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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Her track record looks impressive until you pull back the curtain a bit. She got many primaries wrong. Her final polls differed from polls a month prior in strong ways.

Also there is a bit of survival bias here. Stock pickers that survive may not be that much better; could just be a random walk.

Her track record looks impressive until you pull back the curtain a bit. She got many primaries wrong. Her final polls differed from polls a month prior in strong ways.

Please provide links.

Also there is a bit of survival bias here. Stock pickers that survive may not be that much better; could just be a random walk.

She's been high-profile since at least 2008. 16 years of bucking conventional wisdom is a lot of record to just dismiss as "random walk".

16 years sounds like a lot. In reality you are talking about four presidential elections. Also not nearly all of that was “bucking conventional wisdom.”

Keep in mind the claim re random walk in stock pickers is frequently much larger compared to Selzer.

In 2020 in the penultimate poll she had the race in Iowa tied between Trump and Biden tied. Is it possible the electorate moved by 8 points? Sure but not likely.

She also in for example had the Iowa 2016 primary going for Trump.

She also does midterms and a bunch of other stuff, and I'm pretty sure she started in the 90s sometime and only became well-known in 2008 after a few runs having relatively robust results. You can cherrypick anything she's gotten wrong, but she has one of the best track records of any pollster bar none. It's clear that some around here are only questioning her because they don't like the result she's getting, rather than for any relative inaccuracy.

No we are questioning her because the poll doesn’t make sense for all the reasons given.