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Political Polls Become Less Reliable As We Head Into 2016 Presidential Election
HughPickens.com writes: Cliff Zukin writes in the NY Times that those paying close attention to the 2016 election should exercise caution as they read the polls — election polling is in near crisis as statisticians say polls are becoming less reliable. According to Zukin, two trends are driving the increasing unreliability of election and other polling in the United States: the growth of cellphones and the decline in people willing to answer surveys. Coupled, they have made high-quality research much more expensive to do, so there is less of it. This has opened the door for less scientifically-based, less well-tested techniques.
To top it off, a perennial election polling problem, how to identify "likely voters," has become even thornier. Today, a majority of people are difficult or impossible to reach on landline phones. One problem is that the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act has been interpreted by the Federal Communications Commission to prohibit the calling of cellphones through automatic dialers, in which calls are passed to live interviewers only after a person picks up the phone. To complete a 1,000-person survey, it's not unusual to have to dial more than 20,000 random numbers, most of which do not go to actual working telephone numbers.
The second unsettling trend is rapidly declining response rates, reaching levels once considered unimaginable. In the late 1970s, pollsters considered an 80 percent response rate acceptable, but by 2014 the response rate has fallen to 8 percent. "Our old paradigm has broken down, and we haven't figured out how to replace it," concludes Zukin. "In short, polls and pollsters are going to be less reliable. We may not even know when we're off base. What this means for 2016 is anybody's guess."
To top it off, a perennial election polling problem, how to identify "likely voters," has become even thornier. Today, a majority of people are difficult or impossible to reach on landline phones. One problem is that the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act has been interpreted by the Federal Communications Commission to prohibit the calling of cellphones through automatic dialers, in which calls are passed to live interviewers only after a person picks up the phone. To complete a 1,000-person survey, it's not unusual to have to dial more than 20,000 random numbers, most of which do not go to actual working telephone numbers.
The second unsettling trend is rapidly declining response rates, reaching levels once considered unimaginable. In the late 1970s, pollsters considered an 80 percent response rate acceptable, but by 2014 the response rate has fallen to 8 percent. "Our old paradigm has broken down, and we haven't figured out how to replace it," concludes Zukin. "In short, polls and pollsters are going to be less reliable. We may not even know when we're off base. What this means for 2016 is anybody's guess."
Who wants to be Nate Silver will be able to make sense of the polls?
Still some interesting points, and yes we may reach a point where polls actually have no predictive value. But I doubt we've gone from "100% accurate if you know how to interpret them" to 0% in 4 years ;-)
Politicians will have to come up with their own ideas, rather than just saying what plays well in the media?
Please.... help..... murder.....
What do you expect. Figures don't lie, but liars can figure.
INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
One problem is that the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act has been interpreted by the Federal Communications Commission to prohibit the calling of cellphones through automatic dialers, in which calls are passed to live interviewers only after a person picks up the phone.
I know some people that the pollers could outsource to that have seemed to have found a very easy workaround to this problem.
"Hi, this is Rachel from polling services....."
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
... it means you wait until the votes are counted to declare a winner instead of when the press tells you who the winner is.
Post Citizens United we're going to get the best government that money can buy.
One reason why polling companies can't get usable info is that end users tend to be constantly barraged by robocalls, be it the GE security system, "polls" which actually turn out to be scammy sales pitches, or many other types of scams.
Because of this, people either use apps like Mr. Number which autoblocks, or just ignore any number not on their contacts list and area code. If someone does answer and gets a "hi, this is not a sales call", the "end" button on the phone gets pressed by instinct, just like one's hand draws back if they touch a hot pan.
People don't want to give up their time to do a stupid fucking political poll for no real compensation? Who knew?
Captcha: heinous
- Mark Twain
I've never believed the polls. They've always been up to interpretation.
".. the response rate has fallen to 8 percent. "Our old paradigm has broken down, and we haven't figured out how to replace it..."
Here's a crazy idea: let's have everyone vote, and then see what the results are before we report on it?
Or even weirder: instead of micromanaging a candidate's positions based on what they think the public wants to hear, have the candidate state what they actually think, and let the public judge them (shock!) on their actual beliefs? Do they even remember what they think themselves still?
I know, I'm so old-fashioned.
-Styopa
I need to wrap up that FreePBX raspberry Pi project I started so I can take better control of my landline.
I'm a politically interested, reliable voter. I always answer political polls. I get them quite a bit, so I think I'm on some sort of list.
Perhaps ask people go to a place and let their preference be known. Let's call the place a "polling place" and let's call their preference, say, a "vote". We can get rid of the term "poll" and use some new fancy term like "election".
But, polling really does need to change with people's communication preferences. ID verification was ALWAYS a problem on phones. I think that knocking on doors, trusted e-mail, text messages, and other alternatives exist. Harder to do, but oh well. If you want good data, its ALWAYS really hard to do. Good data is very difficult to come across. All data is wrong, but sometimes it tells you something interesting... (something like that...)
The talking heads and candidates care who is "leading in the polls". I don't. I choose my candidate based on what is best for ME and then I ALWAYS vote. I ALWAYS lie to pollsters. Or do I?
