As Trump and his spinners suddenly appear uncertain of victory amid last-minute shifts in the polls, the head of a Democratic Super PAC explains what must happen now for Harris to win.
I’ve yet to get a clear answer on how they correct for the fact that no one answers the phone or wastes time talking to pollsters for free. I keep reading that " they take it into account" but not the methods used.
Its worth searching it up, theres many recent stories detailing the methods.
They use a representative sample by reaching out to random voters or posting ads online in social spaces. Once they have enough people to make representative groups to match the population of the state or nation, maybe a few thousand people, they then ask them questions.
They tend to use the same people repeatedly, as they are more reliable in answering, and some of them are regularly paid small amounts for their time.
The polls are essentially tracking a group of people who thought it was worth their time to answer polls, which I am not a part of, and noone I know is a part of.
Edit to add: one new thing this election cycle is that a new weight has been added to account for party affiliation, which wasnt used before.
Ultimately, polls are simply unable to account for the demographic of “doesn’t participate in advance polling”, and Anthony they attempt to do to account for that glaring weakness is guesswork.
Probably also looking at previous elections to compensate.
But the simple fact is that the repubs lost way more of their voterbase to covid than the Dems did. So if you use proportional models, there is a good chance they are off by double the excess deaths in the republican party… And that is a lot.
I’ve yet to get a clear answer on how they correct for the fact that no one answers the phone or wastes time talking to pollsters for free. I keep reading that " they take it into account" but not the methods used.
They use a representative sample by reaching out to random voters or posting ads online in social spaces. Once they have enough people to make representative groups to match the population of the state or nation, maybe a few thousand people, they then ask them questions.
They tend to use the same people repeatedly, as they are more reliable in answering, and some of them are regularly paid small amounts for their time.
The polls are essentially tracking a group of people who thought it was worth their time to answer polls, which I am not a part of, and noone I know is a part of.
Edit to add: one new thing this election cycle is that a new weight has been added to account for party affiliation, which wasnt used before.
https://goodauthority.org/news/pollsters-are-weighting-surveys-differently-in-2024/
Agreed.
Ultimately, polls are simply unable to account for the demographic of “doesn’t participate in advance polling”, and Anthony they attempt to do to account for that glaring weakness is guesswork.
Probably also looking at previous elections to compensate.
But the simple fact is that the repubs lost way more of their voterbase to covid than the Dems did. So if you use proportional models, there is a good chance they are off by double the excess deaths in the republican party… And that is a lot.