Another election, another massive screw up by the \u201cbest\u201d pollsters in the business. Yes, excuses will be made about how margins of error are only 1\/20 and while rare 1\/20 events do happen occasionally (it\u2019s roughly like getting two pair in a five card poker hand on your initial deal), they really don\u2019t happen twice in a row. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So any attempts to ascribe this to \u201cmargins of error\u201d  is complete BS. Clearly these polls are not (and didn\u2019t in 2016) use random samples. The magic didn\u2019t happen because the groundwork wasn\u2019t there. No random samples, no magic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s another way of thinking about this. If they did use random samples in each election, you could also safely assume the polling result errors in each election are independent events. Which means by the \u201cmultiplication of probabilities\u201d result I have talked about before, the odds of two screwups in a row would be >= 1\/400 and that just isn\u2019t believable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So something clearly is wrong in their methodology: they aren\u2019t getting random samples. You can come up with conjectures as to why. For example, a common method to get random samples in polls is to do random dialing of phone numbers. If a certain group is always more likely to hang up on you than another group, randomness ain\u2019t happening. You can attempt to weigh your results to take this into effect, and pollsters certainly claimed they would do that after the 2016 debacle, but whatever they added to their secret sauce in 2020 just made the dish taste worse, not better – that is for sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My conclusion after this year’s debacle: absent some methodological innovation, political polling isn\u2019t worth paying much attention to going forward and so neither is the effort put into it – by a lot of really smart people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another election, another massive screw up by the \u201cbest\u201d pollsters in the business. Yes, excuses will be made about how margins of error are only 1\/20 and while rare 1\/20 events do happen occasionally (it\u2019s roughly like getting two pair in a five card poker hand on your initial deal), they really don\u2019t happen twice … Continue reading “Why did the polls get it so wrong?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=584"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":585,"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584\/revisions\/585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garycornell.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}