True but what the poster said is important: polls do not work well in close races because they don’t sample correctly. The average poll respondent is older, whiter, and more conservative than the average voter. So you end up with a skewed sample. Plus you sample so few of the other voters that you can’t make a guess as to what they think.
No younger people answer the phone for pollsters, so this is hard to fix. They are probably going to have to start paying people to answer surveys. I know I won’t answer them for 15 or 20 minutes for free.
The average poll respondent is older, whiter, and more conservative than the average voter. So you end up with a skewed sample.
Any reputable polling group will adjust for that. Granted, fewer and fewer people are answering their phones and taking these polls, but basic demographics are a well-known and pretty easy to adjust for thing. Most polls take a lot of that information for that reason
True but what the poster said is important: polls do not work well in close races because they don’t sample correctly.
That’s not my point. My point is that the poll movements are almost always correct, because pollsters are at least consistent with how biased they are / errors in sampling.
Fox News had Trump leading Biden a few weeks ago. Today, Biden is ahead of Trump. We don’t know where the “truth” lies, but we can 100% conclude that the typical American has lost a bit of favor on Trump in the past few weeks.
True but what the poster said is important: polls do not work well in close races because they don’t sample correctly. The average poll respondent is older, whiter, and more conservative than the average voter. So you end up with a skewed sample. Plus you sample so few of the other voters that you can’t make a guess as to what they think.
No younger people answer the phone for pollsters, so this is hard to fix. They are probably going to have to start paying people to answer surveys. I know I won’t answer them for 15 or 20 minutes for free.
Any reputable polling group will adjust for that. Granted, fewer and fewer people are answering their phones and taking these polls, but basic demographics are a well-known and pretty easy to adjust for thing. Most polls take a lot of that information for that reason
That’s not my point. My point is that the poll movements are almost always correct, because pollsters are at least consistent with how biased they are / errors in sampling.
Fox News had Trump leading Biden a few weeks ago. Today, Biden is ahead of Trump. We don’t know where the “truth” lies, but we can 100% conclude that the typical American has lost a bit of favor on Trump in the past few weeks.