I'm starting to becoming a little suspicious of the Presidential Polls. All the polls are showing McCain and Obama are either tied...or McCain is up a point. There is no way this can be accurate. I'm not saying that there's no way McCain can be winning. Actually, quite the opposite. The thing is, there is no way you can conduct a random poll everyday and come up with the exact same result every time. That's not the way randomness works. If the polls were truly accurate...there should be polls that show Obama up 15 points or McCain up 20 points. They shouldn't be common...in fact, they should be very rare...but they should still exist.
Here's a very easy exercise to try to show how randomness works on a very basic level. Grab a deck of cards and pull ten cards at random. How many red and how many black cards did you pull? 5 and 5? Do it again...and again. Try it 20 times. How many time did you get 5 black and 5 red? I tried it this weekend. Out of 20 tries...I only got 5 black and 5 red 4 times...that's barely 20%. That means 80% of the time...I got inaccurate readings. I know this isn't exactly how polling works...but the polls are still supposed to be random. So how can all the "random" calls come out exactly the same every time. If you don't know who you're supposedly calling, then there should be occasion where you call 70% Obama supporters...or 90% McCain supporters. Again, these should be rare...but they should still occur. If the results come out the exact same every time...then they can't be random.
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ReplyDeleteDude i usually love your rantings (Palin=wicked witch of the Klondike), but do you have any clue how polling actually works? This is not to say presidential polling is perfect (far from it). It usually is a meticulous art/science/guesscraft of predicting the composition of likely voters—not randomness.
ReplyDeleteThat said, to steal from Mr. Twain (or whomever said it first): “There are 3 types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Statistics and random polls are different creatures. Take a look at all the different polls. many of them will have fairly similar results. Places like Rasmussen (run by an ultra conservative Christian) accurately predicted the outcome of the 04 election when all the other polls had Kerry winning. And Rassmusen tends to take the smallest portion of the public...around 1000.
ReplyDeleteBut then take a look at the Quinnipiac polls which take a much larger sample of the public base...closer to 5000 and they wildly different results...yet places like Rassmusen are the industry standard.
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