Letters to the Editor
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Independents: are you stupid or what?
Lieberman's beloved independent voters would go Republican in a Clinton-McCain matchup, 48-36,...
This just goes to show that our elections are still about meaningless bull s**t and popularity rather than real issues.
You'd think voters in this country would have noticed by now that elections have consequences.
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margin of error
The margin of error is plus or minus 2.4 percentage points, meaning the Clinton-McCain numbers are really a tossup.
No it doesn't. The "margin of error" is perhaps the most abused epistatistic. Just because the difference between two candidates' numbers is less than the so-called "margin of error", it doesn't mean that it's "really" a tie. What it actually means (e.g., in this case) is that there's 97.6% confidence in the numbers. (That's still not entirely correct, actually.)
Say that in week 1 Candidate A is at 52% and B is at 48% and the "margin of error" is 5%. Then in week 2 Candidate A is at 51% and B is at 47% but the "margin of error" is still 5%, and in week 3 Candidate A is at 53% and B is at 49% and the "margin of error" is still 5%. You'd have to be really naive to call that a "statistical tie"; A is clearly ahead.
But everything is within that "margin of error"...
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Is Quinnipiac considered more reliable than NBC/WSJ? (I don't need to ask about Gallup)
Joementum, Schmoementum. Other than whispering corrections into Johnny-Mac's ear, what good is he? Onto the much more interesting buried lede...
"A Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday shows McCain trailing in head-to-head contests with either potential Democratic nominee. Barack Obama leads McCain 52 percent to 35 percent, while Hillary Clinton leads 45-42. (The margin of error is plus or minus 2.4 percentage points, meaning the Clinton-McCain numbers are really a tossup.)"
I confess I've been more than a little concerned about McCain's recent free ride and rising poll numbers. I understand that there are several lifetimes left in political terms before the general election, but I find no small amount of joy in these results. But joy must be tempered with reality: is there reason to doubt this poll, or is the Democratic frontrunner maintaining his sizeable lead over McCain after the worst stretch of his campaign thusfar? Are American voters, perhaps, really growing up and taking the effort to separate substance from silliness? Maybe? Just maybe?
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Does Lieberman want to be McCain's running mate?
That wouldn't necessarily be bad news for Democrats, since he didn't do much for Gore's campaign.
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American political savvy.
"You'd think voters in this country would have noticed by now that elections have consequences."
They know the consequences. The winner gets to say "Nyah-nyah!" My side won!"
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I hope that the Senate projections are correct
If we can get 4-5 Senate seats, then I would hope that Reid would sit Joe down and explain that you are on the bus or you are off the bus.
"The Democratic bus no longer needs you, Joe, so you need to decide if you are a real Democrat or an asshole. If you're an asshole, you can leave now, and we re-assign your committee chairmanships immediately to actual Democrats. If you remain a Democrat, I will then be in charge of your calendar."
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@ wysiwyg
Independents: are you stupid or what?
Nope.
How anyone could call themselves Republican or Democrat in America today escapes me and most other Independents.
George Bush was a complete and absolute failure in his first term and people re-elected the moron. The newly elected congress has done absolutely nothing to control this president or his asshole policies. Spineless, amoral pussies, the whole lot of them.
I'll stay Independent thanks.
Polls don't have a clue how we vote because there doesn't happen to be an Independent party in America at this time in history, sadly.
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@JeffM23
Sorry, but you're wrong. It is not 97.whatever percent.
Assuming that the errors are Gaussian and they've corrected or accounted for all systematic effects (the real kicker in these polls), lets run through some examples.
Candidate A leads B by 2% and the margin of error is 2%. This means there is a 68% chance that A leads B by anywhere from 0-4%. There is a 16% chance that A leads B by more than 4%. There is a 16% chance that B leads A by some amount.
There is a 95% chance that the real results are somewhere in the range of A trailing B by 2% to A leading B by 6% (original lead +/- twice the margin of error).
I'd love to see a real examination of how often election results fall into the window suggested by polls. Not as often as they should based purely on the statistics, I bet. Which means that pollsters are constantly under estimating systematic effects.
Accounting for only statistical differences, you need to ask
1000 people to get 4.5% error
2000 people to get 3.1% error
4000 people to get 2.2% error
assuming two evenly matched candidates.
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Margins of error, and polling results in the news
I'll spare everyone a detailed statistics lesson (not that I'm entirely qualified to give one) but the 'margin of error' is actually much more complicated than any news outlet ever explains. JeffM, I don't think your explanation was quite correct either, but your point was still valid.
The margin of error (a range of error from the reported statistic) also has an associated level of confidence (90%, 95%, 99%) which is seldom reported. If there's a +/- 2.4% margin of error with 95% confidence, that means we would be 95% sure that the ACTUAL number (in the "real world") is within 2.4 percentage points of the reported statistic from the surveyed sample. Or in other words, there's a 5% chance that the real number is outside the margin of error.
Furthermore, the margin of error our news media reports is usually the 'maximum margin of error' which usually applies to statistics that are in the midrange (around 50%). With a higher or lower statistic (closer to 0% or 100%), the margin of error would be less than is typically reported.
Even more important is that these analyses assume a perfect random sample for a survey or experiment, which I think is a pretty risky assumption these days given the inherent bias in any survey methodology. So it's quite possible that in any given study, the survey bias could produce more error than random variation.
The bottom line is this: the survey statistics we usually hear about in the news aren't explained as well as they should be; the results aren't as simple as they seem, and they're being *dumbed down* for mass consumption.
And my opinion is this: survey results get WAY, WAY TOO MUCH coverage in our political news. I fear people's opinions are being swayed too much by what they hear that other people are thinking via polls.