Rasmussen and Polling Topic

And here's something else. Rasmussen is always in the top 5 for polling. Usually #1 like last year and 2010.

The polls the Nazis push end up around #20. That's how far off and bad they are.

And that's after the last two weeks when they try to get serious and make their numbers look better so they get hired again next year.

But they don't have to worry about that anymore.

For years now, the DemoNazis and America haters in Washington and the media, have been hiring these slum-dogs to run 24/7 polls to make news.

The Media.  The fourth estate. What used to protect us in good times and in bad....has been corrupted.

We exist in the new Reich. Nothing is safe anymore because nothing is real.

The numbers aren't real. Your money isn't real. The news isn't real. The only thing real is your misery.

If it's gonna be fixed it's gonna be right now.

If it's gonna be fixed, you have to do it.

Again.
10/1/2012 8:02 PM
Posted by DougOut on 10/1/2012 8:02:00 PM (view original):
And here's something else. Rasmussen is always in the top 5 for polling. Usually #1 like last year and 2010.

The polls the Nazis push end up around #20. That's how far off and bad they are.

And that's after the last two weeks when they try to get serious and make their numbers look better so they get hired again next year.

But they don't have to worry about that anymore.

For years now, the DemoNazis and America haters in Washington and the media, have been hiring these slum-dogs to run 24/7 polls to make news.

The Media.  The fourth estate. What used to protect us in good times and in bad....has been corrupted.

We exist in the new Reich. Nothing is safe anymore because nothing is real.

The numbers aren't real. Your money isn't real. The news isn't real. The only thing real is your misery.

If it's gonna be fixed it's gonna be right now.

If it's gonna be fixed, you have to do it.

Again.
Second amendment remedies! The tree of liberty has to be watered with the blood of patriots.
10/1/2012 8:14 PM
First amendment lies! The rights and freedoms of the innocent masses are to be stolen by the lawyer class.
10/1/2012 8:25 PM
Rasmussen has Obama up 3.
10/2/2012 6:32 PM
Actually rasmussen has Obama up by 1.

And the Congressional tracking poll has the Pubs up by 3.

And the Rasmussen Electoral college has Obama up by a small margin, and no one has 270.

If you take leanings into account I believe Obama wins by something like 305.

Again this is after Obama got to spend tons on commercials and Romney had to get through a bitter primary and the Media is bending over backwards to pump up Obama.

Of course we are all waiting for the release of the tape tonight and the Debates tomorrow.

The bar is pretty high for Obama. If Romney looks good and breaks even with him Obama may be cooked.
10/2/2012 7:54 PM
so you're giving up?
10/2/2012 8:12 PM
National Journal Poll has it tied among likely voters.  Sample is +7 Dem.  But don't worry, the media says it's over and Obama is going to win.
10/2/2012 8:57 PM
I wonder how many of them were saying Carter was going to beat Reagan? Or Kerry over Bush?

They probably were calling McGovern over Nixon!
10/2/2012 11:40 PM
With polls drawing increased attention in the closing weeks of the presidential race, perhaps it is no surprise that when supporters of one candidate do not like the numbers they are seeing, they tend to blame the messenger.

In 2004, Democratic Web sites were convinced that the polls were biased for President George W. Bush, saying they showed an implausible gain in the number of voters identifying as Republicans. But in fact, the polls were very near the actual result.

Mr. Bush defeated John Kerry by 2.5 percentage points, slightly better than the one- or two-point lead that he had on average in the final polls. Surveys of voters leaving polling places that year found an equal number of voters describing themselves as Democrats and Republicans, also close to what the polls had predicted.

Since President Obama gained ground in the polls after the Democratic National Convention, it has been the Republicans’ turn to make the same accusations of bias. Some have said the polls are “oversampling” Democrats and producing results that are biased in Mr. Obama’s favor. One Web site, unskewedpolls.com, contends that even Fox News is part of the racket in what it says is a “trend of skewed polls that oversample Democratic voters to produce results favorable for the president.”

The criticisms are largely unsound, especially when couched in terms like “oversampling,” which implies pollsters are deliberately rigging their samples.

Pollsters, at least if they are following the industry’s standard guidelines, do not choose how many Democrats, Republicans or independent voters to put into their samples — any more than they choose the number of voters for Mr. Obama or Mitt Romney. Instead, this is determined by the responses of the voters that they reach after calling random numbers from telephone directories or registered voter lists.

Data suggest that polling in presidential elections has no history of partisan bias, at least not on a consistent basis. There have been years, like 1980 and 1994, when the polls did underestimate the standing of Republicans. But there have been others, like 2000 and 2006, when they underestimated the standing of Democrats.

To examine for bias, it is useful to examine all presidential polls since 1972, the year when the number of presidential polls began to proliferate.

In the 10 presidential elections from 1972 on, there have been five years (1976, 1980, 1992, 1996 and 2004) in which the national presidential polls of likely voters overestimated the standing of the Democratic candidate. However, there were also four years (1972, 1984, 1988 and 2000) in which they overestimated the standing of the Republican. Finally, there was 2008, when the average of likely voter polls showed Mr. Obama winning by 7.3 percentage points, his exact margin of victory over John McCain.

