Friday, 6 November 2020

Bugger the pollsters

 

"Pollsters can try to adjust their sample for gender, race, political party, education, and a dozen other [allegedly important] demographic categories. But there's one category for which it would seem inherently impossible to adjust -- differences in willingness to talk to pollsters..."

          ~ Scott Sumner from his post 'Some thoughts on polling'

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1 comment:

MarkT said...

You get that with any poll in any country, but the under-stating of Trump support seems to be somewhat unique. Robert Tracinksi thinks that's probably due to a 5-10% contingent who don't like Trump (of which I'm one), and so won't want to declare support for Trump when asked, but can't bring themselves to vote for someone on the Left on the day. That rings true to me, and somewhat positive in terms of the power we have.