• mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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    5 months ago

    New York Times doing its thing again

    Presenting the poll results for registered voters, with candidates limited to Biden or Trump with no RFK involved, both of which are decisions which will swing things towards Trump and away from reality, is a decision that I’m hard pressed to explain any other way than that they’re looking for the worst numbers they can present.

    It’s not even like the answers to the more accurate question were even any better for Biden. To me they look more or less the same (i.e. serious trouble for Biden). My only explanation is that a lot of these likely voters don’t know their ass from their elbow (e.g.

    Oooooh

    This is interesting.

    Look at the question “What one issue is most important in deciding your vote this November?”

    It leads off with:

    • The economy (including jobs and the stock market)
    • Inflation and the cost of living
    • Abortion
    • Immigration
    • Crime
    • Gun policies

    … and then, way down below, is “The state of democracy/corruption” (with 6% still bucking the trend to vote for it), and “The Middle East/Israel/Palestinians” (2%).

    Lo and behold, a whole lot of people voted for one of the first two options, and also tended to answer questions about how they felt about the economy overall, and whether they felt overall happy with how things were going, accordingly.

    I would be interested to see how this poll was presented exactly (especially whether written or verbal, and what order for the questions), and what the numbers would be if there was a similar weight of questioning and emphasis given to “The state of democracy/corruption” as a major issue. Maybe the results would be the same. Maybe not. I’d be interested to see it.

    (Edit: Someone else sussed it out better than I did; their methodology was actually much worse and more explicitly slanted than that.)

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I would be interested to see how this poll was presented exactly

      Have you tried the article?

      If that doesn’t answer your questions, it links to the poll questions and breakdowns…

      But it seems like you just don’t believe in polls, which is weird because I honestly can’t remember presidential polling not getting in the margin of error of the real result.

      This is the same shit that happened in 2016 and 202:

      The polls say my favorite isn’t winning! Polls are lying! Everyone ignore the polls and act smug we’ll win!

      If you’re somehow actually a Biden supporter, these polls should have you working harder to do the only thing that can help him beat Trump:

      Pull him to the left.

      Or you could spend the run up to the election telling people not to listen to polls and instead…

      I dunno? Read tea leaves? What is exactly is your alternative?

      Pretend we’re ostriches and stick our heads in the sand? We won’t be able to see any warning signs but you’re gonna ignore them anyways. So sure, you go first and the rest of us will stick our heads in the sand right after you, promise.

      Just you go first.

      • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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        5 months ago

        Read tea leaves? What is exactly is your alternative?

        Other people in other threads have found more of the fucky things about this poll; it was a phone poll which 2% of people answered the phone for, which made no attempt to correct for “what ideological mentalities are likely to answer the phone to random numbers”, and then on top of that explicitly made adjustments like increasing the weight of non-college-educated people for some pretty dubious reason.

        Polls sound great. The fact that the election is even within 10 points, or 20, should lead to alarm in the Biden camp, and cause some deep soul searching for what went so wrong in the American system that we could be talking about electing Lex Luthor mayor and people are taking it seriously as an idea and it’s even a question of who is going to win the election. I think education and media are the main culprits. Concrete things Biden is doing are not unrelated, exactly (especially on aid for Israel), but they honestly don’t seem to make all that much difference, and a lot of people who are voicing concerns about him seem totally unaware of concrete things he’s been doing.

        I’m by no means saying don’t be alarmed. I think we should be very alarmed. But yes, also, I think we should call out bullshit polls when they are as clearly bullshit as this one is (as part of examining the reasons why a respectable news outlet would even be reporting a close poll between Biden and Trump as anything other than the absolute looming catastrophe that it objectively is.)

        If you’re somehow actually a Biden supporter, these polls should have you working harder

        That’s actually a really good point – I’ll try to come up with some concrete things I can do to help Biden win sometimes later today. I just went to verify that I’m registered to vote (I still am), and I think maybe a good thing politically overall would be a little informational thing about who to vote for in Congress. Presumably some little tool already exists that can tell if your congresspeople have been voting for aid for Israel, inform your voting accordingly instead of just blindly checking the D box, things like that, but I don’t know all that much about it.

        IDK, I’ll see what I can come up with later on today if I have some time. It’s a good reminder that talking on the internet without some sort of action isn’t always a good investment of time.

        • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          The fact that the election is even within 10 points, or 20, should lead to alarm in the Biden camp,

          But…

          It’s within 1 or points…

          Unless… Are you ignoring everything but popular vote polls across the whole country?

          If you’re doing that and not understanding why it’s a bad idea, then that explains why you think polls are bad, but you’re still wrong. Your just looking at polls that don’t matter because those are the ones you agree with