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You make it sound as if pollster bias is just a simple matter of them deciding not to correct for them, rather than them trying repeatedly to correct for it but reality being surprising in various ways.
Hofstadler's Law of polling mean there is always a shy Tory effect, even when you correct for Hofstadler's Law.
Right, but that doesn’t mean the pollsters aren’t trying to correct for it all the same.
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Yes, and you seem to be implying there's something strange about that?
If the bias is consistently in the same direction, I find it unlikely that they are actually trying to correct it. I'd have to look up the post I'm citing, but I think they were talking about Sweden where their right-populist party was underestimated during one election, overestimated in the next one, and finally estimated correctly in the one after that. This is what you'd expect to see if they were trying.
How do you explain the pollster debate over polling methodologies if they’re not trying to correct for biases? Perhaps sometimes the biases are hard to correct for https://archive.is/6tjvT
The same way I explain debates over methodology in academia, which result in a peer review process that can't outperform laymen simply looking at studies' titles.
That does not imply a peer review process that can’t outperform laymen, because laypeople are only acting on the outputs of the peer review process. Moreover, a prediction performance of 67% may be much higher than chance, but there’s clearly a lot of signal still that laypeople cannot discern. You’d expect something different if they’re not trying at all.
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I’ll go one further. I don’t think any poll is actually trying to figure out who will win so much as to convince the electorate of whatever the polling centers want to be true. There’s really no reason to bother with them other than to see if anything is changing within the narrative.
Polls are destructive tests: once you conduct one and announce the results, the value changes.
Which is kind of the point. If the point was just to see who might win, why publish the results? If the polls say Trump wins, then it’s useful perhaps in business where you might want to long term plan for the future economic policies Trump brings. Or it might be useful to the various campaigns as a signal of where the weak points are. I suspect that they aren’t getting the polls generally available to the public, which are not about reporting the likely winners, but in motivating or demotivating various factions in the electorate. CNN isn’t trying to guess the outcome. They want to scare democrats into voting and working harder for Kamala and saying she might lose is motivation for people who are afraid of a Trump second term. If they’re wrong, it’s not like they get a black eye even.
I think what makes more sense is to try to gage enthusiasm and whether or not some factions of the base are not on board. Kamala has a big problem because of Israel Palestine. There’s a fairly large portion of the left that’s jumping to either staying home or voting Green Party. If they’re serious, I think that’s a problem no matter what the polls say. I don’t see the same divide with any issues for Trump. I see lots of people saying they can’t wait to vote for Trump. Both things seem important as data points.
According to some polling at least, Israel/Palestine ranks rather low on voter priorities: https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/eba2f5ad-57c0-4c7b-b546-296a1e273e06_1456x1241.png
Depending on the motivations of the pollster, I can imagine various reasons why they’d publicize accurate results (eg to advertise their polling outfit in case you want to hire them to poll on other issues of note). But I haven’t actually been able to find much about how public polls are funded and why. You?
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Nate Silver has written about how the Red Wave that never manifested was in fact never well supported by the polling data and instead was a result of just such an overcorrection so there is at least some evidence in that direction.
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Trump has had two Presidential elections so far. Even with no bias, you'd expect the error to be the same sign 50% of the time.
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The dark and cynical but not quite CapitalRoom level of cynicism is that the pollsters have to keep the polls showing the possibility of a Harris victory to give the Democrats cover when they "find" enough ballots to put her over the top.
This has been the theory put forth by some commenters over at the Dreaded Jim's blog.
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I do have to say it's concerning that this election runs through several of our nation's most corrupt cities: Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.
I won't make specific claims but it's the height of naivete to think these cities can run an election correctly.
What city exists that Republicans actually trust?
Until we get annexation of metropolitan areas it's just going to be like this.
If you're advocating for this policy on the basis of culture-war reasons, prepare to be dissapointed. If you're advocating for this policy on the basis of being part of a non-urbanite interest group, prepare to be very dissapointed. In the short run you'd probably stand to benefit, which is why I as an urbanite would oppose you. But in the long run I think I'd get the last laugh.
The ultimate redpill is that none of this culture war stuff actually matters. It's all just cynical economic interest groups. The republicans are the rural party, the democrats are the urban party, and that's been true since they were called "Federalists" and "Democratic-republicans." And, historically, integrating provincial/national and metropolitan governments tends to benefit urbanites, not rurals. Consider the likely results of removing the electoral college as being illustrative. Or look at paris/france, rome/rome, vienna/austria, moscow/russia, etc.
