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Joined: Nov 2009
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You can be assured that the Times has choked on this latest poll. They most likely weigh these polls in favor of the Demonrat party,as they always poll more Demonrats that Republicans or independents. http://www.latimes.com/politics/
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." **Edmund Burke**
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." **Benjamin Franklin**
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Joined: Oct 2004
Posts: 23,367
Campfire Ranger
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Campfire Ranger
Joined: Oct 2004
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Why the USC/L.A. Times tracking poll differs from other surveys
David Lauter
Since July 28, when Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination, she has gained five points in the USC Dornsife/LA Times Daybreak tracking poll of the election. That’s similar to Clinton’s gain in other measures of the race, including the 538.com polling forecast (4.5-point gain) and the Real Clear Politics average (2.9-point gain).
But although the trend lines are similar, the Daybreak tracking poll shows a smaller lead for Clinton. As of today, the tracking poll shows Clinton leading by two percentage points, 45% to 43%, compared with a nine-point lead in the Huffington Post polling average (48% to 39%), an eight-point lead in the Real Clear Politics average (48% to 40%) and a seven-point lead in 538.com’s model of national polls (45% to 38%).
Why the difference? Part of the answer is simply statistical noise — all these differences are within the polls’ margins of error. But another part involves the post-convention bounce that Clinton has been enjoying.
Typically, candidates get a boost after their conventions, and typically that increase fades pretty quickly. The Daybreak poll is built in a way that mutes the impact of bounces and temporary shifts in candidate support.
If Clinton’s current high level is sustained, she’ll continue to move up in the Daybreak poll, as she has been doing for a week and a half. If her post-convention increase turns out to be a bounce that fades at least partially, the polling averages will show the race tightening.
Either way, the current gap between the tracking poll and the other measures of the election likely will shrink over the next couple of weeks.
That probably won’t close the whole gap, though. A couple of other aspects of the Daybreak poll make it differ from most other surveys:
Typically, polls ask people which candidate they favor or lean toward. Those who say they don’t know or are undecided don’t get factored into calculations of candidate support.
The Daybreak poll, by contrast, asks voters, using a 0-to-100 scale, to rate their chances of voting for Clinton, for Trump or for some other candidate. As a result, everyone who responds to the survey has some impact on the results. Because that approach gathers information from everyone in the poll sample, it should give a better read on the many voters who remain ambivalent about their choices.
See the most-read stories this hour >>
Using the 0-to-100 scale, however, almost certainly makes the Daybreak poll differ somewhat from other surveys. As with the bounce, any difference that results should shrink as election day gets closer and voters become more certain of their choices.
Finally, some analysts think the Daybreak poll is slightly tilted toward the Republican side because of how it accounts for the way people voted in the last election.
All pollsters weight their results somewhat to make sure their samples match known demographics — the right proportions of men and women, for example, or blacks, whites and Latinos.
The Daybreak poll goes a step further and weights the sample to account for how people say they voted in 2012: It’s set so that 25% of the sample are voters who say they cast a ballot for Mitt Romney and 27% for President Obama. The rest are either too young to have voted four years ago or say they didn’t vote.
The potential problem is that people tend to fib about how they voted. Polls have often found that the percentage of people who say after an election that they voted for the winner exceeds the winner’s actual vote.
If that’s the case this year, then weighting for the vote history would result in slightly too many Republican voters in the sample, which would probably boost Trump’s standing by a point or two.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to know for sure until we can compare the final vote to the poll’s final forecast. Given how long it takes to count all the votes, that answer won’t be available until at least a week after election day.
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"The Democrat Party looks like Titanic survivors. Partying and celebrating one moment, and huddled in lifeboats freezing the next". Hatari 2017
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid." Han Solo
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Joined: Jan 2008
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http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-leave-the-la-times-poll-alone/I’m tired of hearing about the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times tracking poll.
I’m tired of hearing about the poll from Donald Trump fans such as Reince Priebus, Matt Drudge and Donald Trump himself.1 They frequently cherry-pick that poll because it consistently shows much better results for Trump than the other surveys. As of Tuesday morning, for example, the poll showed the race as virtually tied — Hillary Clinton 44.2 percent, Trump 44.0 percent — even when the national poll average has Clinton up by about 6 percentage points instead.