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
The summary tries to blame this on the FCC for "interpreting" the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) to apply to survey calls to cell phones. The law itself (47 USC 227), not some rogue FCC interpretation, says no auto-dialed or prerecorded calls to cell phones without express consent. Period. No exceptions for "surveys." No exceptions for "get out the vote" political calls either.
Considering that the major change in campaigning strategy over the last 15 years has centered around using statistical techniques to hack an election, this probably is not a bad thing at all. It means that defining a wedge issue and engineering the entire political discourse toward that wedge might have some uncertainty. Maybe the candidates can talk about things that they actually believe.
first you must discredit the polls.
I have to wonder how much of this has to do with 'push polling'. I have a zero tolerance for this practice and I will shut down a survey call in a heartbeat if it appears to be headed in that direction. I have probably ended some legitimate calls because of this.
Add to that the following:
I certainly don't have to wonder why people are so skeptical of surveys.
No reliable polling data? The horrors!
Instead of focusing on the horse race (who's ahead? who's falling behind?), do you think the media will discuss what candidates actually say and do, maybe even compare and contrast their stump speeches with their actual record and/or accomplishments?
That would truly be "we inform, you decide."
Lose = not win
Won't Big Data and all those super smart data scientists come to our rescue???
If they can accurately assign percentage points to advertisers based on purchases I make months later, surely they can mine my browsing habits and ad viewing preferences and predict whole I'll vote for.
Hell, I'll make it easy and tell them right now: (in order of preference) Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz*
To make it a little more challenging, I'll post anonymously. C'mon data science wizards, convince me you're not just the Web Masters of this bubble.
*Seriously, if he gets on the ballot he'll get my vote just so we can end the GOP once and for all by giving them four years to truly destroy the country.
Seriously Fuck the pollsters, if they call hang up on the fuckers and take that 8% to zero percent.
Don't replace it, don't change it, ditch it completely and make the fucking candidates campaign blind instead of changing their noise every time some new poll comes out.
Political Survey equated with Reliable?
Ha, ha, ha, ha...
Never was. Never will be.
The opinion polling industry here in the UK got got last month's General Election badly wrong. Not only did almost all of the pre-election polls (conducted by a wide range of companies, some of whom use telephone surveys while others use an online approach) get the vote-distribution wrong, over-estimating Labour support and under-estimating Conservative support, but they also misread the mapping of those vote-shares into Parliamentary seats (which is, admittedly, not always simple in the UK's first-past-the-post electoral system).
Only the exit-poll conducted on the day of the election itself got relatively close to the actual result (and even that under-estimated the scale of the eventual Conservative victory).
There's a major industry post-mortem in progress at the moment, which is scrutinising various aspects of previous methodological orthodoxy. UKpollingreport has a fairly good write-up of the state of play here.
There's been a fair degree of political acrimony about the inaccuracy of the pre-election polling. In particular, there have been questions raised about whether inaccurate polling caused the parties or the voters to change their behaviours in a way that accurate polling (or no polling) wouldn't have. There are also some calls for the UK to follow the example of some continental European countries and ban the publication of opinion polls in the 2-3 week period before an election.
One other point worth noting is that there was one particular data-analytics organisation (sorry, can't find the link right now) which looked at the raw data from the opinion polls and made a call a few days before the election which predicted the outcome fairly accurately.
Nate Silver called it badly wrong, in this instance.
They're not even mentioning those who are happy to lie to a pollster, just to further confuse things.
Because both parties are backed by the same lobbyists, it really doesn't matter who you vote for any longer. It's just that the donkey and the elephant like to shout at each other a lot, so that the plebes might not notice that there is effectively only one party left.
Maybe now we'll see an election where we don't actually know who has won until the voting is complete.
All of this polling has created a self-fulfilling prophecy where sketchy polls predict a winner, undecided people vote for that winner to make their vote "count," and others for or against the the projected winner don't bother to vote. Meanwhile, political candidates don't really bother to take a stand on issues unless they have verified via polling that XX% of their constituents support their position.
Let's get back to a situation where the news corporations and the 10% of the population with landlines (who answer the phone) don't actually decide the entirety of public opinion.
Public polls are meaningless mostly because of the method and partly because calculating the % glosses over concepts such as the Electoral College, which are strategic determinants.
Regarding the method, elections is all about getting the majority of votes of the people who go to vote. Hence voter suppression tactics (aka negative ads that depress the voters that would vote for the other side). The parties spend all their time canvassing their regions to determine who favors their parties, who doesn't, who is going to vote, who needs a ride to go vote, etc. They make extensive use of people databases. The parties can then predict more accurately how things are going to go and also plan how to distribute their resources (i.e. spread out the workers) to maximize the only goal of attain Electoral College majority. This sure beats a firm calling 2,000 random people and calling it a poll.
This is not to say that the parties' internal polls are perfect. Shit happens, like people turning en masse against a candidate at the last minute. But in comparison with public polls, the latter are basically just a crap shoot with a bet on 7.
How I vote is none of the pollster's business. And it's not like the politicians would even listen to my opinion anyway. Vote all incumbents out, always!
Polls are not reliable, they rely on opinion and the way you ask the question.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Politicians are becoming less and less reliable heading into the 2016 election, too. We should do a study.
...where it's not really a poll at all, but a disguised negative campaign ad. At this point, if I don't recognize the number, I don't answer it. Period.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
What does he do that's different from what everyone else does?
