Here Comes The Polls

[BumRushDaShow]

74. Nope, I'm not "an employee of RCP or 538 or any other aggregator site", nor do I see the relevance of that

I suppose you trash the "concern" threads, many that get invaded by trolls?

And maybe you haven't "seen any" because you're not on MIRT getting rid of the 1- or 2-post wonders.

For the sake of brevity, I decided to skip spelling this out, but I guess I have to:

Yes, there are a few trolls hanging about on DU. But my point was whether or not there was any real concern of damage to the motivation of DU members to GO and V because of polls being reported and discussed here. The trolls aren't going to voting the way we want regardless (probably can't vote from their offices in Moscow and Mumbai anyway), and the trolls don't seem to be very effective at dissuading genuine DU participants from voting.

You are assuming that the only people reading DU are actual registered members (some internet forums require that to see any discussions but DU is NOT one of those). There are thousands who lurk, who are NOT members, and who might or might not consider finally creating an account, and becoming an active participant.

Those lurkers are very much exposed to some excellent discussion from the microcosm of what is an international community of those who choose to participate, and that includes both "good information" AND "bad information".

In other words, using the modern internet slang terminology, DU is a "political influencer".

A troll posting "Gosh, I'm just so disheartened I'm staying home this year" is not evidence that real voters are being turned off by bad news from polls, by good news from polls, by accurate polls, by inaccurate polls, etc.

The DUers and non-DUers who read that and then turn on the TV to see doom and gloom, may start to internalize it and trigger a vicious cycle of apathy.

This doesn't mean demanding a "rah-rah"-only fantasy discourse but it requires calling out misinformation and putting things into perspective.

I.e., DU CANNOT be a magnifier of misinformation and disinformation.

You described organizations NOT individuals and it is their JOB to gather data and act on it. But the "average person"?...

Stop right there. You've just admitted that polls are not meaningless. No matter what else follows "But the 'average person'?..." is a discussion of utility, not a discussion of meaning.

Stop right there. My entire discussion has been on "narratives" that are generated by "analysts" and "pundits" that impacts the information that gets passed on to INDIVIDUALS. You miss the fact that one group does it for ratings and another group might use them as just ONE PART of their work mission.

I.e., standalone polls are "meaningless".

The problem is that the former group "poll humps", in some cases out of laziness, with little ancillary "non-poll" data to inform a decision and/or will even neglect to do the necessary deep dives into that other data to look for another pattern, and will instead make a blanket assumption that now introduces detrimental "errors" in what will become "the narrative".

This is what happened with the 538 guy, whose discussion I posted about in this thread. I'll add it again here -

What I Got Wrong In 2022

By Nathaniel Rakich

Dec. 28, 2022, at 6:00 AM


Here’s a prediction that 100 percent, absolutely, positively will come true: I will get something wrong in 2023. Here at FiveThirtyEight, we make a lot of predictions every year; some of them work out, but we can’t get every single one right.  We can, however, learn from our mistakes. That’s why I like to write about everything I got wrong in the previous 12 months.1 I do this for two reasons: First, they’re often unintentionally hilarious (and when you’re a politics reporter, sometimes you need a laugh); second, identifying my blind spots has helped me become a better analyst.

And there’s no shortage of material for this year’s installment. Let’s start with a tweet I wrote on Nov. 6, 2020, shortly after it became clear that Joe Biden had won the presidential race: “Congratulations to Republicans on their victory in the 2022 midterms!” This was obviously meant to be snarky but also to communicate a political tenet: that the president’s party almost always has a bad midterm election. Of course, that tweet wasn’t from 2022, but I also made this argument in January of this year. And for several months thereafter, my analysis was colored by my expectation that 2022 would be a good election year for Republicans. As everyone knows by now, the midterms were a disappointment for Republicans. They won the House — but only barely (they gained just nine seats on net). Meanwhile, Democrats gained a seat in the Senate.

Clearly, I was overly confident in my early prediction. While it is true that the president’s party almost always has a poor midterm, there have been exceptions. And the 2022 midterms turned out to be one of these “asterisk elections,” thanks in no small part to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn the constitutional right to abortion. This year I should have been more prepared for the possibility that the ruling could throw a wrench into the election, especially after a draft of the decision was leaked in May. And even after the decision, it took me a while to become convinced that voter anger over Dobbs would prove durable enough to last until Election Day.

It wasn’t until the fall that I revised my expectations from a “red wave” to a “red ripple.” My biggest mistake here was not realizing just how common an “asterisk election” actually is. I often quoted one key stat: that the president’s party had gained House seats in only two of the previous 19 midterm elections. But there were four other midterms where the president’s party lost fewer than 10 House seats — so what happened in 2022 isn’t that rare. I also neglected to remember that the president’s party had lost Senate seats in only 13 of the last 19 midterms. In other words, midterms like 2022 happen about a third of the time — way too frequently to count them out.

(snip)

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/2022-predictions-i-got-wrong/

The latter group doesn't solely rely on "polls" to determine how they need to assist and boost the vote. They have access to OTHER data, like what previous turnout has been, by who (including the demographics), and where.

It's very simple. No one should hang their hats on "polls" because "polls don't vote, people do".