NJ: Parties Wonder Which Side's Polls Reflect Reality

[SkinsFTW]

I think that if the polls are within a couple % of either winning on average then Romney will end up winning. I think you should consider it like Romney will get 3-5% more than the polls say in other words.

Many of the "hype" voters for Obama won't show up this time, IMO, and the "nutcase" side of the republican party are going to show up in force, even dragging along their 95 year old almost dead relatives or anybody they can talk into voting to add a vote as well. My crazy mother has been nagging everybody in the family to go out and vote Obama out for almost the whole 4 years.

Here's the deal. I never vote, a lot of people never vote or usually just don't feel like it, but if we are walking down the street and are asked who we will vote for we will give an answer, then never show up. Those people this time are possibly going to show up for Romney just like they showed up for Obama last time because last time they hated Bush or anything republican enough to vote, and this time they hate Obama. Thats good for a few % swing IMO. I'm still not voting but if I did it'd be for Johnson and no it's not what Fox says, I don't even smoke weed, lol.

Also, the country has had its first minority, and first black president already. Some minorities wont show up to vote and a lot of hispanics will vote the other way.

Of course I could be totally wrong too but I doubt it. I just don't think those polls are ever that accurate. Then again Obama might have a 4-5% lead and he'll win anyway but it comes down to Ohio, Florida and 1 or 2 other states really.

[Rdskns2000]

Well, we will find out on Tuesday hopefully unless Ohio is the deciding factor; then we have to wait 10 more days.

[Bliz]

I see confirmation bias and it's cognitive cousins playing a very dominant role in most people's politics.

100% agree. And it's only reinforced by their preferred media. Here's something from Friday, from 538.

(On my phone, this should be in quote box)

President Obama is now better than a 4-in-5 favorite to win the Electoral College, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast. His chances of winning it increased to 83.7 percent on Friday, his highest figure since the Denver debate and improved from 80.8 percent on Thursday.

Friday’s polling should make it easy to discern why Mr. Obama has the Electoral College advantage. There were 22 polls of swing states published Friday. Of these, Mr. Obama led in 19 polls, and two showed a tie. Mitt Romney led in just one of the surveys, a Mason-Dixon poll of Florida.
(End)


And which poll does Drudge cite at the top if the page? You guessed it: FL: R 51% O 45%...

So if Obama performs close to 538s projection, it encourages pubs to be distrustful of the outcome. How did he do so well when drudge was telling us bad poll numbers? It must be that he used acorn and Chicago style politics and voter fraud to steal the election!

Pollsters are not in the business off using outlandish projections to get their prediction wildly wrong. The op's theories on voter models are wrong. As has been explained to him in other threads. It is the work if a partisan news agenda, with very little basis in reality

[twa]

I'll take your word on pollsters not being in the business of being wrong Bliz


Parsing the Polls
If Gallup is right, Tuesday will be a long night for the Democratic party.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...chael-g-franc#


If you are keeping score, in slightly less than four years President Obama has presided over an eleven-point decrease in his party’s standing with the American people, 15 points if you include those voters who “lean” one way or the other.

[Unforgiven]

I'll take your word on pollsters not being in the business of being wrong Bliz


Parsing the Polls
If Gallup is right, Tuesday will be a long night for the Democratic party.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...chael-g-franc#

Yeah, that's a really big *if*.

I could equally point out that if Gallup is wrong then all the people who ignored all the other polls and pinned their hopes on Gallup will be very disappointed.

Posted it in another thread but here is the article written by ex-Bush aide Matt Latimer.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...f-victory.html

"The lone standout is Gallup, which for the past few weeks had shown a single-digit lead for Romney. If Gallup knows something the rest of the polling world doesn’t, it will be a major news story and Gallup will cement itself as the pollster of record as it once was in its glory days. If not, what Gallup is doing to Republicans is cruel. Today they cling to those numbers tighter than Katie Holmes to her divorce lawyers."

[Jumbo]

I'll take your word on pollsters not being in the business of being wrong Bliz


Parsing the Polls
If Gallup is right, Tuesday will be a long night for the Democratic party.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...chael-g-franc#


If you are keeping score, in slightly less than four years President Obama has presided over an eleven-point decrease in his party’s standing with the American people, 15 points if you include those voters who “lean” one way or the other.

