killerzX said:
Flanneryaug said:
dsgrue3 said:
Mr Khan said:
Pollsters know that their job is to report with accuracy. If *all* the pollsters were getting it wrong, people would be losing their jobs. Even Wall Street Journal is showing Obama currently ahead in the polls.
The spin comes with how the polls are interpreted, but the raw data is not false. |
The raw data isn't displayed. That's my point. Where is the inclusion of the breakdown of Republican, Democrat, Independent voters? Without this, the statistics are meaningless.
And the pollsters do get it wrong, quite often, actually. Look at the polling services rankings from 2008. Some projections are hilariously incorrect. I think Rasmussen was most reliable.
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Rasmussen is the most unreliable poll, and is much more favorable towards republicans. The fact is that since the 2010 elections less people are calling themselves republican, and more are calling themselves democrats.
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ummm... rasmussen was shown to be the most accurate.
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No, they weren't.
While 2000 was generally a fairly rough year for pollsters, who had to deal with an unenthusiastic electorate, some third-party challengers, and some late-breaking developments like Bush's DUI charge, Rasmussen was the worst of the lot, missing by an average of 5.7 points. They also called 7 states wrong.** Some of this was the result of bias, as they were 3.5 points too high on Bush's margin in the states they surveyed, on average.
Although Rasmussen has certainly gotten a lot of things right, their high pollster rating was mostly based on their strong performance in 2004 and 2006. Their rating is likely to go down now that we've found their 2000 data, and are adding in the 2008 data, when their performance was mediocre.http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/05/blast-from-rasmussen-past.html
That was during 2010. After the 2010 mid-terms, Nate Silver had this to say about Ras:
"Rasmussen Polls Were Biased and Inaccurate; Quinnipiac, SurveyUSA Performed Strongly."
[P]olls 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.
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/rasmussen-polls-were-biased-and-inaccurate-quinnipiac-surveyusa-performed-strongly/
Rasmussen had an average error of 5.8 points, with a pro republican bias of 3.9 points in 2010.
And keep in mind, this was a year when Republicans made HISTORIC gains in every state across the country. Rasmussen STILL showed a Republican bias.
