Biased polls? Yes...

[GameOver22]

Kasz216 said:

GameOver22 said:

theprof00 said:

"Some of the overall Republican bias in the polls this year may reflect the fact that Mr. Obama made gains in the closing days of the campaign, for reasons such as Hurricane Sandy, and that this occurred too late to be captured by some polls. In the FiveThirtyEight “now-cast,” Mr. Obama went from being 1.5 percentage points ahead in the popular vote on Oct. 25 to 2.5 percentage points ahead by Election Day itself, close to his actual figure.

Nonetheless, polls conducted over the final three weeks of the campaign had a two-point Republican bias overall, probably more than can be explained by the late shift alone. In addition, likely voter polls were slightly more Republican-leaning than the actual results in many races in 2010."

Key word....some. There are plenty of polls conducted over the final week and the final days. Just look at the data. RealClearPolitics

Edit: To get an even better idea of all the polls conducted over the final days Polltracker

Yep... it's funny.  People like to repeat that saying their are three kinds of lies, lies, damned lies and statistics...

the truth is, statistics don't like.  It's just most people don't understand the statistics and don't really understand what's being said.

 

It would be really worth it to replace a lot of Alegebra and Geometry in jr highschools and highschool with math logic and statistics classes.  Much more applicable day to day.

Couldn't agree more. As long as you know what the stats represent, the stats can't lie. The problem is, the meaning can sometimes be misleading and counterintuitive.

One example that I've been reading up on lately and that's relevant to politics is what people mean when they identify as conservative or liberal. After the election, I remember Ari Fleischer talking about how the conservative ideology dominates liberal ideology, so the country is still a center-right country. The problem is, it seems people don't have politics in mind when they identify with conservatism. Conservatism actually loads more onto a religious/social/familial dimension while liberalism is associated moreso with the counterculture of the 1970s, race riots, environmentalism, welfare exploitation, etc. This is the reason you tend to see Democrats with a party ID advantage even though liberalism gets trounced 2:1 by conservatism. Long story short, there's a big difference between someone identifying as a republican and a conservative or vice versa.