2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forum"Rasmussen Polls Were Biased and Inaccurate; Quinnipiac, SurveyUSA Performed Strongly" (11/4/2010)
The amazing thing is that mainstream media heavily relies on Rasmussen even though its history has demonstrated that its polls display a significant Republican bias. We should keep in mind who missed and by what amount and in what direction for future elections.
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/rasmussen-polls-were-biased-and-inaccurate-quinnipiac-surveyusa-performed-strongly/
On Tuesday, polls conducted by the firm Rasmussen Reports which released more than 100 surveys in the final three weeks of the campaign, including some commissioned under a subsidiary on behalf of Fox News badly missed the margin in many states, and also exhibited a considerable bias toward Republican candidates.
* * *
Moreover, Rasmussens polls were quite biased, overestimating the standing of the Republican candidate by almost 4 points on average. In just 12 cases, Rasmussens polls overestimated the margin for the Democrat by 3 or more points. But it did so for the Republican candidate in 55 cases that is, in more than half of the polls that it issued.
If one focused solely on the final poll issued by Rasmussen Reports or Pulse Opinion Research in each state rather than including all polls within the three-week interval it would not have made much difference. Their average error would be 5.7 points rather than 5.8, and their average bias 3.8 points rather than 3.9
TexasCPA
(527 posts)IfPalinisAnswerWatsQ
(452 posts)What, you don't think that's scientific? Haha. Guy's a total idiot. He makes fake super pro republican polls every presidential year then brings them somewhat more in line with other polls in
the last few days before the election.
TomCADem
(17,390 posts)The gist of KoS's critique is that Nate Silver does not take into account potential funny business done at the early part of the election cycle and that Nate's methodology allows pollsters to game the system by tweaking their numbers in the final days to get closer to the "true" election result. Still, how do you prove this?
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/11/07/918497/-Should-2010-s-most-accurate-pollsters-pay-for-their-earlier-sins
You see, Silver only grades pollsters on the final three weeks of the campaign. There is an operant logic here, of course: dynamics of a race often change late in the game, and rating a pollster on their early polling might be considered akin to grading a history test based on only the first 20 questions out of the 100 on the test.
Fair enough. And, most of the time, it wouldn't be an issue. Pollsters that are strong at the beginning tend to be solid throughout. Duds tend to stay duds.
But, this cycle, Nate's pollster report card, because of the constraints of counting only the final 21 days, gives credit to a pair of pollsters that deserve enormous asterisks on their plaques.
IfPalinisAnswerWatsQ
(452 posts)But Rasmussen fucked up in 2010. Worst pollster out there. His results this time,
Even with the late corrections, are still going to be near the bottom in reliability.