Which Polls Fared Best (and Worst) in the 2012 Presidential Race

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-polls-fared-best-and-worst-in-the-2012-presidential-race/

by bslatkin • 14 years ago

30 13 14 years ago

fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com

bslatkin• 14 years ago

"Perhaps it won’t be long before Google, not Gallup, is the most trusted name in polling."

elchief2• 14 years ago

What is the deal with Gallup?

001sky2• 14 years ago

relevant > http://pollingmatters.gallup.com/2012/11/polling-likely-vote...

elchief2• 14 years ago

But how could you/they be so wrong? Are you a subsidiary of Fox? It only makes sense to me if there was money involved.

aristidb• 14 years ago

"Our final estimate of registered voters was an unallocated 49% for Obama, 46% for Romney. The transition to likely voters moved that to the unallocated 49% Romney, 48% Obama."

Ouch. So their "transition to likely voters" estimation is just completely off.

pbreit• 14 years ago

It seems like taking 3 weeks worth of polls would lead to larger error sizes, especially towards Romney this year, since it did seem like Romney was faring better (although still trailing) 1-3 weeks out.

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

Take the current value of the dow jones, round it to the nearest dollar. Then create one hundred letters, each of which says "The dow jones will be at X, one week from now." where X is the current value plus or minus increments of 5 dollars up to +250 and -250. Then add some sort of hook to the end of the letter such as "If you would like to learn my secrets of predicting the stock market you can take my course for the reasonable cost of Y dollars." Then print out 100 copies of each letter and send them to random folks, perhaps some number of people who receive letters that end up accurately predicting the stock market will fall victim to your scam.

That's the same problem we're dealing with here. Presidential votes only happen once every four years, so it can be difficult to validate any sort of model. A hundred pundits make a hundred different predictions. And dozens of polls make different predictions as well. Does that mean that the pundits and the polls which ended up being closer to the truth are more accurate or does it just mean that they were lucky?

Which Polls Fared Best (and Worst) in the 2012 Presidential Race

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