Also, I'm not going to vote and I don't believe in democracy any more. :)
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Let's say polls were way off resulting in newspapers with headline errors. But the printed newspaper has gone wayside along with all those "hard to reach" people on landlines. However there is the internet. I did a screen grab of news website a week or two after the 2012 election that has a Romney infotainment article on the side, "we're confident we will win this election."
mfwright@batnet.com
high-quality research much more expensive to do, so there is less of it
Good. Fewer polls means fewer people trying to intrude on my time. I don't know why pollsters think they have a right to rudely cold-call people and take up their time - without giving anything back. But it does seem that more and more people are becoming resistant to their interruptions.
If fewer polls means less punditry and less time talking about inconsequential "what-ifs" on TV in the seemingly years long run up to elections, then that can only be a good thing for viewers and all us ordinary people. Sadly the demise of political polls seems to have been taken over by equally pointless and even more trivial time spent debating what political whimsy happens to be trending on Twitter. I guess the political programmes will always find ways to fill up their hours with mindless banter.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Someone's desire to poll me doesn't translate into my requirement to be accessible or responsive.
Only Voter ID can solve the problem, all voters must have a landline phone to certify their participation in the election, to do otherwise is a grave threat to the integrity of the election system.
Have they ever considered text polling / text surveys to solve this crisis? Does the FCC's interpretation of the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act extend to texting? I would be a lot more likely to respond to a text poll than a phone call from an unknown number whose intent I haven't yet determined. Usually these kinds of calls are just from automated credit scam calls anyway.
Does anybody vote differently because of pools? This is not like we have instant-runoff voting. Just the only thing pools results may affect is voter turnout and to do that you don't need reliable numbers.
I agree that there could be positive effects if polling became useless, but there could also be negative effects. It's not clear to me which effects will be stronger. My guess is that it'll be a wash.
Two possible examples:
-I think that politicians have a good idea of what their base wants even without detailed polls. If politicians have no idea what the rest of the electorate wants, maybe politicians will pander even more to their base because it's a known quantity.
-When there's real hysteria, politicians don't need polls. Take the recent ebola scare/hysteria. I don't think politicians jumped on it because of polls.
If the politicians didn't actually know how people would vote, maybe they would focus on having an ideology, principles, articulating clear policies and talking with constituents.
the growth of cellphones and the decline in people willing to answer surveys
I have had a few of these polls call me. They ask every permutation there is. After about the third one I declined. Sorry I am about to walk into a store and you want to have an hour of 'would you vote for x or y' or 'what is your perception on a scale of 1 to 10 on candidate x'.
Sorry not my problem on how you rank.
Now polling comes down to who has the most followers on Twitter and who's Facebook page gets the most "likes".
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I've been burned by interminable pools too. I'd be a lot more willing to answer polls if the people on the phone started with something like, "Hello. We're doing a political poll that has X questions and will take about Y minutes. Are you interested?" Y would be 3-4 minutes tops. I'd answer that type of poll.
I'm sure you will get at least 100% response.
Maybe even 1000% response.
. Today, a majority of people are difficult or impossible to reach on landline phones. One problem is that the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act has been interpreted by the Federal Communications Commission to prohibit the calling of cellphones through automatic dialers, in which calls are passed to live interviewers only after a person picks up the phone. To complete a 1,000-person survey, it's not unusual to have to dial more than 20,000 random numbers, most of which do not go to actual working telephone numbers.
Landline phones? Come on this isn't the 1960s. I would have expected the same to include "party line" in the same sentence.
The 1991 CPA doesn't stop every fucking political action committee from spamming your with calls to vote for some idiot; a nuisance that was allowed explicitly by the act.
Just conduct your survey on twitter or facebook and pay the devil his due.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
http://www.transhumanist-party...
we're doomed...
Let's start out with how they choose what exchanges to poll. Until I moved into a specific neighborhood in a city I used to live in, I'd *NEVER* been called, which told me that "likely voters" mean "don't call any exchange where it's heavily black or 'ethnic'".
Second, I have *real* trouble with the idea that 1k or 2k people will give an accurate view of how half a million folks are going to vote; rather, that kills excellent candidates who don't have big money backers from getting to be voted on.
Finally, there are the polls - I'd say at least half of the national ones - that will be sure to do their best to come up with the numbers that the folks paying them want to see. I mean, show me a poll that Faux News uses that doesn't show what they want their audience to hear?
mark
Just ask Rachel from Cardholder Services or the guy who's installing security systems in my area that I either already own or don't need.
Not noteable, IMO a rubbish article.
It's a Transhumanist idea: http://www.transhumanist-party...
we're doomed...
Perhaps if politicians actually waited until 2016 to start campaigning for 2016, we wouldn't already be sick and tired of the election and might be willing to answer questions about it. Instead, if we think of President Obama's term as a year they've started showering us with ads for Christmas and it's only late July or early August. Frankly I feel like awarding each of the candidates a load of coal or perhaps reindeer dung in their stockings.
