Traditionally, this blog avoids getting overtly political. The reason being that many of the issues I discuss cross party lines here in the US. Both sides have some terrible ideas. Both sides have a few practical and good ones. Sometimes policies painted simply as evil, have a good intention behind them and may actually be better for people over the long term. One such unpopular policy I discussed recently here, would have older people working longer and take away some benefits for workers. For many people this seems heartless but for policy wonks like Alan Greenspan, he is concerned about long term economic growth which betters the lives of people through higher living standards. Stagnant economic growth could hurt as many if not more people, than cutting benefits, and it’s hard to quantify which is more beneficial.
Much of what is presented to us in the media and in political commentary is watered down to make it as simple as can be for the laymen and women. If that’s you then I would ask how you even stumbled upon this blog because you are not going to get that here. Problems which require complex policy solutions are often complex in themselves and can’t be just brushed aside with campaign slogans or painted as black and white decisions.
I don’t want to get into a policy discussion here but rather an analysis of why and how the mainstream (and alternative media too, they don’t get a pass) is doing the public such a disservice in their coverage of who is winning, what the issues are and what the consequences are.
The Media Doesn’t Think Critically
In 2016, Clinton had it in the bag. It was considered so much a foregone conclusion that many think that turnout was much lower for the democrat base due to the fact that people assumed Clinton would win. Almost all polls had Clinton leading nationally and in battleground states. No one, including the Clinton campaign, made an effort to check on their base in states like the Midwest where it was assumed Clinton would win. The polls said so, and the polls don’t lie. The only vocal exception may have been Michael Moore.
We all know how that turned out. The media and the pollsters were all shocked. Which is why I am so surprised that this cycle, the media is still so reliant on those same polls and assumes that they have fixed their issues and they are now accurate. I’m here to argue that they haven’t and the polls are still not accurate.
Rather than get into the details of why polls may still have a problem, many commentators and writers like to create a narrative, a story as to why. These stories are usually somewhat based in reality and then wildly extrapolated to produce an entertaining narrative that gets people talking, such as the “shy Trump voter.” They do this because it’s more entertaining to read, it gets more clicks and theories on statistical sampling aren’t sexy or hot topics. But the theory behind how the data is being collected and used matters because it can affect voter turnout amid attitudes. Additionally, I think that discerning voters actually do want to know if the polls are wrong and no big media outlets are providing an objective look at the issue, rather they are putting out meaningless garbage like this:
The headlines just read in a partisan manner such as “The polls could be wrong. But that may help Biden, not just Trump.” Just the title tells me the author is gunning for Biden and we won’t get a balanced or contrarian analysis here. They are playing to their readers wishful thinking. If the 2016 race was really close and polls are impartial, then we should have seen at least a significant minority of polls saying Trump has a strong chance when measured close to Election Day. Instead we saw wildly skewed data predicting a 90% chance that Clinton would win the election. Now we are seeing these same predictions again.
What’s Wrong With the Polls
I’m not a statistician, but I did get a math degree with a focus in statistics and probability, so I have some novice knowledge of the topic which is what makes me so critical right off the bat. The only reason I mention this is so that you as the reader don’t think I am coming to you with an English degree assuming that just because I went to college I somehow know better than you in a topic I know nothing of.
With that in mind, the one thing I do recall from my days as a math student was that choosing a representative sample is probably the most important part of the process in polling. This is because statistics as a social science really took off after the late 19th century when people like A.N. Kaier of Norway, argued that you could make inferences for the whole population even from a small sample as long as that sample was representative of the whole population. This is a key distinction that’s important to understand.
For example, a representative sample in the US would likely have a demographic makeup roughly similar to that of the US: balanced in terms of gender, about a third with higher education, over a quarter minority. These polls used to use the land line telephone, which 20 years ago almost everyone had, to randomly call people and ask their opinions on who they were likely to vote for, and they were relatively accurate.
When cell phones and increased screening of calls started to become more widespread about 15 years ago, political pollsters started to have real problems. We now know that they are more likely to speak with people with a college education. They also still utilize land lines, which are more likely used by older voters. They make up for this by utilizing online samples, which are more likely to skew younger and more liberal. Rather than toss out the whole old method, pollsters have been just patching together different methods in the hope that it will produce something accurate. Then after all this, many pollsters found their polls were still skewed towards more educated people because they found that educated people are more likely to answer and trust a pollster compared to those without a college education. So they “adjust” their responses to give them less weight in the sample. I have yet to find any guidance as to how they think they can just pick a different weight for these responses and how that weight will make sense but they do it anyway.
In addition, of the polls we are seeing in the media, only something like 20% of the polls are being adjusted in this way anyway. Hopefully pollsters are also taking into account the demographics of the state they are polling as well and not assuming national demographics apply at a state level which would seem obvious but so little is revealed of their methods we can’t be sure of even basic questions like this.
What’s worse is that the media just takes these figures at face value and runs with them. Their response is not to analyze the figures and critique them but set up two right and left opinion commentators to square off about some topic that will have no resolution at the end in the interest of “objectivity”, a bogus concept that journalism is still attempting to uphold.
How the Pollsters Claimed They Fixed All This
In fairness to the polling companies like the AAPOR and Pew Research, they did try to analyze where they went wrong after the 2016 election, but their answers weren’t comforting. This is where the concept of the “shy Trump voter” came from as well as the revelation that samples were skewed towards people with higher education that were more likely to vote for Clinton. The study also pointed to the fact that the poor polling in itself pointed to a lower turnout for one party (the Democrats) thinking that Clinton would be elected anyway.
The fixes for these issues lacked imagination at best. They claimed that they got it right nationally but that state polls are underfunded and need more money. This was then blamed on the decline in print journalism and of the traditional media in itself. But those are the customers of the polling companies. Of course they aren’t going to bash their customers and say, “hey stop asking for meaningless national polls when the state level outcomes determine the President” but it seems that’s the problem. If people really wanted to know these things and have them be more accurate, then there would surely be organizations that want to pay up. Who knows? Maybe the “good” state data is being privately provided to the campaigns themselves, they definitely have the funds for it.
And this leads me back to why I am skeptical of the most recent polls. If Biden leads by so much, why is Obama, who has been on the campaign bench this whole time, being brought out in Florida and Georgia at the last minute? My feeling is it’s none other than to increase the black turnout because the campaign feels it doesn’t have enough of other voters to beat Trump. This looks to be a desperate move. Even Michael Moore, that bell weather of the last Trump victory, is sounding the alarm again. Despite all the headlines saying it will be a Biden victory or that it will play out for weeks or days, we could be in for another shock of a swift Trump victory. If that happens, please let’s hold the polls and media accountable this time.
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