politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
Have you ever participated in one of these polls? I haven't. None of my friends have. Who are they polling?
Lots of people. I have. The linked AP article says they polled 1165 people, which seems small compared to the 332 million, but the math checks out for a 95% confidence level and a 3% margin of error.
How did they do it? Phone? Email?
If you're interested in their methodology, they're named at the bottom of the linked AP article, and they have a page that answers that exact question.
"The poll of 1,165 adults was conducted Aug. 10-14 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points."
So it doesn't say how. I have this idea that they call people. I also have this idea that no one in certain age groups and demographics answers their phone, so are underrepresented.
And if you Google their name, they have a page that gives a summary of how they conduct their polls.
The thing is that they can be 95% sure they are within 3% of what they’d get if they polled everyone. But that’s it. The way people answer polls doesn’t always translate to the way they vote or do anything else.
I'm not American, but my wife used to be in these pills here. I think it started with like music polls, have you hear this song in the last week in the radio etc. Later on it was TV, product placement in supermarkets, news events, local, state and federal elections.
Half the time she admitted she had nfi what they were talking about so just made shit up so the call ended quickly and she got whatever payment/reward they were giving out.
There have definitely been periods when polls were quite skewed because they were conducted by phone and they over-represented people with landlines. I guess because it’s harder to get a “phone book” of cell numbers. This skewed actual outcomes of the polls.
I think they still have similar issues. They probably underrepresent people who change phones often or just don’t use the telephone to communicate. Sometimes they’re conducted online and recruited over email. There are all different ways that that can skew more to one type of person.
And when they say they have such and such a confidence interval, that does not mean they are that confident they’ve controlled for all the biases. It’s just simple statistics math about sample sizes.
I think we have seen very clearly in recent presidential elections how unreliable polls are. Not only do people answer them differently than they fill out ballots, there just isn’t a perfect way to be sure you’re polling people who will actually vote.