With the activists in CA using public data to get people fired for supporting Prop8, and the gay marriage supporters who drove Brendan Eich from his job at Mozilla (for having the same position on gay marriage in 2008 that both Obama and Hillary had) combined with the massive and well-publicized and bragged-about ability of left wing groups to vacuum-up and analyze data (Facebook, Google, the Obama campaign, etc), combined with the proven history leftists have for being hyper-vindictive to anybody who disagrees with them, have convinced a huge part of the population to refuse to answer pollsters. Unfortunately in politics there is a tendency for any bad behavior by one side to be adopted by the other side as "the next big thing" rather than something everybody should back away from, so there is no guarantee that with a future unforeseen political change some other group could go on a rampage and oppress their opponents based on data mining.
I have personally always refused to answer on two principles: privacy (my thoughts are my own and none of your business) and opposition to political manipulation (why help politicians figure out how better to lie to you?). I have more-recently however discovered that most of the people I know seem to have migrated to my position regarding pollsters. I know a family that used to be in the Nielson TV ratings system, and they have gotten out and no longer answer pollsters either after they started to feel like specimens under a microscope.
All this analysis of people used to be creepy, but in the post-Mozilla world it is no longer safe for anybody who rejects group-think.
ahh ... so the lying narrative YOU'VE been fed is the true one
I'll answer (more) polls when they start subsidizing my home phone. Since that seems to be the only legit use for it lately, I assume Sharon from Google services and 'Microsoft support' aren't willing to chip in :(
Just wait until you are one of the last thousand landlines and you get EVERY poll call :O
When they started to be used instead as a way to push a political agenda. ie. An agenda wearing a poll's clothing. This is true often enough that I no longer participate in any polls.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Political polls are exempt from do-not-call lists and every Sept-early November my phone rings several times each evening. I can ask to not be called and I will continue to get called over and over.
This year I've decided if I can't make phone polls stop calling I will actively work against them by lying my ass off. I'll tell them I'm voting for Darth Vader because he's honest about where he stands on social issues and foreign policy. The most important issue in this election season is freeing minds from the Matrix.
It also never hurts to answer every question with "Hodor"
Most of the political poll calls I get, and I get them regularly, are focused on the 2016 Presidential election.
The primaries are still 7-10 months away. I am uninterested. I hang up.
Call me in November, when campaigning should be heating up. It's MUCH too early.
And yes, I know this is driven by the candidates, money, and the media. Those points don't make me more eager to participate so early.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
One problem is that the line between random sample polling and individual data mining has become blurred. In 1991 it wasn't typical to gather the individual preferences of an entire population and put them in a database somewhere. Both the GOP and the DNC made heavy use of data mining in the last couple of races. Now, whenever someone responds to a political poll, in the back of their mind they are thinking: how will my responses affect my credit score? My likelihood of an income tax audit? My eligibility for entitlement programs? While you think this is tin foil hat paranoia, consider that indulging that paranoia doesn't really cost anything. Why risk it, without a compelling reason? The especially heavy handed way the DNC went about drumming up votes in the last presidential race (the public shame approach) is just one example of how things have gotten out of hand. No one wants their details leaked to a media hit list because they responded the wrong way on what was supposed to be an anonymous poll. The camps have simply gotten too aggressive, and it is chilling frank discussion. The same thing is happening in the UK as well.
It was actually the phenomenon of 'Shy Tories(1)'; people who told pollsters they were definitely voting Labour, but in the booth, they didn't. As to what they were thinking, maybe a better shot at personal gain under the Tories, and the rest of the country can sod right off? Or a protest vote against Milliband personally for being an abject failure at retail politics (along with that adenoidal voice)? Hell, maybe it was just the vague thrill of screwing up the predictions, knowing your own vote really would never change your life in any meaningful way.
(1) AKA, Quiet Bat People
I've been reading this type of story for years, and then the election unfolds just as the polls predicted.
My guess is that the sellers of newspapers etc. are just trying to convince people that this is an exciting topic, so they publish these anti-poll theories and a few suggested explanations that they reckon are credible.
Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
What difference does it make if I put stock in polls, or not?
How will Hillary know what to say if she doesn't have a poll to follow?
It's ironic that we share more of ourselves than ever, pollsters should be having a hard time guessing what we think. From the millions of tweets and Facebook updates and Google searches we collectively make each day, plus modern text parsing and data mining techniques, we should be able to approximate something like the political pulse of the population. I have a feeling that we reveal a lot more with our online behavior than what we ever reveal to pollsters, it's just a matter of someone scooping up and processing the data.
Let's not forget people are SICK AND TIRED of sales and poll-calls.
Some of us purpposefully LIE to you people and waste your time when we have the time to do so.
Make the calls a waste of the callers' time and money and that will help get the point across.
This is a good thing. Polls are bad in several ways: they scare the public away from voting for smaller parties on the grounds that "they've got no chance". True maybe, but if people voted for what they believe in rather than who they think has a chance then they might eventually be pleasantly surprised by the result. They encourage the political parties to focus only on the issues they think will play well at the polls. And they feed vast quantities of turgid TV time. Who cares, anyway? We all find out who won once the real votes are cast.
The margin between the major parties has been shrinking over the last 30 years, mostly due to ambivalence. It really matters less and less who you vote for as the deep pockets have already ensured that you have the choice of Tweedledee or Tweedledum, candidates who will do their bidding no matter what their party affiliation.
