The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    The Polls. Again. Sigh.

    By PeraclesPlease on Fri, 05/27/2016 - 8:16am |

    Scanning RealClearPolitics, they've got the latest poll up from PPIC, showing Hillary up by only 2%, an improvement from 2 1/2 months ago when she led by 7%. Except nobody thought he was within 7% back in March, except for the most fiercely devoted. PPIC chose 552 likely voters - 2/3 to 1/3 of the typical poll.

    What's worse is you see news stories start to be written based on this latest "tightening" of the race. Except SurveyUSA released a poll today too, based on 803 likely voters. FiveThirtyEight weights SurveyUSA over 4 times what they weight PPIC (1.91 to .45), presumably because PPIC sucks. But if you go to HuffPost, you see the 2 averaged equal. And if you go to RealClearPolitics, PPIC hasn't even shown up yet.

    If you look at SurveyUSA over the last 1 1/2 months, you see 14%, 19%, 18%. Not a lot of tightening, & certainly not a big worry. Depending on which website you follow. For the rest, it's just more confirmation data of whatever they'd like to see.

    For example, a lead article in Politico declares "a new poll out Wednesday from the Public Policy Institute of California showed Clinton’s one-time 18-point lead over Sanders had dwindled to just 2 percentage points."

    In the reality tinged world, they might have noted a "one-time 7-point lead", since PPIC's poll has little to do with SurveyUSA's which shows a widening of 4 points in the same period, and a spread of 18% as of today. But that's not how polls work in the hands of "journalists" skilled in the dismal art of "making shit up". And indeed they do. As long as it buys clicks and eyeballs at least, feeding interest in the no-longer relevant campaign, there's certainly no reason for them to stop (aside from pride, but we can only imagine).

    Now, about that Trump/Sanders debate....

    Comments

    NY Times again uses the scary +2% number and ignores the +18% poll, even though they were released the same day and the latter had a higher sampling plus was stable for 2 previous periods and is more respected. It's so nice to have multiple polls so you can pick the one that pleases you, in this cas the scarier "horserace is still on" one. The small bit of consolation is they at least compared 2% to 7% for the same poll, rather than an average. 


    by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 05/28/2016 - 1:15am

    Going to be a lot of this.  Trump will lose because the US isn't that far gone, but the media will choose polls to make it look like he has a chance to the end.


    by Michael Maiello on Sun, 05/29/2016 - 5:02pm