Comments on: The facts, ma’am, just the facts

By: brkily

brkily — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 04:25:39 +0000

if polls are being manipulated to show bush ahead, it would certainly make bush wins election results – less suspicious and harder to challenge…

By: sagenz

sagenz — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 22:00:48 +0000

so, uh what happened with rather. try http://www.nationalreview.com/dkonig/konig200409201016.asp for some new info

By: BigMacAttack

BigMacAttack — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 17:22:39 +0000

A good way of detecting trends but how useful is it for predicting? How bad does Bush’s A/D ratings need to be before the US will elect a Democrat? Apparently pretty bad. I would be really worried about this if I were a Democrat. I think the debates and the spin from the debates will be important. But right now I am amazed at how well Bush is doing. (In part this is probably because I find Bush so under whelming) I live in NJ and I actually saw some Elect Bush and Elect Kerry commercials last night. That was topped off with a front page story in my non-liberal local newspaper with the headline Thinking the Unthinkable about a possible Bush victory in NJ. That is really bad news for Kerry.

By: Ragout

Ragout — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 17:15:22 +0000

D^2, The criticism mostly isn’t about “biases in pollsters’ treatment of registered voters for the two parties.” It’s about the fact that the polls have shown a large jump in Republican ID. The critics would like to adjust this away. Since it’s shown up in multiple polls, the spike in Republican ID clearly isn’t due to the bias of particular polls with bad methodology or due to sampling on particular days. It’s a genuine Bush bounce, presumably due to the convention and the 9/11 anniversary. There are also some signs that the bounce is dissipating already (e.g. the recent Pew poll). I’ve been saying this for weeks. The bounce is genuine and the poll critics are letting their partisanship override their better judgement: http://ragout.blogspot.com/2004/09/bush-fires-up-base.html

By: evans

evans — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 07:09:54 +0000

Is it just me not understanding the chart, or aren’t Bush’s approval/disapproval numbers lower than when he took office, even lower than August 2001, and probably on a continued downward swing? So that would be a nice spike up on a path down to his personal low?

By: rc

rc — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 06:28:31 +0000

Like Prof. Pollkatz, I analyze the job approval spread here; but in addition, I also look at the trial heat spread. If you look, you’ll see that I use the two together to calculate poll bias or lean for each factor.

By: evans

evans — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 05:52:03 +0000

By: racer

racer — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 04:27:40 +0000

Let’s hear ‘em, Zizka. If there’s money to be made by corrupting polls, I’m 95% confident that it’s being conspired about as we blog.

By: James Surowiecki

James Surowiecki — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 04:00:39 +0000

“I spit on the wisdom of the crowd.” Well, that’s the first time I’ve heard that one. Makes all the other reviews seem positively glowing.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 02:41:39 +0000

Bad polls may have the beneficial effect of making Bush overconfident if he believes them. For example, he apparently thinks that WV is safe and MN winnable. If he mistakenly moves resources from WV to MN, he hurts himself. I think that the primary effect of these polls is to discourage Kerry people, though. I’ve toyed with conspiracy theories of the big (10-point) discrepancies but am not committed to one.

By: dnexon

dnexon — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 02:36:11 +0000

If polls remain roughly the same by election day, I predict with total confidence that George Bush or John Kerry will be elected President. A less snarky comment: if the state polls look like they do now by election day, the key factor will be turnout. We’re talking about within MOE spreads or barely outside of MOE spreads in enough states to swing the election. I repeat, if little changes, we really won’t know. Why were the polling predictions wrong in 1998, 2000 and 2002? Differential turnout. And we simply don’t have a good way to predict that. I spit on the wisdom of crowd :-). Those numbers only matter if they lead to a significant combination of bandwagoning (people like to vote for winners) and depressed turnout for the group that doesn’t expect to win.

By: frankly0

frankly0 — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 02:35:47 +0000

The recent upturn looks much less like a discontinuity and perhaps signals a trend. Huh? Does your graph go on longer than mine??

By: frankly0

frankly0 — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 02:30:35 +0000

Of course, the very problem with the latest polls, which problem you simply dismiss, has a clear impact on Bush’s approval ratings. If the number of Republicans is considerably overrepresented in these latest polls—and all kinds of evidence strongly suggest that it is—then Bush’s approval numbers would be unrealistically high. It would be a very useful thing to create a similar graph corrected for plausible Republican/Democrat representation. My guess is that mostly the shape would be the same, with the only difference being that the final Bush bounce would be much diminished, and already in rapid decline. And it is hardly reasonable to regard the overrepresentation of Republicans as just something to which we should pay no attention. It is an authentic anomaly, producing wildly, and otherwise inexplicably divergent polls. This is not a problem that goes away by ignoring it.

By: llld

llld — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 02:16:52 +0000

Interesting post. Regarding the last comment, I think it is unlikely that Kerry will win a close election. The Republican party seems to be much better positioned to use unethical practices or cheat. They run a ruthless operation. Both parties can and have used cheating (illegal) and unethical practices in American elections. But the more ruthless operators at this juncture of history seem to be the Republicans. The unethical tricks they have pulled off so far are numerous, including i) staging a “union” guy assaulting a man with his daughter. ii) pushing through a phony convicts list in Florida iii) getting an operative to force an investigation of Kerry’s medals (talk about craven) I am sure many readers can list more. So when the voting machine results come back in Ohio and Florida, I expect them to closely reflect Bush favorable polls. In fact, an uncanny resemblance is very likely.

By: epist

epist — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 01:39:19 +0000

My hasty and uneducated perusal of blog writing on the polls convinces me of a couple of things: 1) that there are two sets of data sources, those that have Bush up by more than 10, and those who have him up by less than 3. 2) The EC map is looking wierder, but Kerry is more likely to pull ahead in PA and NH, since he has polled well there all year, than Bush is to pull out CO, NV, ME, and WV, all of which just crawled into his favor in the margin of error. So my ex rectum argument is that, given this data, the bounce has to get better for Bush for him to win.