Here's my previous rant on the subject with U.S. presidential election data since 1980:
Obama: Maybe It's Time For Mandatory Voting In US
The statistics on the previous N coin-tosses will not tell you who will win on the N+1 toss.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
The pollsters can blame telemarketing for this. The ban on recorded/automated calls and restrictions on other calls to cel phones came about because those calls cost the cel-phone owner money (either real money or minutes they paid real money for) to receive and telemarketing calls were chewing up too large a chunk for most people to just shrug off. People ignore or hang up on polling calls because at the start they sound indistinguishable from recorded/automated telemarketing calls and it simply isn't worth the time to listen long enough to separate the two when most of the time it'll be a telemarketer anyway. The laws came about because the telemarketers insisted on calling in such numbers, at such inconvenient hours, despite all protests by the public that it finally reached an intolerable level.
As usual, a small bunch of greedy, inconsiderate jerks screw things up for everybody else.
I actually still have a landline and I get calls every now and then for political polls. I used to participate. I don't anymore. Some of the polls are very slanted, sometimes simply in favor of one issue. I live in what is strongly a red state and most of the polls ask questions about Republican strategies I rarely agree with. I'm not really sure what the purpose is as my state is about as red as they come and it's not likely to ever be competitive for Democrats for decades. I'm not sure I feel comfortable telling strangers that no, I don't agree with whatever the Republican cause du jour is since I'm expressing what is most likely a minority opinion in a state where differences of opinion are not respected at all. The other problem I have is that the polls are too long. You can count on 5 minutes minimum, maybe 10 if you're unlucky. After a few questions I quickly get weary of the time consuming formats they insist on using and I refuse to do any of them anymore.
By the way, I've believed for years that a significant minority of people in the US deliberately lie on polls to throw them off. I've known since 2004 that you can't trust the polls at all.
the lower the response rate the more you can skew the results with bogus answers. Rather than hang up embrace the opportunity to shape the future positions of our government by creatively staking out you position. Don't think of it as a nuisance to be avoid but rather a chance to screw with politicians.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
What do they (pollsters) expect?
I got a call last Saturday morning from an "unknown caller" at 8:30am (which woke me up). I ignored it. Again at 9:30, again at 10:30. Finally I was near enough the phone (actually, Google Voice on an iPad Mini) to pick up. I asked who it was and got a personal name, then I asked who they were calling from and then they admitted it was "ANZ Research" or something that sounds like that. They said they were calling to get opinions on various political topics.
There's no way in hell I'm going to give survey answers to someone who's dumb enough to call before noon on the weekend. Google Voice lets me block numbers, which I suspect is why they disabled Caller ID, so they could sneak through. I refused to even confirm my name, and told them to take my number off their list and never call again.
I figured it was probably a push poll anyway.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
"Hi, my name is Robert (but my real name is Apu Nahasapeemapetalon), can I please having just 15 minutes of your time to answer a survey?"
"Uh, sure" .... 45 minutes later ...
"Umm, I'm going to hang up now. Please never call me again."
Seriously, I got called for one of these things on the last go-round and it was like a PhD defense.
On the side for dipping!
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
Just about everyone in the polling industry was significantly off-base in the recent UK elections. Literally no-one in the mainstream was calling the actual result in the run up to election day, as far as I know. The debate was all about who would be leading a coalition and how the electoral math would stack up to determine which parties would be likely to join. Even the party leaders changed their tune in the last days of the campaign to reflect an assumption that they wouldn't be governing alone and who they governed with would be a significant question.
Ironically, having won an unexpected absolute majority this may have left David Cameron and the Conservative Party leadership in a bit of a bind. I suspect some of the policies they were promoting before the election were things they didn't really want to do but advocated for popularity reasons, hoping that after the election they would be able to "reluctantly" negotiate away some of those commitments as part of a coalition agreement. Similarly, some of their more unpopular policies now won't have a partner party or two to act as scapegoats next time if those policies don't work out well. Given that their working majority is also very small, which leaves the leadership very vulnerable to disruption by rebel MPs on controversial issues such as Europe, ironically they might have been better off leading a strong coalition than winning. The pollsters and commentators and political journalists didn't consider any of these issues in much detail in their pre-election coverage, if they even acknowledged the possibilities at all.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Polls are the only chance that a third-party candidate has with plurality voting.
Without polls, everyone shows up on election day and has to choose between voting for the lesser evil of the two standard parties, or possibly wasting their vote on a third party candidate. Afterwards they get to wonder whether that third party candidate might have won had everyone not been in fear of wasting their vote.
Since polls are not a real vote, people considering voting for that third party candidate have no reason to fear wasting their vote in a poll. Thus, the poll results tell us how the election would turn out if no one feared wasting their vote and instead voted for their true preference.
So if that third party candidate is close to winning in the polls, then a vote for him isn't so likely to be wasted, and so people will vote for him. However, as long as he's only getting a few percent in polls, voting for him in the real election would be a waste of one's vote, since the polls aren't so inaccurate that his few percent is going to turn into 34% in the real election.
It's not only robocalls and the rubbish you mention, but I believe a disproportionate hunger for information about us in general.
They scrape web sites.
They pilfer personal information we give corps for other reasons and trade it.
They snoop on us via social media.
They snoop on our purchasing habits as much as possible.
