{"id":1556,"date":"2004-09-22T21:10:03","date_gmt":"2004-09-23T01:10:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/nateptest\/2004\/09\/22\/why-to-ignore-the-polls\/"},"modified":"2004-09-22T21:10:03","modified_gmt":"2004-09-23T01:10:03","slug":"why-to-ignore-the-polls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/2004\/09\/22\/why-to-ignore-the-polls\/","title":{"rendered":"Why to ignore the polls"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a566'><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/rjwaldmann.blogspot.com\/2004\/09\/arg-reports-polls-for-50-states-and-dc.html\">Robert explains it all for you<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8230;If you decide to trust all polling agencies equally, the thing to do is<br \/>\nto average weighted by the inverse of the square of the reported<br \/>\nstandard error. This means that estimates of Bush&#8217;s lead in September<br \/>\nwould be roughly halved by the ARG result ! From 3 &#8211; 5 % to 2 &#8211; 3%. If<br \/>\nyou have decided to ignore Gallup, CBS and Time, you have to decide<br \/>\nwhether to ignore ARG too.<\/p>\n<p>Why did I say embarassingly low ?<\/p>\n<p>I think pollsters use small samples only partly to save money, and also<br \/>\nto give themselves an excuse if their numbers are off. With a huge<br \/>\nsample, a difference between the poll and the election would imply a<br \/>\nmore worrisome problem, either a biased sample, a faulty likely voter<br \/>\nfilter or a psychological difference between talking to a pollster and<br \/>\nactually voting. It is clear that some or all sampling techniques give<br \/>\nbiased samples, because the spread of polls is to large to explain with<br \/>\nsampling error alone. Polling agencies certainly don&#8217;t want to spend<br \/>\nmoney to prove that they are one of the agencies with a defective<br \/>\nsampling technique.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Robert explains it all for you: &#8230;If you decide to trust all polling agencies equally, the thing to do is to average weighted by the inverse of the square of the reported standard error. This means that estimates of Bush&#8217;s lead in September would be roughly halved by the ARG result ! From 3 &#8211; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politicks"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5G3PH-p6","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1556\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/natep\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}