The Reliable Mainstream Media vs. The Alternative Scum

[Westside]

13 hours ago, ChiGoose said:

There was a study years ago that showed that Fox News viewers knew less about current events than people who did not consume the news. 
 

I’d love for someone to run a similar study today in our current media environment because it’s clear that the underlying foundation of MAGA is ignorance and emotional reactions. 

Exactly what your post is. It’s your typical ignorant, emotional response. You are unaware that describes you to a T! 

[Doc]

59 minutes ago, Westside said:

Exactly what your post is. It’s your typical ignorant, emotional response. You are unaware that describes you to a T! 

 

Never mind this "study" was likely done by the same people who said/believed that the scores of video clips of Biden doing something showing his senility were just "cheap fakes."

[leh-nerd skin-erd]

2 hours ago, ChiGoose said:

 

Selzer famously never herds her polls. She puts the work out there and she's right more often than wrong (she has had misses before). But because people don't understand polling/statistics and because (as you continually like to demonstrate) the MAGA population seems especially ignorant on how things work, they come up with conspiracies that don't make sense if given even the smallest amount of scrutiny.

 

Let's say Selzer intentionally fudged her poll to boost Harris numbers. Why? What would that accomplish? A good media cycle? In an environment where all of the polls were showing the race basically even, the Selzer poll stood as a clear outlier. Remember that at the time, the Harris campaign was running on a theme of being the underdog. They did not want their voters to get complacent (which seems like a pretty accurate concern considering how things ended up). A popular poll showing numbers that would indicate a Harris landslide would go *against* the campaign's messaging at the time.

 

Imagine you have a classroom of 20 students, you give each of them a coin and tell them to flip it 100 times and mark down how many times it came up heads. 19 of the 20 students reported that it landed heads 50 times while one of them reported heads 57 times. Who do you think was being honest vs who do you think was fudging the numbers?

I really enjoy reading your posts, occasional condescending tone notwithstanding.  

 

I don't know Ann Selzer from Alka Seltzer.  To answer your question, one reason she might fudge her numbers would be an attempt to influence voter turnout.  Another might be she has a drinking problem and screwed up the number but is unwilling to admit it.  A third might be she's being blackmailed by the KGB in  keeping with the "Russians in our midst" era in American politics. 

 

Regardless, she's a professional pollster and it is what it is. 

[B-Man]

8 minutes ago, leh-nerd skin-erd said:

I really enjoy reading your posts, occasional condescending tone notwithstanding.  

 

I don't know Ann Selzer from Alka Seltzer.  To answer your question, one reason she might fudge her numbers would be an attempt to influence voter turnout.  Another might be she has a drinking problem and screwed up the number but is unwilling to admit it.  A third might be she's being blackmailed by the KGB in  keeping with the "Russians in our midst" era in American politics. 

 

Regardless, she's a professional pollster and it is what it is. 

 

 

It's number one, trying to influence the election  (remember all the Kamala-Momentum stories on November 2nd0

 

 

PS: leh-nerd you continue to be the nicest poster on the board. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . occasional condescending tone  ??  

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

[ChiGoose]

37 minutes ago, leh-nerd skin-erd said:

I really enjoy reading your posts, occasional condescending tone notwithstanding.  

 

I don't know Ann Selzer from Alka Seltzer.  To answer your question, one reason she might fudge her numbers would be an attempt to influence voter turnout.  Another might be she has a drinking problem and screwed up the number but is unwilling to admit it.  A third might be she's being blackmailed by the KGB in  keeping with the "Russians in our midst" era in American politics. 

 

Regardless, she's a professional pollster and it is what it is. 

 

If Selzer's numbers were correct, it'd almost certainly mean a Harris landslide where she won 350+ electoral votes.

 

If Dem voters thought the race was in the bag, that would be more likely to decrease turnout than to increase it. 

 

Simplest explanation remains: she missed hard. Not the first time she's missed, but certainly the biggest one.

[BillsFanNC]

33 minutes ago, B-Man said:

 

 

It's number one, trying to influence the election  (remember all the Kamala-Momentum stories on November 2nd0

 

 

PS: leh-nerd you continue to be the nicest poster on the board. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . occasional condescending tone  ??  