They pilfer search queries.
And then on top of all that they seriously also expect us to take out time to straight up answer them even more questions via telephone?
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---
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WRONG - "Almost ALL Ads Blocked"'s PAID NOT TO by default-> http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/...
&
ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...
UBlock/Adblock = far less efficient on CPU & RAM (added messagepassing, SLOW usermode vs. hosts in kernelmode) & NEITHER does a fraction of what hosts do in more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity.
---
"your system blocks fewer ads" by andymadigan (792996) on Sunday June 14, 2015 @12:04AM (#49907001)
See above: + hosts do MORE w/ less via 1st link above!
---
"I'm more than happy to spend an extra 1% of my computer's power to block far more ads than your shitty idea" by andymadigan (792996) on Sunday June 14, 2015 @12:04AM (#49907001)
You're 'happy' being illogical & stupid?
AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU use inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth...
+
ClarityRay defeats it & NOT hosts (clarityray BLOCKS addons via native browser methods).
---
YOU started it -> http://apple.slashdot.org/comm... & here too http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
I finished YOU WITH IT all above!
APK
P.S.=> Howard Stark in "Capt. America" - hosts (Cap's Shield) vs. AdBlock & variants (steel):
"It's stronger than steel & 1/3rd the weight"
"Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" & "eat your words"
... apk
"Chrome has thankfully started warning users who try to download it." - by andymadigan (792996) on Sunday June 14, 2015 @03:48PM (#49909947)
Google's going to have a tough time explaining away multiple PROOFS below that my ware's COMPLETELY CLEAN:
MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee who also has the source & verified it safe too) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus per this VERY recent testing of them all http://www.av-test.org/en/news...
&
It's GUARANTEED safe & clean per it being checked by 57 antivirus programs recently in BOTH its 64-bit model https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
+
In its 32-bit model also https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
* :)
In case you hadn't noticed it, like when you made your PUNY THREATS effetely *trying* to "blackmail me" on Hilton Hotels here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... ?
(which I could give 2 fucks about, I made the money already on a successfully done large scale project with them on contract)
I SMOKED YOU TOTALLY @ EVERY TURN, & who started it twice here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... AND HERE TOO http://apple.slashdot.org/comm... saying "I should die painfully" etc. - et al?
You failed badly on all accounts.
APK
P.S.=> Especially funny is that you work for CLOUDWORDS (an advertiser affiliate of Marketo) which tips your hand & PROVED YOUR ILL MOTIVES for your stupidity, running away from this most of all -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
... apk
"uBlock is using 33MB of RAM" - by andymadigan (792996) on Friday June 12, 2015 @10:31PM (#49902053)
Inefficient: Hosts @ 3-11mb w/ current data & does things adblock variants can't & U RAN FROM IT http://apple.slashdot.org/comm... ).
UBlock uses 63++ MB & AdBlock = 128mb++ -> http://www.ghacks.net/2014/06/...
SCREENSHOT -> http://cdn.ghacks.net/wp-conte...
BEST UBlock's done = 38mb/ABP = 64mb -> http://www.extremetech.com/wp-... From http://www.extremetech.com/wp-...
* See 'p.s.' below - Says all (& I didn't do the saying!)
---
"which blocks more ads? Answer: uBlock/Adblock" by andymadigan (792996) on Sunday June 14, 2015 @12:04AM (#49907001)
WRONG - "Almost ALL Ads Blocked"'s PAID NOT TO by default-> http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/...
&
ABP too http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...
UBlock/Adblock = far less efficient on CPU & RAM (added messagepassing, SLOW usermode vs. hosts in kernelmode) & NEITHER does a fraction of what hosts do in more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity.
---
"your system blocks fewer ads" by andymadigan (792996) on Sunday June 14, 2015 @12:04AM (#49907001)
See above: + hosts do MORE w/ less via 1st link above!
---
"I'm more than happy to spend an extra 1% of my computer's power to block far more ads than your shitty idea" by andymadigan (792996) on Sunday June 14, 2015 @12:04AM (#49907001)
You're 'happy' being illogical & stupid?
AdBlock's 4++gb & 100% CPU use inefficiency -> https://blog.mozilla.org/nneth...
+
ClarityRay defeats it & NOT hosts (clarityray BLOCKS addons via native browser methods).
---
YOU started it -> http://apple.slashdot.org/comm... & here too http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
I finished YOU WITH IT all above!
APK
P.S.=> Howard Stark in "Capt. America" - hosts (Cap's Shield) vs. AdBlock & variants (steel):
"It's stronger than steel & 1/3rd the weight"
"Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" & "eat your words"
... apkb
As a follower, how will I know how to vote? I only vote for the apparent winner, because I don't want to waste my vote, and because I trust that everyone else puts thought into their votes so I don't have to. Without the polls to tell me who the winner is supposed to be, how will I decide?
--Jaborandy
"Chrome has thankfully started warning users who try to download it." - by andymadigan (792996) on Sunday June 14, 2015 @03:48PM (#49909947)
Google's going to have a tough time explaining away multiple PROOFS below that my ware's COMPLETELY CLEAN:
MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee who also has the source & verified it safe too) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus per this VERY recent testing of them all http://www.av-test.org/en/news...
