and produced more accurate results this year.

Trafalgar gets a C- in Testy Nate's FiveThirtyEight’s grading system despite outperforming many more established and better-graded polling firms in the last several elections.

Republican pollster Jim Lee of Susquehanna echoes Cahaly’s observations about growing distrust, noting that pollsters are most often affiliated with either the media outlets or universities – two institutions that are hostile to conservatives.

Jim Lee Drops A Truth Bomb On Lying Fake News Polls.​

Lee has called on AAPOR, the industry trade group, to hold pollsters accountable for poor performance. He has produced a detailed memo making recommendations. Many of these suggestions call for greater transparency, such as requiring pollsters to disclose donors, business relationships, and partisan affiliations. But Lee wants AAPOR to institute meaningful professional consequences for pollsters who are wrong, and suggests instituting the following paragraph in the trade organization’s “Code of Professional Ethics and Practices”:

Push Polls and Suppression Polls:

Public, private and/or academic university polling firms that publicly release results to election-related polls within 14 days of an impending election, and where hypothetical "ballot test" results are released, and where these results are said to differ wildly from actual election outcomes post-Election Day, and thus are vulnerable to criticisms of contributing to voter suppression, shall face sanctions, rebuke and/or reprimands by AAPOR and as a result, should be called on to issue public apologies with detailed explanations of their survey methodologies and reasons for [their] erroneous election outcomes. Furthermore, AAPOR should strongly encourage these academic institutions of higher education who are recipients of federal and/or state grants or other taxpayer financed earmarks for the purposes of conducting “research” to refund in full to governmental jurisdictions and/or state/federal agencies these expenditures.​

While Lee doesn’t specify what sanctions or rebukes the organization should institute, he is concerned that the Lying Fake News media’s obsession with reporting on polls, particularly when those polls have consistently and inaccurately favored the Democrat Party, is affecting election results. “I think the study that needs to be done is with registered voters that chose not to vote on Nov. 3 and to ask them why,” Lee says.

The AAPOR won’t comment on Lee’s memo.

While the contention that bad polling affects election outcomes is contestable, there’s really no doubt polls are distorting the electoral process in a way that’s bad for Democrats and Republicans. Democrats raised nearly $200 million for Senate races in Maine and South Carolina, in no small part because polls indicated those races were close. The Democratic candidates in those races lost by nine and 10 points, respectively. Democratic leaders told Politico after the election that poor performance in November was because the party “underestimated Donald Trump’s popularity, relied too much on polls, and failed to heed the warnings of its most vulnerable members.”

And most of that money was spent with lying fake news media companies that published the lying fake news polls, so, go figure.

More broadly, the failures of 2020 have rekindled periodic questions about whether journalists and political professionals alike rely far too much on polling. Just a few weeks after widespread failure in the polling industry, reporting on polls continues to shape media coverage and set the national political agenda as if nothing happened. And that might be the biggest problem of all, says Cahaly. “If you can't predict something as simple as an election race, do you think these same polls are giving people the right answers on how people feel about Covid?”

Their job is to act as propagandists for the Left, so, don't expect anything resembling real self-evaluation.