I don't pay attention to polls since I'm not in politics in any professional capacity, and am not "hobbyist" enough to care too much about them in general, so I am wondering in ignorance---is a point decline like that a historically dramatic figure? I could understand it being one of the large on record given the state of things. I think most of us believe that when the economy sucks, the guy in the WH is going to suffer no matter how much culpability he has either way, and the worse it sucks the more the suffering for him/her/it (not sure they've all been human---certainly some of the candidates are suspect).

[Jumbo]

I'll take your word on pollsters not being in the business of being wrong Bliz


Parsing the Polls
If Gallup is right, Tuesday will be a long night for the Democratic party.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...chael-g-franc#


If you are keeping score, in slightly less than four years President Obama has presided over an eleven-point decrease in his party’s standing with the American people, 15 points if you include those voters who “lean” one way or the other.

I don't pay attention to polls since I'm not in politics in any professional capacity, and am not "hobbyist" enough to care too much about them in general, so I am wondering in ignorance---is a point decline like that a historically dramatic figure? I could understand it being one of the large on record given the state of things. I think most of us believe that when the economy sucks, the guy in the WH is going to suffer no matter how much culpability he has either way, and the worse it sucks the more the suffering for him/her/it (not sure they've all been human---certainly some of the candidates are suspect).

[Bliz]

I'll take your word on pollsters not being in the business of being wrong Bliz

LOL

not intentionally, at least. Which is exactly what the OP is accusing them of doing: using a model based on assumptions that are patently absurd and unbelievable on their face, intentionally yielding a result that is substantially less accurate and reliable than they are capable of reaching.

We all know the campaigns will do this from time to time, for marketing purposes. But I do not think there is any evidence to suggest that 90%+ of state polls are doing it.

Now I'm not saying those state polls are accurate. Hell, I have no idea and neither does anyone else. But if they are inaccurate, it is not because they are systematically assuming "Obama is going to outperform his numbers from 2008." In recent history, state polling has been reasonably accurate. That's why Nate Silver uses it as the basis for his model. Not because, as Erick Erickson would have us believe, he's nothing but a shill for the dems.

[Unforgiven]

I'm not really concerned with national popular vote numbers. It's all about the electoral college. If we're talking strictly popular vote then Rassmussen is much closer to reality than Gallup.

If you look at their EC board Rassmussen has it tied up in Ohio and Wisconsin, Romney up by a point in Iowa, up by 2 in New Hampshire and up by 3 in Virginia and Colorado.

I'm aware of margins of error and all that but those numbers are out of line with the majority of pollsters. We'll have to wait till election day to see who was right and who was wrong, but those numbers just seem out of whack.

Swing and a miss for Rasmussen, badly. He refused to correct after blowing it in 2010, working on becoming irrelevant.

[Lombardi's_kid_brother]

Swing and a miss for Rasmussen, badly. He refused to correct after blowing it in 2010, working on becoming irrelevant.

Yea. At this point, Rasmussen is sort of worthless.

[Tulane Skins Fan]

Yea. At this point, Rasmussen is sort of worthless.

Not worthless if you know how to interpret their data and findings. I'm sure the pollsters will keep using Rasmussen in their algorithms, but noting them as skewed.

Gallup takes a big hit too, by the way.

[greenspandan]

I think this is Nate Silver's most accurate election yet. he got 50 out of 50 states.

[Heisenberg]

I think this is Nate Silver's most accurate election yet. he got 50 out of 50 states.

More than that, his predictions in regards to the actual margins are incredibly accurate.

[brandymac27]

I think this is Nate Silver's most accurate election yet. he got 50 out of 50 states.

Anyone know how he did as far as the other races were concerned (Senate, etc)?

[Unforgiven]

Anyone know how he did as far as the other races were concerned (Senate, etc)?

Just glancing at the map of his prediction and looking at the results map on CNN it would appear he only missed 1 senate race. He slightly favored the Republican in Montana and it actually ended up tipping to the Democrat.

Edit: Actually North Dakota hasn't been called yet, he favored the Republican there and with 93% of the vote counted the Democrat is leading 160,752 to 157,758.