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naraburns  nihil supernum  1mo ago (text post)   27150 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

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NYT is predicting Trump winning iowa +9. So what was with that selzer poll?

She admitted to weighting women much higher than usual for *mumble mumble* reasons.

Honestly one of the reasons why I am watching the site and the election results right now. A few theories:

  1. Someone published an outlying dataset without permission

  2. Someone paid someone else big $$

  3. Bad sample

  4. Recording error

Note that none of these truly excludes any other reason, but it was a confounding polling error.

I'm more interested in what was with the people trying to convince everyone who doubted it that they were crazy. There was a real hard consensus building push there, almost as forced as "weird" was.

I tend to be easily blackpilled due to my anxious temperament. That’s my excuse why I let that poll sway me so much.

Well, I was pushing it as an important data point, with my motivation being that she has done well in the past, including publishing pro-Trump results against public sentiment. What did I get wrong? I'm not sure. My most generous interpretation is that her methodology has essentially been a RNG that got a pretty lucky streak.

Or could it have just gotten an unlucky miss with that poll? I don’t understand why people took a single data point like that so seriously

It's a bit more than an unlucky miss, though: she's going to be off by double digits, far outside the statistical MoE.

At the least, I should have taken the "throw it into the pile" approach, instead of privileging it as a gold standard poll.

Sign error?

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