What's Wrong with the Polls? [View all]

[LanguageLover]

Last edited Mon May 8, 2023, 02:28 PM - Edit history (2)

The top three Biden Popularity Polls today on 538 show the following:

Rasmussen 51% B rated pollster
TIPP Insights 43% A- rated pollster
ABC News 36% A rated pollster

Firstly, how can there be a 15% difference between Rasmussen and ABC? Rasmussen is not a Democratic leaning poll by any means. A 15% difference between two polls taken at more or less the same time? It is unthinkable.

Then, sitting right in the middle is TIPP at 43%. Just because this looks to be an "average" of the other two doesn't mean that it is correct. It could very well be wrong too.

Something is very wrong with the polls. I am not one to say that I never believed in the polls because I do. I regularly look at 538 and Biden's popularity numbers. However, there is something wrong in the very methodology of "collecting the data" that different pollsters are using, to cause this array of numbers which continue to appear daily with none having any correlation with another.

It has been going on for quite some time. Let's look back at some of the Poll Prediction Averages which were put up by 538 before the Nov-2022 midterms:

NH Maggie Hassan was predicted to win by 4% but finally won by 10% (diff +6)
PA Fetterman was supposed to LOSE by 1% but finally won by 5% (diff +6)
WI Barnes was supposed to LOSE by 5% but finally LOST by 1% (diff +4)
GA Warnock was supposed to LOSE by 1% but won by 2% (diff +3)
CO Bennet was supposed to win by 8% but won by 15% (diff +7)

538 gave the Democratic Party only a 41% chance of winning the Senate. I am assuming that to mean that they gave the Dems a 41% chance to get to just a 50-50 Senate, which would technically be "victory" for them. The Dems cleared that easily and actually got 51-Seats finally.

And here are two Governor Races in the same election:

PA Shapiro was supposed to win by 10% but won by 15% (diff +5)
WI Evers was supposed to LOSE by 0.4% but won by 3.4% (diff +4)

I have tabulated the above just to show that in all of the above the Dems beat 538's average predictions - and quite comfortably too in the majority of the cases. Only in Wanock's case was the difference +3 over prediction but in the others they were 4 to 7 percentage points higher.

There is something very wrong with the polls folks. I have a feeling that the "demographic representation" while collecting the raw data of opinions, has become very faulty for whatever reason and therefore we are getting numbers which no longer represent reality.

The problem for me and others like me is that we don't know whom to believe. Any Dem should be concerned about the ABC poll showing Biden at only 36% right now but then all he has to do is to look at Rasmussen showing 51% and immediately be comforted again. No one knows what's going on though.

To end this discussion, a last one: Before the Wisconsin Supreme Court election a month ago, a Dem operative said on TV that he would be happy to win it by just 10 votes! That's +10 votes total out of hundreds of thousands cast! The Dem backed candidate won it by a whopping 203,000 votes.