In all but three years, the partisan bias in the polls was small, with the polling average coming within 1.5 percentage points of the actual result. (I use the term “bias” in a statistical sense, meaning simply that the results tended to miss toward one direction.)

The first major exception was 1980, when late polls showed Ronald Reagan leading Jimmy Carter by only two or three percentage points on average — but Mr. Reagan won by almost 10 points. There were some complicating factors that year: the first and only debate between Mr. Carter and Mr. Reagan was held very late in the election cycle, perhaps too late to be captured by the polls. In addition, that race had a third-party candidate, John Anderson, an independent, and third-party candidates contribute significantly to polling volatility. Also, some private polls of the campaign showed Reagan with a much wider advantage.

Still, it is hard to make too many excuses for the polls: 1980 was probably the worst year for them since 1948, when the Gallup poll favored the Republican candidate, Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York, but the Democratic incumbent, Harry S. Truman, won instead.

In 1980, the miss was in Reagan’s favor, meaning that the polls had a Democratic bias. But one does not have to go back to 1948 to find a year when they had a Republican bias instead. In 2000, national polls showed Mr. Bush winning the popular vote by about three percentage points — but Al Gore narrowly won the popular vote.

The other year in which the polls were reasonably poor was 1996, when most of the national polls projected President Bill Clinton to win re-election by double digits, but he defeated Bob Dole by 8.5 percentage points. The results received little attention since Mr. Clinton’s victory was not in any real doubt before or after the election. But the polls had a Democratic bias that year, as they had in 1980.

Over the long term, however, the polls have been about as likely to miss in either direction. Since 1980, they have overestimated the Democratic candidate’s margin by an average of 0.9 percentage points and by a median of 0.3 percentage points. These errors are so modest that they cannot really be distinguished from statistical noise.

We can also evaluate whether there was bias in the polls of Senate races. In some ways, this is a much richer data set because there are different candidates and different conditions in each of the 33 or 34 states that hold Senate contests every two years.

As in the case of presidential polls, there have been years in which most of the Senate polls missed in the same direction. Senate polls had a Democratic bias in 1992 and 1994 but a Republican bias in 1998, 2000 and 2006.

(A Republican bias, although it was very modest, shows up in 2010. The two Senate races that the FiveThirtyEight forecasts “called” wrong in 2010 were Colorado and Nevada, where the polls had Republicans as favored but where Democrats won instead.)

But as in the case of the presidential polls, the years in which the Senate polls missed in either direction have tended to cancel one another out. On average across 240 Senate races since 1990, the polls have had a Republican bias of just 0.4 percentage points, a trivial number that is of little meaning statistically.

On the whole, it is reasonably impressive how unbiased the polls have been. In both presidential and Senate races, the bias has been less than a full percentage point over the long run, and it has run in opposite directions.

That does not mean the pollsters will necessarily get this particular election right. Years like 1980 suggest that there are sometimes errors in the polls that are much larger than can be explained through sampling error alone. The probability estimates attached to the FiveThirtyEight forecasts are based on how the polls have performed historically in practice, and not how well they claim to do in theory.

But if there is such an error, the historical evidence suggests that it is about equally likely to run in either direction.

10/3/2012 12:00 AM
Ths article is wrong in many ways. I am picking out 2.

1 The article implies that there is nothing the pollster can do. That there are standards that make all polls fair. That isnt accurate. After the polls are taken they need to be translated into numbers, and the weighting system is what is being brought into question.

2 Their analysis of 2004 is way off. Most of the polls that are calling Obama ahead were predicting a Kerry win. I am not sure where they get the idea that the polls were predicting Bush and they just missed by a small margin.

Reagan won by 10 points in 1980 and somels had him down. This is the same kind of thing we have this year, where hard core "Tea Party" people are being underrepresented. Just like they were in the 2010 votes.
10/3/2012 12:36 PM
And for the most part no one is implying direct fraud.

The system they used is based on weighting.

The problem is sytemic, but we have to bring it up every year.
10/3/2012 12:44 PM (edited)
Rasmussen has Obama up by 2 today.

538 gives Obama an 85% chance of re-election.
10/3/2012 12:42 PM
Yesterdays video and todays Debate may change that.
10/3/2012 12:45 PM
10/3/2012 12:48 PM
Posted by swamphawk22 on 10/3/2012 12:45:00 PM (view original):
Yesterdays video and todays Debate may change that.
What video?
10/3/2012 1:33 PM
◂ Prev 1...20|21|22|23|24 Next ▸
Rasmussen and Polling Topic

Search Criteria

Terms of Use Customer Support Privacy Statement

© 1999-2024 WhatIfSports.com, Inc. All rights reserved. WhatIfSports is a trademark of WhatIfSports.com, Inc. SimLeague, SimMatchup and iSimNow are trademarks or registered trademarks of Electronic Arts, Inc. Used under license. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.