Bernie Sanders
Related: About this forumThe new Yorker: Are Polls Ruining Democracy?
Internet pollsters have not replaced them. Using methods designed for knocking on doors to measure public opinion on the Internet is like trying to shoe a horse with your operating system. Internet pollsters cant call you; they have to wait for you to come to them. Not everyone uses the Internet, and, at the moment, the people who do, and who complete online surveys, are younger and leftier than people who dont, while people who have landlines, and who answer the phone, are older and more conservative than people who dont. Some pollsters, both here and around the world, rely on a combination of telephone and Internet polling; the trick is to figure out just the right mix. So far, it isnt working. In Israel this March, polls failed to predict Benjamin Netanyahus victory. In May in the U.K., every major national poll failed to forecast the Conservative Partys win.
Its a little crazy to me that people are still using the same tools that were used in the nineteen-thirties, Dan Wagner told me when I asked him about the future of polling. Wagner was the chief analytics officer on the 2012 Obama campaign and is the C.E.O. of Civis Analytics, a data-science technology and advisory firm. Companies like Civis have been collecting information about you and people like you in order to measure public opinion and, among other things, forecast elections by building predictive models and running simulations to determine what issues you and people like you care about, what kind of candidate youd give money to, and, if youre likely to turn out on Election Day, how youll vote. They might call you, but they dont need to.
Still, data science cant solve the biggest problem with polling, because that problem is neither methodological nor technological. Its political. Pollsters rose to prominence by claiming that measuring public opinion is good for democracy. But what if its bad?
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/politics-and-the-new-machine
So... how about those polls?
Cassiopeia
(2,603 posts)come on election day.
I think there will be some very vocal people here will be very surprised come April.
Ed Suspicious
(8,879 posts)imagine what this primary race might look like absent polling? I know we are often beaten over the head, day after day, with polls in an effort to demoralize us thereby weakening support for our candidate. I think without polls we might actually learn where a politician stands on the issues and we might actually have a very different race.
jkbRN
(850 posts)alcina
(602 posts)Yes!
femmedem
(8,207 posts)if you're voting for someone who isn't polling well. They depress voter turnout, because you might think your candidate doesn't need you, or that your candidate doesn't have a chance whether you vote or not.
And imagine if all the media stories about polls were replaced by stories delineating the different policies and records of the candidates.
Scuba
(53,475 posts)Erich Bloodaxe BSN
(14,733 posts)Ask people how they lean to start, then give them a series of statements by a candidate, then ask them whether they'd be more or less likely to vote for a candidate based on those, then tell them who said those statements. I think Bernie's got an incredible number of such good statements to pick from. Heck, his twitter feed is full of them. Unless they're political junkies, they probably won't have already heard most of them, so it's a quick way to essentially read a pamphlet to people who might have otherwise simply pitched it if you'd just handed it out to them on the streetcorner.
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)If the polls are lies, then yes.
Erich Bloodaxe BSN
(14,733 posts)the takeaway is going to be that on voting day, the result is going to be less old and conservative and younger and more 'lefty' than telephone polling suggested.
This is a two edged sword - it leaves those 'bandwagon' people more likely to vote for the more conservative candidate, but at the same time suggests that the more lefty candidate will outperform polling.
Fawke Em
(11,366 posts)so it's not without precedent.