This has been a fairly consistent difference between this poll and most others. Take the LA Times poll, add 6 points to Clinton, and you usually wind up with something close to the FiveThirtyEight or RealClearPolitics national polling average. What’s the source of the LA Times poll’s Trump lean? There are good “explainers” from The New York Times’s Nate Cohn and Huffington Post Pollster’s David Rothschild. Long story short: The poll’s results are weighted based on how people said they voted in 2012. That’s probably a mistake, because people often misstate or misremember their vote from previous elections.2
The poll does some other things differently also, some of which I like. For instance, it allows people to assign themselves a probability of voting for either candidate instead of saying they’re 100 percent sure. And the poll surveys the same panel of roughly 3,000 people over and over instead of recruiting new respondents. That creates a more stable baseline and can therefore be a good way to detect trends in voter preferences, although it also means that if the panel happened to be more Trump-leaning or Clinton-leaning than the population as a whole, you’d be stuck with it for the rest of the year.
But I’m also tired of hearing from the LA Times poll’s critics. I’m not a fan of litigating individual polls, for several reasons. First, in my experience, these critiques tend to involve their own form of cherry-picking. Clinton fans will pick apart the LA Times poll and find a few things wanting — in this case, with good reason (in my opinion). But they’ll give a free pass to a poll like this one that shows Clinton ahead by 16 percentage points in Virginia, even though it’s also something of an outlier. You can almost always find something “wrong” with a poll you don’t like, even if you might have approved of its methodology before you saw its result.
It’s probably also harmful for the profession as a whole when poll-watchers are constantly trying to browbeat “outlier” polls into submission. That can encourage herding — pollsters rallying around a narrow consensus to avoid sticking out — which is bad news, since herding reduces the benefit of averaging polls and makes them less accurate overall.
Furthermore, the trend from LA Times poll still provides useful information, even if the level is off. Before the conventions, the poll had Trump ahead by an average of 2 or 3 percentage points. Trump then got a modest convention bounce in the poll and pulled ahead by 6 or 7 percentage points. But Clinton got a bigger bounce, and she’s been ahead by an average of 1 or 2 percentage points in the poll since the conventions, although it’s been a bit less than that recently, with Trump narrowly leading the poll at times. All of this follows the trend from other polls almost perfectly, as long as you remember that you have to shift things to Clinton by about 6 points.
And that’s pretty much what FiveThirtyEight’s forecast models do through their house effects adjustment. A pollster’s house effect is a persistent lean toward one candidate or another, relative to other polls. House effects are not the same thing as statistical bias — how the poll compares against actual results — which can be assessed only after the fact. Nor do they necessarily indicate partisan bias. For example, Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling firm, has a very mild pro-Trump house effect this year.
Calculating house effects is simple, in principle — you compare a poll’s results against the average of other surveys of the same states (treating national polls as their own “state”). In practice, there are a few challenges, which you can read more about in our methodology primer. One of the important ones is defining what the average is. In the case of FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts, the average is weighted based on our pollster ratings.
Put another way, the house effects adjustment seeks to determine what the best pollsters are saying and not just what the most prolific ones are saying. In 2012, that made a difference: the higher-quality pollsters generally projected better results for Obama than the lower-quality ones. This year, any such effects are very minor,3 and neither Trump nor Clinton benefits much from the house effects adjustment overall, although it can matter more in individual states. Polls in Nevada happen to be a Trump-leaning bunch, for instance, so the house effects adjustment slightly helps Clinton there.
"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence". John Adams
"A dishonest man can always be trusted to be dishonest". Captain Jack Sparrow
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Joined: Nov 2009
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Campfire Tracker
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OP
Campfire Tracker
Joined: Nov 2009
Posts: 7,306 |
Nobody is going to read these long cut and paste posts.
Allow me to summarize:
As long as Trump is ahead,these polls are meaningless.LOL
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." **Edmund Burke**
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." **Benjamin Franklin**
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Joined: Nov 2008
Posts: 16,610
Campfire Ranger
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Campfire Ranger
Joined: Nov 2008
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Jesus, he should use that nickname a few times.
"Hey jackass, get your government off my freedom."
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