From: Josh Rosenbluth <noway@nowhere.com>
Newsgroups: alt.politics.trump,alt.politics.liberalism,alt.politics.democrats,alt.politics.usa.republican,alt.fan.rush-limbaugh,can.politics
Subject: Re: Trump Sues Newspaper Over Election Interference
Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2024 08:31:18 -0800
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
On 12/19/2024 4:15 AM, NoBody wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Dec 2024 08:01:01 -0800, Josh Rosenbluth
> <noway@nowhere.com> wrote:
>
>> On 12/18/2024 4:15 AM, NoBody wrote:
>>> On Tue, 17 Dec 2024 11:30:51 -0800, Josh Rosenbluth
>>> <noway@nowhere.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 12/17/2024 10:48 AM, AlleyCat wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Pure election interference, JUST like 2016.
>>>>>
>>>>> It was election interference, plain and simple. Falsifying polls is the same as telling people they don't need to vote, because your candidate is too
>>>>> far behind to win.
>>>>
>>>> This is just plain, fucking stupid. There is no way the poll was falsified.
>>>
>>> Did the poll's author ever explain what went wrong with her "poll"
>>> that resulted in it being completely out of line with the state's
>>> actual results?
>>
>> It's called an outlier. It's supposed to happen a small portion of the
>> time. Pollsters who throw away outliers are engaging in a bad practice
>> called herding.
>>
>> https://www.natesilver.net/p/trust-a-pollster-more-when-it-publishes
>
> So the answer is "no".
She did explain. She chose not to recall weight her poll.
The poll asks who they voted for in 2020. In this case, she had a higher
percentage of Biden 2020 voters than there actually were. Had she
adjusted her sample to match the actual percentage of Biden 2020 voters,
she would have had Trump +6 which matches the average of all the other
Iowa polls.
There were good reasons to recall weight and also not to. On the plus
side, in both 2016 and 2020 most pollsters (***) who did not recall
weight missed Trump voters because these voters were less likely to
agree to take the poll. On the other hand, recall weighting has been
lousy when Trump is not on the ballot (see for example the mistakes made
by Rasmussen and Trafalgar in both 2018 and 2022).
(***) Selzer is not "most pollsters." She was the most accurate Iowa
pollster in both 2016 and 2020 (the other pollsters underestimated
Trump, she stood alone getting his margin of victory correct) even
though she did not recall weight. It makes perfect sense for her to use
the same methodology that worked in the past when Trump was on the ballot.
In the end, it was a bad decision, but a perfectly honest and reasonable
one.