&
It's GUARANTEED safe & clean per it being checked by 57 antivirus programs recently in BOTH its 64-bit model https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
+
In its 32-bit model also https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
* :)
In case you hadn't noticed it, like when you made your PUNY THREATS effetely *trying* to "blackmail me" on Hilton Hotels here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... ?
(which I could give 2 fucks about, I made the money already on a successfully done large scale project with them on contract)
I SMOKED YOU TOTALLY @ EVERY TURN, & who started it twice here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... AND HERE TOO http://apple.slashdot.org/comm... saying "I should die painfully" etc. - et al?
You failed badly on all accounts.
APK
P.S.=> Especially funny is that you work for CLOUDWORDS (an advertiser affiliate of Marketo) which tips your hand & PROVED YOUR ILL MOTIVES for your stupidity, running away from this most of all -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
... apk
Then the pollsters and the news media can STFU and stop trying to influence how people vote. Just report who won and get back to reporting facts.
"The second unsettling trend is rapidly declining response rates, reaching levels once considered unimaginable. In the late 1970s, pollsters considered an 80 percent response rate acceptable, but by 2014 the response rate has fallen to 8 percent."
Who in their sane mind would dare to answer questions relating to Political views in the age of data retention/aggregation and profiling?
Why is it a bad thing for me to not know who other people are planning to vote for? Shouldn't I be making up my own mind on election day, not just "going with the flow"?
Why is it a bad thing that politicians don't know how their latest soundbytes are playing with the public? Shoudn't they just be being themselves and representing their platform?
I can't wait for accurate polling to die. All it has done over the past 50-60 years is ruin the democratic process.
It will make it that much harder for the media to turn everything into a horse race. No data, means it will be difficult for them to gin up anything.
This decline in polls is VERY welcome. In fact, it's about the only way democracy will have a chance going forward.
The old style poll was democratic in nature: Do you believe in god? What car do you like? Why do you buy that brand of TV?
This was used without excess interpretation, and made available. Pollsters were sure to get a decent response rate, they were sure to get data that was statistically relevant, etc.
This gave polls a magic power: people believed they were true.
Where power goes, corruption follows.
Modern polls:
1)- Hardly ever list their rate of response.
This little trick allows the pollster to get what he wants his poll to say. It also can make for wildly sensational polls in general.
2)- Often is a form of advertisement or political mindfuck.
Ex: Are you Christian? Who will you be voting for in the next election?
Asking the questions in this order makes you more likely to vote for a candidate you perceive as more in line with the FIRST question. So if the first question is about God, you will be (statistically) more likely to actually vote, and more likely to vote for a Republican. No, no, you say, Reasons. First, you are quite possibly incorrect. Second, even if you are correct in saying that this can't possibly effect YOU, just pretend that it DOES effect everyone else, including those you know and love. They wouldn't do it if it did not literally make votes out of nothing.
3)- Way too meta, fuck that noise.
Current polls are often done with a bunch of other questions whose actual goals are to assess the level of corporate threat from different demographics and locations. You could think you are answering questions about kitchen cleaning products, but in reality many of the questions are just there as smoke screen (and no one cares about the thought or time you spend on them), and the "real" questions are to determine the level of political savy of a certain area, the likelihood of a future lawsuit, etc.
4)- Clearly not a civil service.
Polls used to be perceived something like a civil service- the companies, who have a responsibility to make the world a better place (this was not so long ago a thing- before the court decision saying that corporations had to act to maximize profits for shareholders), would get information on how to trade off reliability, quality, and cost, to make your life better. The politicians, always interested in Democracy, would figure out how to better represent people. The scientists, always interested in metrics, would figure out what you wanted and research in that direction. I don't know how true this actually was, but that was the PERCEPTION. Even if you don't keep up with all the psych tricks that any profitable or powerfocussed entity is employing, everyone sort of knows that no one is taking their opinions and making a better world for everyone- they are figuring out where you aren't looking so they can slash the pound of flesh with less of a fight.
This used to be a census. Now, it's intel.
Pollsters can fuck right off. With some exceptions- actual science still needs polls, and that's sad for them, but they are a rounding error in the giant race to "solve the democracy problem" that companies face (they don't like you voting elsewhere with your dollars) and that politicians face (they don't like that elections are not safe and determined in their favor).
It is rational to avoid polls, unless you are in possession of expert knowledge of the poll taker's integrity- never the case.
Stats from the last congressional election:
o 14% approval rate -- that was a poll
o 94% re-election rate -- that was actual voters.
o In the same election, national turnout was 36.3%.
I think the advent of the net's new accessibility to information outside of the laundered and agitprop driven channels, the money-based reasoning of SCOTUS, the lobbyist factor, the obvious malfeasance of Fox news, MSNBC, the blatantly unconstitutional legislation coming out of congress... and so on... all combine to give a very large portion of the people who might otherwise vote a sense that the system is so massively corrupt that there just is no point to it.
When you ask them -- polling asks them -- they tell you that. That's why the 14% approval rate.
But the only people voting are the droolers who watch MSNBC and Fox. They're agenda- and plank-driven (abortion! guns! perverts! terrorists! taxes! etc.) and that's driving them to or from one party or the other. And *they* are controlling the narrative here; that's why the polls just aren't -- and won't be -- working in the current context.