Some states are disproportionately rural/suburban and to have their power balanced between multiple cities. In those cases, it's actually feasible for a rural/suburban coalition to partially dominate the urban areas. See: the missouri state government's control over Kansas City's police force. But that's ultimately a fragile equilibrium given anticipated climate-change driven migration from heavily urbanized coastal areas plus the new ideological YIMBY trend towards densification. Our future is destined to be more urban, not less-- even actual degrowth would hollow out suburbs and rural areas first. (See: what's happening in Japan.) Any effective attempt to oppress urbanites will just motivate people to move to rural/suburban areas and mold them in their image.
Ironically a republican success on immigration would only boost this trend. More homogenous cultures accommodate denser living-- the reverse of what caused the original white flight/suburbanization. It doesn't actually matter what that culture ultimately ends up being. Democrats would adapt to serve it, and then turn around to put their boots on ruralite necks.
I wouldn't really label any of those as reasons for the policy, nor am I really advocating for it, I expect for me personally it would negatively impact my day-to-day interactions with government.
Rather, my point is that the cities in question (Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia) are all examples of cities where there's a significant population living outside of the city limits that consists largely of commuters into the city center, or businesses dependent on those commuters. Philadelphia has the main line, Atlanta has Decatur, Detroit has Northville. These are all well run, largely white, wealthy areas. Those populations would have a moderating and improving impact on City politics. As long as those populations lie outside of city limits, with no vote in city politics, city politicians will be elected entirely by city populations. As a result the outlying areas will view the city politics as corrupt, dysfunctional, machine politics until those kinds of voices are represented.
I think I need to urbanism-pill you.
Suburban vigour is essentially illusory. The per-capita cost of providing infrastructure and services is higher in suburban and rural areas, which makes annexing suburbs fundamentally a drag on urban economies. New, fashionable suburbs often look well-run-- providing a good balance of services to taxes, but that's often a product of debt-financed ponzi schemes.
And-- car-centric infrastructure (highways, parking lots) designed to serve suburbs have turned out to be dramatically negative for cities.
What you say here:
... may accurately reflect the perception of these outlying areas, but does capture the truth. Because what you say here:
Is definitely wrong. These areas appear well run, but that's a consequence of an unusually beneficial status quo. It's a consequence of-- and I hate to use this term-- "white supremacy." No, seriously. Politicians during the era of suburbanization and white flight prioritized structuring their cities to benefit their ingroup-- which turned out to be the white people living in the suburbs, rather than the black people living in the inner cities. Those people are gone now, but infrastructure lasts for a long time, and second-order effects last for even longer. You can still see the traces of roman city planning in modern european city centers. Their roads have disappeared but their grid patterns have not.
The reason businesses are dependent on commuters is because commuter-friendly infrastructure made it feasible for people to move outside the cities in the first place. That's not an argument for cities continuing to cater to commuters, it's an argument for cities incentivising people to move into the city limits, boosting the city's tax base, economy, and political power all at once.
And-- at least in the cities where NIMBY's don't hold sway-- we're seeing exactly that happen. The 15 minute city concept is infuriating for suburbanites, and it should be. But as an urbanite, I'm very pleased at all the new apartment complexes with integrated shops on their bottom floors, the traffic calming measures, the expansion of public transit, the proliferation of parking meters, and so on and so forth. And all those things are happening despite the fact that I live in a very red state.
So wrapping around to your original point-- that non-urbanites don't trust cities... well, I won't say they're wrong to do so. But their reasons for mistrusting cities are the wrong ones entirely.
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There is still a big difference between the corrupt but functional cities (Boston, Seattle, NYC), and the corrupt dysfunctional cities (Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta).
Even here in deep blue Washington state, the government mostly still works. I trust the elections are mostly fair (modulo some Antifa ballot harvesting in Seattle races). In a place like Detroit, nothing works. How can they run an election fairly?
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Fort Worth, Salt Lake City, and OKC would probably be trusted by most Republicans.
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There is also the possibility that the underlying cause for the bias could have abated. Support for Trump can have normalised in poll answering demographics for instance.
I still find it likely that some underestimation is going on but I wouldn't be surprised if the poll aggregate is largely accurate or even overestimating Trump.
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