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

 

The King.

 

Constant clueless condescension. 

 

A laughingstock. 

 

 

[Biden is Mentally Fit]

10 minutes ago, ChiGoose said:

Simplest explanation remains: she missed hard.

That’s not an explanation, that’s the result. An explanation would address why the “gold standard” pollster missed so hard. 

[Taro T]

4 minutes ago, ChiGoose said:

 

If Selzer's numbers were correct, it'd almost certainly mean a Harris landslide where she won 350+ electoral votes.

 

If Dem voters thought the race was in the bag, that would be more likely to decrease turnout than to increase it. 

 

Simplest explanation remains: she missed hard. Not the first time she's missed, but certainly the biggest one.

 

To your 1st point, true.  But the VP didn't come anywhere close to that, so we already know her numbers weren't correct.  As an orange tinted former and future Prez would say "she missed hugely."  The question becomes 'why?'

 

To your 2nd point, doubtful.  People apparently LOVE to be on the winning bandwagon.  So, the idea is more independents will be drawn to the side they expect is going to win and far more of the partisans will be drawn in because they want to be able to say that they voted for the 1st woman ever to be elected president (or from the other side, they want to vote for the 1st person to have two presidential terms separated by at least 4 years in over 100 years).  Putting her finger on the proverbial scale is far more likely to have helped than to have hindered the VP's candidacy.

 

To your 3rd point, as she is generally proclaimed to be "the best" by the pundits and she'd presumably want to maintain that title on the way out and with our also knowing that Harris' own polling never showed her in the lead; the simplest explanation would be one of the following: she's lost her fast ball (your explanation, which if she messed up a lot of other races this year would be plausible), she REALLY wanted Harris to win and thought helping to elect the 1st female president was worth the potential hit to her reputation (also, potentially plausible; how closely she come to calling the Clinton-45 race could help to auger whether this may be likely), or somebody paid her off thinking that her reputation was so stellar that she might help Harris pull off the hail Mary (and considering the campaign had $1.5B to piss away and the DNC pumped in another $1B; would also seem plausible).  Don't know how much her integrity was worth to her, but have to believe there was enough money there for her to at least think about putting a thumb on the proverbial scale.  She wouldn't be the 1st and she won't be the last.

 

Where you sit on the partisan scale likely colors your choice of which of those is the most plausible reason for only her 2nd major miss in the last 8 or so "big" elections.

[leh-nerd skin-erd]

11 minutes ago, ChiGoose said:

 

If Selzer's numbers were correct, it'd almost certainly mean a Harris landslide where she won 350+ electoral votes.

Maybe, so institutional incompetence would certainly be a possible explanation, though not the only one. 

 

 

11 minutes ago, ChiGoose said:

 

If Dem voters thought the race was in the bag, that would be more likely to decrease turnout than to increase it. 

Unlikely—the more likely outcome would be an emboldened and ecstatic liberal base would pour it on.  

 

On the other hand,  a demoralized GOP base hearing from multiple sources that the end was nigh might well have opted to stay home.  

11 minutes ago, ChiGoose said:

Simplest explanation remains: she missed hard. Not the first time she's missed, but certainly the biggest one.

That she missed is not an explanation, it’s an outcome.  Why it occurred is a whole ‘nother question that will be of interest to some, but not to others. 

[leh-nerd skin-erd]

1 hour ago, B-Man said:

 

 

It's number one, trying to influence the election  (remember all the Kamala-Momentum stories on November 2nd0

 

 

PS: leh-nerd you continue to be the nicest poster on the board. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . occasional condescending tone  ??  

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

Don’t let me fool you, B—4th&kreskin has assured me he has figured my **** out.  
 

[ChiGoose]

23 minutes ago, leh-nerd skin-erd said:

That she missed is not an explanation, it’s an outcome.  Why it occurred is a whole ‘nother question that will be of interest to some, but not to others. 

 

Polling misses happen all of the time, it's just the nature of the business. You're taking a sample of people and extrapolating for an entire population. Most pollsters also include assumptions and try to fit their sample to the population (if 10% of the population is Demographic X but only 2% of the sample is Demographic X, they may decide to multiply the answers from Demographic X respondents by 5).

