(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Listen to What the Polls Are Saying: They are Saying That Polls are Bunk! (And Other Advice) [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-10-13 Two recent events have prompted me to write this. One was a post here on Daily Kos, and the other the most recent stylings of Steve Kornacki. Let me take them in turn. The Daily Kos post was this one: www.dailykos.com/… It tries to make a mildly optimistic case for the Democrats regaining the House. This immediately struck me as bizarre: the Democrats only barely lost the House in 2022, and they did it by completely ignoring some seats in NY (George Santos?) that they should have won. They should take those back. They will lose some to gerrymandering, and gain some from ungerrymandering. But no party could possibly screw up House leadership and governance worse than the GOP has in the last 2 years. Given that, one should expect them to be given the boot in competitive districts. The post above makes a rather tentative case for optimism, but right at the start makes an error of analysis. Here is the comment I left there: “This is a sincere post, and clearly a lot of effort when into it. But right at the beginning, a claim is made that is highly misleading. Let’s just work through some numbers. The claim is this: “Race ratings are historically accurate. Cook’s 2024 analysis of its own ratings since 1984 found that it accurately predicted upward of 90% of races for governor, House, Senate, and president. And the more confident the rating, the greater the accuracy.” Offhand, “upward of 90%” sounds pretty good. But think it though, just taking the House as the example. There are 438 House seats. According to the ratings here, 367 of them are either “Solid Republican” or “Solid Democratic”. Those seats can be predicted without looking at a single poll: just look at the actual voting history. If the district lines have not changed, and it went decisively for one party or the other over the last 6 cycles, then call it and you are done. That prediction will be more than 99% accurate right there. Upsets in districts like that are big news, and are usually accompanied by some sort of scandal. If there were more than 4 in an election we would know about it. OK: so that leaves 71 seats. Less than 20% of the total. Here’s what to do with them: flip a coin and make that your prediction. For sure, that method will be about 50% accurate, so now have over 400 correct predictions out of 438: over 90%. Done. So the statistic cited does not in the least support the idea that the Cook’s analysis is somehow a good source of extra information beyond the obvious. In fact, it more or less proves that once you take away the gimmes, Cook is no better than a monkey throwing darts. No better than a random coin flip. All the fundamentals this year are in the Democrat’s favor. Execute the GOTV, and it should be a Blue Wave election” What about Kornacki? He is having conniptions over a poll showing a sudden 5% surge in Trump’s direction (www.mediaite.com/...) But just stop and think. This whole cycle has had one big event: Biden’s debate that was so alarming that it resulted in him leaving the race. That worried me, because the Democrats would be capable of completely messing up the replacement (Open convention!), but it was handled excellently and smoothly. Harris has also been great. Polls showed a slow and steady improvement. OK: that makes sense. But a 5% swing to Trump from something in the last couple of weeks? There just isn’t anything that could cause that. Nothing. So all that result is proving is how unreliable the polls are. It is magical thinking to believe they are tracking some huge event none of us even noticed! Polls are inaccurate for different reasons, some unsystematic (random noise) and others systematic. The unsystematic ones can be ameliorated by larger sample sizes. The systematic ones (biased sampling) cannot. Further, many polls, especially on the right, do not try to get rid of systematic bias: they exploit it and create it (for example by Likely Voter screens). For them, polls are not about getting information, they are about creating a propaganda narrative. Systematic bias comes from not doing true random sampling of the population. In a lab, in a randomized controlled experiment, you can randomize properly. But for polling, it is simply not possible. Who do you contact? How? If you call, which groups are more likely to pick up? (For an unknown phone number, I never pick up). You can try to “unskew” the sample by “rebalancing”, but that is based on pure speculation. For a Likely Voter screen, how do you decide who is a likely voter? (For sure, all that surge in voter registrations after Taylor Swift’s endorsement will not get through any Likely Voter screen.) What do we actually know? We know we start from a baseline where four year ago 7 million more Americans voted for Biden than Trump. 7 million. What would induce many of those to change their minds? As has been pointed out over and over here, we know that Democrats have over-performed the predictions since Dobbs, especially where abortion itself is on the ballot, even in red states. We know that there have been surges of registrations accompanying Harris’s acceptance and Swift’s endorsement. We know who those are for. We know about the recent complete upset in the Anchorage mayoral election. We know that early voting is strong and strongly skewed to Democrats. In other words, there is every indication of a strong Blue Wave. Add on top of that how completely broken down Trump and the entire GOP are at this point. Those are just facts, and more reliable and important than polls. What can you do if (as you should be) you are anxious? 1) Don’t despair. That’s what they want. 2) GOTV, of course. If you live in a battleground, be sure to remind rational people to vote. (If you know irrational people who are inclined to sit this one out, let sleeping dogs lie.) 3) If you have the energy, time and personality, and are in the right area, canvass. The diaries about canvassing here have been great. 4) If you have the energy, time and personality, phone bank wherever you are. 5) Show support online. Even something as small as a recommendation or thumbs up to a good post promotes esprit de corps. 6) Write helpful comments or encouraging posts online. 7) This is a hard one. If you have the time, energy and personality for it, pushback on right-leaning sites in the comment section. That means: facts, facts, facts. The right-leaning sites (think Fox or RCP) are used to having comment sections that are just cheering sections: someone posts the nonsense-du-jour from the GOP propaganda factory and everyone gives it thumbs up. They are simply not prepared for factual pushback, for showing that the claims are simply false. Have the facts ready. As they say, don’t feed the trolls (you will get all sorts of nasty remarks) but don’t ignore them either. Call them out. If they use juvenile name-calling (to you, or Harris, or Biden) don’t respond in kind but do point out what they are doing and that it is juvenile. Also: go meta. Sometimes you need to push back on the content, and sometime you need to point out how the web site works its propaganda. For example, RCP often rewrites the titles of articles in the links, to be extremely misleading. Most people, who never click on the link, still get an impression about the content, and it is often wrong. Or when one of these places posts an article of the form “Internet goes wild after Harris says….”, which just collects a bunch of predictable nonsense from right-wing agents, point out that that isn’t news. Of course GOP agents will attack Harris no matter what she does. Yawn. Or if all of a sudden, everything Harris says is called “word salad”, no matter how coherent it is, point out the trick they are using. Propaganda is like a magic trick: one you see how it works, it doesn’t work any more. Point out what they are doing. We are in a good place going the right direction. Keep it up and we will be smiling on Nov. 5. For the record, here are my predictions. Harris wins easily. We know election night. The House goes Democratic. The Senate…..that’s a real worry. We have lost WV and Tester seems to be really in trouble. I know Cruz and/or Scott would be delightful to defeat, but my own sense in that in a wave election the best shot is in Nebraska. But if they take the Senate it is not a disaster. It means two years of good legislation out of the House that goes nowhere, followed by a midterm with the map stacked against the GOP, so two years of getting things done. And we need to push the National Compact, so all this nonsense about caring for only 7 states ends, and the only fair system—one person, one vote, equally counted—is put in place. Oh, and once we have House, Senate and Presidency, give DC the Congressional representation it deserves, and Puerto Rico if they ask for it. 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