Slashdot Mirror
Daily Kos Pollster Made Up Numbers
jamie found a story up on Daily Kos revealing that the polling firm they had contracted with for 18 months, Research 2000 or R2K, apparently made up or at least manually tweaked its polling results. The blog published a preliminary report by a team of statistics gurus (Mark Grebner, Michael Weissman, and Jonathan Weissman), and it is an exemplar of clarity and concision. The team reports, "We do not know exactly how the weekly R2K results were created, but we are confident they could not accurately describe random polls." Daily Kos will be filing a lawsuit against its former pollster. "For the past year and a half, Daily Kos has been featuring weekly poll results from the Research 2000 (R2K) organization. These polls were often praised for their 'transparency,' since they included detailed cross-tabs on sub-populations and a clear description of the random dialing technique. However, on June 6, 2010, FiveThirtyEight.com rated R2K as among the least accurate pollsters in predicting election results. Daily Kos then terminated the relationship. One of us (MG) wondered if odd patterns he had noticed in R2K's reports might be connected with R2K's mediocre track record, prompting our investigation of whether the reports could represent proper random polling. ... This posting is a careful initial report of our findings, not intended to be a full formal analysis but rather to alert people not to rely on R2K's results."
Nobody expects the Daily Kos to be accurate.
It would be like trusting Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or anything ever aired on "Air America" before it went bankrupt.
Those who aren't used to phrases used with "political" centric organizations might mistake the title as saying someone who is on Daily Kos' payroll flubbed the numbers, rather than a company working on contract with them.
Living With a Nerd
For me, the surprising part of this isn't so much that R2K made up poll results, but that the results actually were noticably less accurate than traditional polling, which I like to think of as representing a broad cross-section of people who still have landlines with no caller ID for some reason (or are desperate enough to talk to another human being that they'll answer their landline anyway).
I used to work a different major polling company, and I can assure you R2K is not alone in just making up numbers. Easily 80% of surveys that went through my region were completely falsified, and the remaining 20% rarely matched the demographic they were supposed to be answering for. Survey administrators have quotas, and then get paid extra for additional surveys past that, but there is basically nothing done to verify any of the surveys turned in, and everybody in the company knows it. Don't always trust what you read, especially not statistics.
For headline skimmers, this post would produced a completely inaccurate sense of what the article was all about... at length, the D.KOS are the ones who found out about this and are doing something something about it. That's good... but if you just read the headline, you'd come away thinking that D.KOS were the culprits instead.
"Republicans right now are citing our polls more than Democrats because it's in their interest to do so," Scott Rasmussen said. "I would not consider myself a political conservative -- that implies an alignment with Washington politics that I don't think I have."
Can't really argue when it comes from the guy who started the company.
Living With a Nerd
Apparently the situation with Rasmussen is complicated, but this seems to be a fairly decent starting place (that's not just some activist blogger).
I am officially gone from
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
For actual details on how you can tell that stuff was just made up, start reading here: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/06/breaking-daily-kos-to-sue-research-2000.html
The quote you gave merely says that the results that Rasmussen is getting at this time show a public more greatly favoring Republican positions not that Rasmussen is fudging the numbers to get those results. The rest of the article can be dismissed since the source for the article clearly favors Democratic policy over Republican
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
If you place a statistician's head in ice and his feet in boiling water, then on the average he is quite comfortable!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I know, I know, sarcasm, but I just couldn't help think of this:
http://livefeed.hollywoodreporter.com/2009/12/fox-news-120-have-opinion-on-climate-research-pic.html
Daily Kos wasn't trying to manipulate anything -- notice that they fired R2K once fivethirtyeight's statistics showed them to be least accurate at predicting election results, long before there was any evidence of fraud?
Actually, Kos had already fired R2K before the study was performed. Evidence of fraud was only recently discovered.
Too damn bad:
But what do you expect from people who start holding anti-tax protests after Obama signed the largest middle class tax cut in history? What do you expect from the kind of geniuses that hold up signs saying "Keep Your Government Hands off My Medicare".
I saw participants referring to themselves as teabaggers in the beginning, and the idiotic right wing commentators at Faux News picked it up and ran with it before they figured out what it meant. Which is hilarious because the initial Tea Party events were sponsored by Faux News.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The pollster was subscribed to by DailyKos, among hundreds of other news organizations, and the results were skewed IN FAVOR OF RIGHT-WING CAUSES, not left-wing, so the assumption that DailyKos was somehow complicit in this is absolutely not true. (And I've rarely, if ever, read DailyKos, so I have no personal interest in defending them.. the headline is just grossly misleading).
That was Strategic Vision, not R2K.
(Hey, I'd be much happier if people named products with distinguishable proper names rather than generic sounding word combinations and worse yet, acronyms, so you have my sympathies for getting them mixed up.)
Someone had to do it.
But my point is that there aren't equal numbers. Slashdot has always leaned one way--left. In this one case where a left-wing site is the topic of discussion, the accusation is being made that Slashdot is a conservative site.
By the way, the Kos supporters with mod points are out in full force abusing the -1 Overrated moderation.
Did you know the original Teabaggers were protesting the fact that the wealthy British lowered taxes on their own tea below the taxes on the colonial tea?
That's a pretty inaccurate depiction of the Tea Act and why the colonists opposed it. In essence, the British government was protecting it's own favored company (East India Company), in favor of other traders (and smugglers, because tea carried a hefty tax). So actually the colonists favored free trade instead of crony capitalism (or fascism, if you prefer), and when the British government tried to pass laws that provided monopolies for East India, the colonists rebelled.
I think that's a pretty good analogy with motivations of the modern-day Tea Party protesters.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Sure bmo, like most Republicans supported Romney Care. Romney's probably taken himself out of contention as a future Republican nominee because of Romney Care. Are you claiming the Tea Parties supported Romney Care or Obamacare? Was this post from you even for real, or was it a joke?
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
By your standards the democrats are in favor of restarting the holocaust, using hamas as the new nazis. After all, some are (just read dailykos for a bit).
And generally, none of them say anything when hamas makes statements about restarting the holocaust. And everytime anyone suggests that maybe hamas should be taught a lesson "democrats" (let's throw everyone in one basket like you so seem to enjoy) rant on and on about how "victimized" those poor genocidal maniacs are.
And let's not pretend that the lunatics of, say dailykos or democratic underground, don't know perfectly well that what they're saying about gazans is simply a lie.