Amateurs Look At One Look Poll. Professionals Look At All Of Em

[DemocratSinceBirth]

http://votamatic.org/into-the-home-stretch/#comments

http://electionanalytics.cs.illinois.edu/election12/index.html

http://electoral-vote.com/

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

http://election.princeton.edu/

http://research.uvu.edu/DeSart/forecasting/

http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2012/romney-vs-obama-electoral-map

Sam Wang // Oct 26, 2012 at 2:10 pm

Don’t give a flying f**k about any one pollster. That includes Gallup.

[Buzz Clik]

1. All the polls and time trends.

Looking at all the polls for a single day is just as foolish as looking at just one poll.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

2. All The Aggregators Are Using The Same Approach And Coming To Roughly The Same Conclusions.

They only start to diverge when they they "put their finger on the scale" and start cherry picking polls.

[Jennicut]

3. Which is why people like Wang and Silver are

so far ahead of the MSM on reporting about the state of the election.

Even doing my own research on past elections, the result was usually not too far off the average polling data for a state or nationally. Pollsters all use different methodologies and all have some bias in some way, even when they don't mean to. Looking at the averages evens things out and makes it clearer.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

6. Exactly

There are about seven or eight models on the net, all similar to Wang and Silver.

[imgbitepolitic]

4. True

!

[DemocratSinceBirth]

5. They Could All Be Wrong

But I rather go down relying on facts and evidence than gut and seat of the pants evaluations.