It's just an idea. But the data is hard data. Something has to explain it. It's too skewed to be any kind of random happening.
I actually do vote, but I have to say, it's pretty damned fruitless. This is a red (very red) state, and so that's the way the pendulum swings here, regardless of how I vote. If I vote progressive on something, it's not going to happen. If I vote conservative on something, it would have happened any way. This is not encouraging.
The only thing less productive than voting for progressive ideas here is voting for a third party candidate. Neither one does any good at all in terms of biasing the political system, but at least the progressive vote isn't buried or simply not mentioned. Sneered at, I think might be the most accurate term around here, actually. But they at least talk about it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Plain and simple. They learned their lesson last election. You have to not only control TV media, you MUST control internet news and polls.
I bet facebook and google have pretty good ideas on who is going to vote, and who they will vote for. The world of machine learning.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
IMHO Romney could have won it if his supporters hadn't cheated the Ron Paul supporters so blatantly, publicly, and sometimes violently, that they alienated, not just them, but many of the other factions of the Republican Party as well.
Many Paulites (and others) will never again vote for Romney, or any candidate supported by the Neocon machine (alias the "GOP Power Structure) or at least by a number of major figures who were involved in the corruption. The thinking is "If that's the way they treat their own party members in a primary/caucus, they can NOT be allowed to control the mechanisms of the Federal Government."
There are five states that Romney lost by substantially less than the number of people who actually voted for Paul in the primaries/caucuses, with an aggregate number of electoral votes to give him the win. If you assume that these Paul people would have voted for Romney if he'd won the nomination without massive cheating (as he probably would have) and instead sat it out (or enough other Republicans behaved that way to make up for Paulites who didn't) it would have been President Romney.
On the other hand, if Paul had managed to win the primary he'd likely have trounced Obama. He can pull support from much of the Democratic Party's base and enough of the typical Republican voters to make up for any that might have sat out HIS run.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If they ask you for your political opinion in the streets or on the phone, most likely the result will never see the light of day. Because the vast majority of polls are commissioned by political parties or candidates for their benefit, not yours or the public. They basically want to identify target groups and know if and how to spend campaign resources to turn around the target group in their direction. And they won't identify their customers, so you never know whether you are helping your preferred party or candidate, or people opposed to your opinion.
If your opinion is the one their customers like, chances are that your candidate will not show up in you area anyway because this would just be a waste time and money for the campaign. If it is the other way, they will pest you with more advertizing and get the candidate you oppose into town to shake hands, hug babies, and blatantly lie to the public.
So tell me again: How does the lack of quality of a political poll affect you personally?
The poll results you get presented in the news are a waste of time and money, anyway. The cheap and outdated method of sitting on ones ass and just calling landlines at random is a good way of getting an unreliable and biased result from the start. And the news channel will have different poll results to choose from and will present the one that manipulates you in their own political direction. Or do you really expect a professional, competent, and neutral presentation of unbiased political facts from a news network like e.g. FOX? If so, there is a bridge I would like sell to you, real cheap - I inherited it from my uncle, a Nigerian prince!
Count me in the no response group. Polls do not do the public any good.
From what I've seen lately, it looks like just about every discussion group excludes participants who don't drink the chosen flavor of Kool-Aid. That said we the people are just about sick of the manipulation and telling of narratives rather than of facts. So it's no wonder people don't like to do polls.
Besides just about all media today seems more like propaganda than information. If they ever told us the truth, would we even know?
What the Republican establish did to Ron Paul was pretty despicable. Even the mainstream media picked up on it and noticed he was getting shut out even when he won support polls. However...
On the other hand, if Paul had managed to win the primary he'd likely have trounced Obama. He can pull support from much of the Democratic Party's base and enough of the typical Republican voters to make up for any that might have sat out HIS run.
In no world does Paul come close to beating Obama, or anyone else in the general election. That was a pipe dream of Paul's small, but very vocal fan base. I liked Paul. He seemed like a good person and actually reasoned through the questions he was asked, a rarity these days, nor did he seem to flip-flop, another rarity. Then I went to his own web site to see what he thought about the issues.
Ron Paul's problem is that most Americans are not libertarians, nor do they hold libertarian ideals. Lots of folks liked his non-interventionist foreign policy (though they also want the US to stand up for its allies). Lots of folks like his positions against torture and the Patriot Act. But he drives people away when he calls global warming a hoax. He drives almost everyone away with his desire to eliminate most federal agencies. He's anti-abortion, opposed federal Civil Rights Acts, and has made a number of controversial racist statements. He claims Edward Snowden did a great service to the American people, and while I may personally agree with him on that, I think another enormous slice of people in this country do not.
Ron Paul would have been easy pickings had he been the Republican nominee for President. It doesn't excuse the shafting he got from the establishment, but let's not pretend that the American populace is libertarian.
What if the news media, instead of reporting on polls and how poling results might alter candidate strategies and all the other "horse race" ephemera, reported on the positions of the candidates? And if there was no news about a candidate's positions, they instead reported on the positions of candidates who had positions?
Of course, they might have to scrape the bottom of the barrel, and report on candidates who were not Democrats and not Republicans.
Terrible idea. It could mean the end of elections as we know them. And wouldn't that be awful?
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Casteism