Welcome to City-Data.com Forum!
U.S. CitiesCity-Data Forum Index
Go Back   City-Data Forum > General Forums > Politics and Other Controversies > Elections
 [Register]
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
View detailed profile (Advanced) or search
site with Google Custom Search

Search Forums  (Advanced)
Reply Start New Thread
 
Old 06-10-2020, 04:16 AM
 
Location: Richmond, VA
5,052 posts, read 6,355,685 times
Reputation: 7205

Advertisements

Quote:
Originally Posted by Matchroad View Post
Weighing polls on:

Party ID
Demographics
Education
Gender

That are more realistic.

Statespoll.com and Strehlspresdentialelection called the election 99 percent correct doing this.

State polling when weighed correctly looks the same for Trump in 2020
I'll answer this in all seriousness. While 'weighting' is an attractive idea and can, in some cases, improve the accuracy, the confluence of factors that probably would have made it more accurate to weight by these factors last time may not apply this time.

That is, it was probably an outlier that party ID correlated SO strongly in 2016, that so many polled did not respond with their true preference (the "shy Trumper" theory), and we had multiple outliers. It is far from clear that 'weighting' for these items will yield more correct results in this election, and generally weighting should be reserved for factors that are absolutely known to consistently have a direct impact on the final result. They impacted last time. Will they this time? How do you know?

It's the continued use of the term 'correctly' that make me wonder if people have really looked into the methodology of pollling. 'Weighted correctly' seems to mean, to those using it, weight it in such a way my preferred candidate's results appear better. They truly believe that's reality-that the weighting will show a more accurate result. But experience tells us it probably won't, and we can already predict if President Trump doesn't win, his supporters will consider it a 'rigged election.'

See below link and text from it for a more in-depth discussion. I bolded/highlighted some key points.

__________________________________________________ ____________________


The Good & Bad of Weighting the Data | NCPP - National Council on Public Polls

"Bad Weighting: The most common bad weighting in political polls is weighting just the likely voters for the number of Democrats, Republicans and others. Party identification is correlated with voting, but what is missing are meaningful numbers of party members for the whole population. Without that, the weighting is a guessing game rather than good theory. Some pollsters use the numbers from an exit poll from a past election, but the numbers of people who consider themselves members of a party changes from month to month and year to year.

Consider the change in party identification from the Pew Research Center polls throughout 1996. In the beginning of the year the Republican-Democrat split was 30%-30%. On Election Day it was 26%-36%. The number who considered themselves Republicans went down steadily the closer the survey was to the election. Using party identification to weight just the likely voters in a political poll is little better than a guessing game where the pollster is substituting his or her judgement for scientific method.

Another type of bad weighting for elections polls occurs when the weighting characteristic has a low correlation with key variables such as voting. For example, in some elections there may be no relationship between age and voting. If the age-voting relationship is weak then weighting for age will make the sampling error larger. Sometimes there is a strong relationship with vote but a weak relationship with some other characteristic. That other characteristic will have a larger sampling error. One also should avoid weighting that creates a large discrepancy in the weights applied to different sample cases."
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message

 
Old 06-10-2020, 01:47 PM
 
Location: Cherry Hill, New Jersey
102 posts, read 48,891 times
Reputation: 62
Biden is leading in polls, so of course they need to be “weighted correctly.”
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 06-10-2020, 02:45 PM
 
5,581 posts, read 2,314,998 times
Reputation: 4809
Quote:
Originally Posted by cg41386 View Post
Biden is leading in polls, so of course they need to be “weighted correctly.”
Maybe they want a Sharpie poll?
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 06-10-2020, 03:36 PM
 
Location: Richmond, VA
5,052 posts, read 6,355,685 times
Reputation: 7205
Quote:
Originally Posted by Matchroad View Post
They needed to be in 2016 as we found out
*checks calendar*

Yep, it’s definitely 2020, not 2016. You might want to update your clocks.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 06-11-2020, 06:52 AM
 
Location: Richmond, VA
5,052 posts, read 6,355,685 times
Reputation: 7205
Quote:
Originally Posted by Matchroad View Post
I was confused what you were talking about, as a slight majority of scientifically conducted polls show Biden leading. Then I read the links and realized, oh, they're 'weighted polls.' In other words, polls adjusted by rabid partisan hacks to show their preferred candidate leading. Got it. I posted a link in this thread that puts 'weighting' to complete bed as the complete ignorant idiocy it is:

Post 80:
https://www.city-data.com/forum/elec...4-point-8.html


I am totally enjoying the meltdown you are having over actually being behind in the polls, and it would be very satisfying to me if your preferred candidate loses so you can cry about how unfair it is. But keep hoping. As we said in the Army, hope is not a method.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 06-11-2020, 08:41 AM
 
Location: Kansas City, MISSOURI
20,884 posts, read 9,572,750 times
Reputation: 15610
Matchroad is about the 20th re-registration Westie15. In his various iterations he has incessantly posted links to either that website or one called statespolls.com (or something similar) both of which re-weigh polls according to how whoever runs those websites thinks they really should be weighed. I'm starting to wonder if Westie15 and all his 20-ish iterations are actually the guy in those websites, and one of his reasons for being here is to promote his website.

But this iteration will get banned soon enough, just like the previous 20, and his posts will disappear, so you can effectively ignore his posts.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 06-11-2020, 01:06 PM
 
Location: Atlanta, GA
14,834 posts, read 7,426,754 times
Reputation: 8966
Quote:
Originally Posted by Matchroad View Post
And miraculously Trump is ahead in most of these state polls just like 2016.
False. Trump is losing almost every swing state in an average of polls. The only states where any polls have him up recently are PA and NC.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 06-11-2020, 01:07 PM
 
Location: Atlanta, GA
14,834 posts, read 7,426,754 times
Reputation: 8966
Biden is now +8 in the RCP average.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 06-11-2020, 01:11 PM
 
Location: Atlanta, GA
14,834 posts, read 7,426,754 times
Reputation: 8966
Quote:
Originally Posted by Matchroad View Post
Trump is up in 90 percent of the state polls when weighed correctly against Biden
False.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 06-11-2020, 01:19 PM
 
Location: Atlanta, GA
14,834 posts, read 7,426,754 times
Reputation: 8966
Quote:
Originally Posted by Matchroad View Post
You would have said false in 2016.

I'm sorry for your loss
Hillary lost bro, it's time to move past 2016.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.

Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.


Reply
Please update this thread with any new information or opinions. This open thread is still read by thousands of people, so we encourage all additional points of view.

Quick Reply
Message:


Over $104,000 in prizes was already given out to active posters on our forum and additional giveaways are planned!

Go Back   City-Data Forum > General Forums > Politics and Other Controversies > Elections

All times are GMT -6.

© 2005-2024, Advameg, Inc. · Please obey Forum Rules · Terms of Use and Privacy Policy · Bug Bounty

City-Data.com - Contact Us - Archive 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 - Top