 

To avoid looking as bad as Selzer does here, a lot of pollsters "herd" their polls: they fudge the numbers so their results look like what other pollsters are showing. This way they aren't way out on a limb. If a pollster has a result that shows John Doe +10 but the current polling average is John Doe +3, they can adjust their polling assumptions to get a number closer to +3.

 

There has been a lot of discourse on the accuracy of polling (including here on PPP) and how to poll in a world where people don't use landlines and don't answer calls from numbers they don't know. Selzer's methods have been pretty good for most of her career but either her methodology no longer works, she was unlucky in her sample, or a combination of both. In any case, there's no evidence of anything nefarious here.

 

Ultimately, I think the backlash against her poll is going to result in more pollsters herding instead of posting their real results and I think that's a bad thing.

[Orlando Buffalo]

4 hours ago, ChiGoose said:

 

Polling misses happen all of the time, it's just the nature of the business. You're taking a sample of people and extrapolating for an entire population. Most pollsters also include assumptions and try to fit their sample to the population (if 10% of the population is Demographic X but only 2% of the sample is Demographic X, they may decide to multiply the answers from Demographic X respondents by 5).

 

To avoid looking as bad as Selzer does here, a lot of pollsters "herd" their polls: they fudge the numbers so their results look like what other pollsters are showing. This way they aren't way out on a limb. If a pollster has a result that shows John Doe +10 but the current polling average is John Doe +3, they can adjust their polling assumptions to get a number closer to +3.

 

There has been a lot of discourse on the accuracy of polling (including here on PPP) and how to poll in a world where people don't use landlines and don't answer calls from numbers they don't know. Selzer's methods have been pretty good for most of her career but either her methodology no longer works, she was unlucky in her sample, or a combination of both. In any case, there's no evidence of anything nefarious here.

 

Ultimately, I think the backlash against her poll is going to result in more pollsters herding instead of posting their real results and I think that's a bad thing.

This kind of post makes me feel better because it clearly show that your understanding of anything math related is pathetic. Seltzer was off by 16% which would mean the 3% Harris lead would be under the 50% accuracy threshold. Basically this poll is worse than simply not calling anyone and calling it 50/50. It fits your argument that illegal and legal immigrants are the same. 

[SCBills]

9 hours ago, ChiGoose said:

 

Selzer famously never herds her polls. She puts the work out there and she's right more often than wrong (she has had misses before). But because people don't understand polling/statistics and because (as you continually like to demonstrate) the MAGA population seems especially ignorant on how things work, they come up with conspiracies that don't make sense if given even the smallest amount of scrutiny.

 

Let's say Selzer intentionally fudged her poll to boost Harris numbers. Why? What would that accomplish? A good media cycle? In an environment where all of the polls were showing the race basically even, the Selzer poll stood as a clear outlier. Remember that at the time, the Harris campaign was running on a theme of being the underdog. They did not want their voters to get complacent (which seems like a pretty accurate concern considering how things ended up). A popular poll showing numbers that would indicate a Harris landslide would go *against* the campaign's messaging at the time.

 

Imagine you have a classroom of 20 students, you give each of them a coin and tell them to flip it 100 times and mark down how many times it came up heads. 19 of the 20 students reported that it landed heads 50 times while one of them reported heads 57 times. Who do you think was being honest vs who do you think was fudging the numbers?

I think she had a bad poll that should’ve been discarded.  
 

I think people in Harris orbit heard about it and pressured/convinced her to release it. 
 

Harris internals at that point had her losing.  They knew they had to shake it up by any means necessary to make it competitive for down ballot races. 
 

Their entire closing push was centered around demonizing Tony Hinchcliffe and an outlier poll. 

[BillsFanNC]

Ann Selzer hasn't been the gold standard" in Iowa for many cycles, as @barnes_law and I have been showing (not even arguing), for years.

1. You don't spike polls on a candidate's request, then fabricate ludicrous excuses using another candidate as a foil. Ask yourselves how and why I 1) knew about that and 2) got the poll.

2. In 2020, Trump and Biden were never tied in Iowa. Not in the spring. Not in the summer. Not in September. It was always a wide lead for Trump.

3. You don't hold polls for a month so you can later use it to help a party's elites argue one candidate is stronger than another, helping to push one out of the race.

