Red Wave Rising
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
What do polls mean at this point?
Are those who already voted surveyed by pollsters?
If yes, could polls be more accurate at this point, since those answering the polls who have already voted know they can’t change their vote.
Polls vary widely in accuracy depending upon the ability of the pollster and their methodology. The closer that you get to an election, generally, but not always, the polling gets more accurate, especially if a good likely voter screen is used. The best pollster currently is Richard Baris.
We shouldn’t trust polls. When they could gin up a probability sample with random digit dialing, you could more or less trust polls. Not anymore. Other confounding factors: early voting and vote fraud.
We shouldn’t trust polls.
Trust doesn’t enter in. Polls are a tool in the politics business. Some pollsters have a much better track record than others. Polls can be useful in a campaign in determining allocation or resources, messaging, where a candidate goes, etc. Polling has become more difficult and too many entities are involved in polling who have not a clue how to do it properly.
In my MPA (Education) program years ago, we had a couple of units on stats. The professor cautioned us that (1) even the best polls are still +/-3% and (2) many polls don’t meet that standard.
The statistical argument is that if you draw a random sample, your accuracy is +/- (1/sqrt(N) where N is sample size. That supposition depends on 1) sample being random, 2) questionaire not being biased, 3) respondees being honest. Even if 2) holds, it’s unlikely that 1) or 3) will often hold.
Meanwhile, out of Orange County, Fl. is another argument, in case you needed one, against promiscuous use of postal ballots. The Fetterman Oz debate is another argument against early voting.