this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
287 points (97.4% liked)

politics

19223 readers
2958 users here now

Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!

Rules:

  1. Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.

Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.

Example:

  1. Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
  2. Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
  3. No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
  4. Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
  5. No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.

That's all the rules!

Civic Links

Register To Vote

Citizenship Resource Center

Congressional Awards Program

Federal Government Agencies

Library of Congress Legislative Resources

The White House

U.S. House of Representatives

U.S. Senate

Partnered Communities:

News

World News

Business News

Political Discussion

Ask Politics

Military News

Global Politics

Moderate Politics

Progressive Politics

UK Politics

Canadian Politics

Australian Politics

New Zealand Politics

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] TropicalDingdong 30 points 6 months ago (2 children)

He should try a "improving my polling numbers" weekend blitz.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

He can start by dropping all federal government support to Israel and by promoting BDS

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

How do you get Millenials and Gen Z'ers to answer their phones for more accurate polls?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Send me a fuckin email for Christs sake

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod 4 points 6 months ago

Or leave a voicemail so I can call you back when I've got ten minutes to take the poll

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Or text messages

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

How do you prevent duplicate voting when anyone can share a link? How do you avoid spam filters, or stay within compliance of anti-spam laws?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Well they could try to not be so daft about these challenges and act in acccordance with living in the 21st century. (I know, very difficult for Biden and his team, but it is possible.)

Phone-based MFA, spend a tiny fraction of campaign dollars to advertise on social media platforms so respondents can opt-in for the poll, applied stats to randomly select for the target demographic you’re after. This should satisfactorily solve for the above and improve poll quality.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

So first off, you seem to be confusing direct campaign activities with polls. Campaigns do sometimes run internal polls, but you should never trust the numbers they put out. Generally, they do want them to be accurate because they want to make strategic decisions around them. However, they aren't obliged to release those numbers to the public, and if they do, it's often for a specific reason; they may want to spin a narrative that they're in a powerful position, or perhaps paint themselves as the underdog. Either way, you don't want to rely on those numbers.

FiveThirtyEight has not historically included campaign polls in their Presidential model. They sometimes do for Congressional campaigns, because those don't get polled as heavily and there would be a lack of data if they weren't included (which also means they have to use other factors to correct the results to get a good model).

Most polls aren't like that, though. They're run by private companies.

Second, any little road bump you do to polling means fewer participants. Need to verify MFA through a text message? Whole lot of people are going to see that and promptly stop and go back to what they were doing.

Third, advertising for opt-in? No way you're getting a randomized sample out of that.

Turns out, polling companies are not run by idiots. This is not an easy problem.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You’re totally right about the distinction between campaign and official polling, fair point.

Still, I do think there are means available for pollsters to get more accurate results from younger voters if they so choose. MFA can solve the identity problem well enough, but there are better solutions if we want them. For example, I’d love to have an anonymous, secure, unique voter id which could be used by individuals to verify voting results independently after an election concludes. If we had it, we could use that instead.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

We absolutely should not have such an ID. People buying votes would ask you to show them your verified vote on your phone before you get paid. There's a long history behind anything that could let you show your vote to another person after the fact, even voluntarily, and we've banned them for a reason. It's one of those problems that we've solved so well that people forget why those rules are there.

Morning Consult does online polling, and they seem to do OK. If you look through the FiveThirtyEight polls, you'll notice they sometimes have an unusually large sample size, like 10k registered voters when most others have between 1k-3k. That's because they gather a whole lot of people in their polls, but the result isn't particularly random. They then have to apply weights to get something like a random sample.

Where do they get those weights and how do we know they're valid? That's a very good question. They match up with other polls, but those other polls have problems that we're trying to get away from.