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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Another factor is how much the "Shy Tory" effect still matters.

Polling institutes in Sweden have had pretty severe issues with the "shy Tory" effect the past few elections concerning SD, the anti-immigration populist mildly reactionary party, not the traditional right wing.

In the elections in 2010 and 2014 (first time they made it into the Parliament) they were pretty severely underestimated, by as much as 20-30% (easier when their total vote share is relatively small). The pollsters were heavily criticised and even accused of partisanship for this with many people asked how they could possibly have made such big errors and if their methods really lead to representative results.

Then in 2018 they ended up actually overestimating SD by about 10%. Everyone were equally as surprised by this polling result as they were the previous two, but none more than the some of the representatives from SD in TV panels, who strongly believed in getting as much of an overperformance as previously.

Then in the latest election in 2022 SD were as accurately polled as anyone else.

My point is that I don't think its wise to rely on or expect a shy Tory effect because polling institutes can adjust and so can the population.

So, will Trump be underestimated or overestimated in this election? Are people outside of blue strongholds actually still "shy"? I have no idea, but I do think it's questionable to continually rely on this polling pattern over time when making predictions. Polarisation surrounding a candidate should probably be treated more like a thing that increases the margin of error of polling, especially when the worst of the hysteria seems to have died down.

Hot take: election prediction should be split into two different jobs: pollsters and oracles.

Pollsters should just ask short, neutral questions and just report the results without any leeway to skew things, like "if today were US presidential elections, who would you vote for?"

If 10% of the respondents are jokesters who reply Lizardman Hitler, they should just report 'Lizardman Hitler at 10%'.

Oracles are the likes of Nate Silver (formerly 538), who have their voting models which takes in polls and any other considerations ('Lizardman Hitler is not on the ballot', 'Shy Tory effect', 'My goldfish Frodo is more depressed than usual') and form a prediction out of them.

If they get it wrong, you can give the oracles shit, but never the pollsters, because they just truthfully reported what people said they were going to vote for. If you trusted people not to lie, that is on you.

The conspiracy theorists who won't answer polls correctly will statistically all break for Trump.

The polls underestimated Trump by 3-4 points in both of the last two elections. There is no reason to think this has changed.

“Surely they wouldn’t make the same mistake three times!” Please allow me to introduce you to managerialism.

I'm not sure where you're getting the 3-4% number from. Polls underestimated Trump by 1.1% in 2016 and 2.7% in 2020. They also overestimated Romney by 3.2% in 2012. Drawing strong conclusions from n=2 in a system where there's historically been no net partisan bias is misguided.

We'll see but I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption that the pollsters would try to improve and trump voters would become less shy as support for him is normalised.

This is literally what happened in Sweden.

It depends if polls are intended to show a snap shot of the election or intended to influence the election.

Polls by the big mainstream pollsters are loss-leaders for said pollsters' commercial market research operations. Accurate polls are a better advert than message-concordant ones.

Who helps liberal media financially more: Trump or Harris?

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