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Polls have long weighted their results, but there's ways to do it well, and ways to do it poorly. The goal is to calibrate demographic metrics based on likely voter data to create a facsimile of a perfectly representative sample. Getting it correct makes for more accurate polls. Getting it wrong in an innocent way can lead to mixups like 2016, where there was insufficient weighting by education especially in swing states.
But with degrees of freedom comes the ability to misuse it, where pollsters can coax their models to produce results they think are "better". Or they can just not release results that show something they think is strange. No matter what happens, polls should still show something resembling a normal distribution. They should create their model first, then enter in their results and see what pops out. The fact they're not getting a normal distribution is evidence that they're looking at results, then tweaking the model and rerunning afterwards, effectively mangling the results into whatever they desire. The fact that this is very prominent around a few polling houses and not others should be an indication that something is wrong.
I'd gladly take an even-money bet that Selzer is off by less than 10 points.
The point was trying to make is that because they're all weighted and because the underlying data are not random, you would not expect to see the variance numbers Silver is using as his thresholds. The claim of binomial distribution around +-6 is dependent on the assumptions Silver is making, but those assumptions are wrong. Polls are done individually, they're tailored individually. When Silver writes articles like this, he comes off as someone who would be actually lost if he ever attempted to conduct a poll and then he makes a bunch of statements about polling generally using assumptions which are just wrong for polling.
Polling with predictive capacity is extraordinarily difficult. The end prediction is what matters, not the particulars of the models they use. The models are a tool, they're not the entire prediction. Of course I think pollsters who adjust their model to better fit what they believe is the correct result and they should. I have far more respect for individual pollsters than aggregators, who I consider to just be poll readers.
If I was Selzer, I would have gone back and tried again because her poll is ridiculous for a variety of reasons we can see in the information released about the demos she reached and what they care about. I understand aggregators don't like this and they don't like when variance shrinks, but the pollsters are the ones making the predictions more so than the aggregators stealing their work.
Well, I didn't expect a response like this and didn't check back here. I am already overbudget on political bets this season, but I likely would have taken this depending on the amount and hassle to set this up. Bravo, though! I love to see people willing to put money down on their predictions.
Selzer is currently off by a whopping 16.5%. I should go back and look at my model for Iowa and why I undestimated Trump by 3 points. Selzer sold her credibility in an attempt to motivate downtrodden Democrats into thinking it was still possible. No serious person could have looked at some of the results from that poll, e.g., abortion most important topic, among others, and take it at face value; anyone who did should be discounted if not entirely ignored going forward.
For what it's worth, I'll cop to the fact that I would have lost the bet. Selzer had a pretty stellar record before, but this was a massive, high-profile mistake that she'll likely never recover from, at least not fully.
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