That's called "propaganda", not polling.

4. You don't call all your political friends before a poll is released to tell them giddily how you're going to drop on a bomb in a candidates lap days before Election Day. Ask yourselves how I knew about those results days before, and told RCP what I heard.

[Doc]

Selzer spiked the poll on Harris' request? 

[ChiGoose]

38 minutes ago, SCBills said:

I think she had a bad poll that should’ve been discarded.  
 

I think people in Harris orbit heard about it and pressured/convinced her to release it. 
 

Harris internals at that point had her losing.  They knew they had to shake it up by any means necessary to make it competitive for down ballot races. 
 

Their entire closing push was centered around demonizing Tony Hinchcliffe and an outlier poll. 

How does one know their poll is bad in the moment?

 

Do you believe that Selzer should have compared her poll to others and if it didn’t match, toss it or change it? Because that’s an argument in favor of poll herding. 
 

Selzer missed the 2024 election by 16 points. She has also missed other elections by 11, 10, 9, 8, and 7 points over almost 30 years. She’s well regarded because the vast majority of her polls ended up very close to the final outcome. 
 

Because that’s how polling works.

 

If you’re honest, you are going to miss. It happens. Selzer could have looked at her number being way off from the margin and done what her peers do: change her numbers to better fit the narrative. She did the correct thing by not doing so and now people are somehow claiming that this is evidence of her fudging the numbers. 

 

[leh-nerd skin-erd]

15 hours ago, ChiGoose said:

 

Polling misses happen all of the time, it's just the nature of the business. You're taking a sample of people and extrapolating for an entire population. Most pollsters also include assumptions and try to fit their sample to the population (if 10% of the population is Demographic X but only 2% of the sample is Demographic X, they may decide to multiply the answers from Demographic X respondents by 5).

 

To avoid looking as bad as Selzer does here, a lot of pollsters "herd" their polls: they fudge the numbers so their results look like what other pollsters are showing. This way they aren't way out on a limb. If a pollster has a result that shows John Doe +10 but the current polling average is John Doe +3, they can adjust their polling assumptions to get a number closer to +3.

 

There has been a lot of discourse on the accuracy of polling (including here on PPP) and how to poll in a world where people don't use landlines and don't answer calls from numbers they don't know. Selzer's methods have been pretty good for most of her career but either her methodology no longer works, she was unlucky in her sample, or a combination of both. In any case, there's no evidence of anything nefarious here.

 

Ultimately, I think the backlash against her poll is going to result in more pollsters herding instead of posting their real results and I think that's a bad thing.

What caught my eye was your comment on Trump supporters and ignorance.  As far as I can tell, faith in pollsters and the work they do is pretty low across the board for any numbers of reasons.  Your explanation here may be part of the reason why, but certainly isn’t limited to supporters of the incoming administration.  Personally, I cannot remember a pollster declaring in advance of a poll “Hey, we fudge the numbers to avoid looking bad so take our work with a grain of salt.”. 

 

[BillsFanNC]

58 minutes ago, leh-nerd skin-erd said:

What caught my eye was your comment on Trump supporters and ignorance.  As far as I can tell, faith in pollsters and the work they do is pretty low across the board for any numbers of reasons.  Your explanation here may be part of the reason why, but certainly isn’t limited to supporters of the incoming administration.  Personally, I cannot remember a pollster declaring in advance of a poll “Hey, we fudge the numbers to avoid looking bad so take our work with a grain of salt.”. 

 

 

Iron law of woke projection. 

[B-Man]

 

 

 

                                  

 

 

 

.

[Biden is Mentally Fit]

Apologies to Frankish in advance as I am not currently able to link, though it’s probably easy enough to find. Tonight’s NBC Evening News, hosted by Kate Snow in for Jose Diaz-Something, had a nice feature on President Brandon’s ceremony awarding the Medal of Honor to a host of individuals. Named specifically in the report - Hillary, Denzel, Magic, philanthropist chef, Michael J Fox. Not mentioned at all - G Soros. I think we can all agree that the inclusion of Soros is newsworthy. Perhaps Frankish will deign to explain to us why a reliable mainstream news outlet would play it as they did.