Just had to share this from the comment section on DailyKos about pollsters

[PortTack]

If you tried to submit a sociology or social psychology research paper to a peer-reviewed academic journal using the same methodology employed in most political telephone polls, the reviewers would laugh hysterically first at your vanishingly small sample size, then bust a gut about the unreliability of your method of calling respondents on land lines, and then die laughing at your conclusions for being completely invalid.

Polls = Propaganda, nothing more, nothing less.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/4/2133645/-If-you-follow-the-money-McConnell-isn-t-giving-off-red-wave-vibes#comment_84876258

[MagickMuffin]

1. Yep, very small sampling data to get worked up over

I generally roll my eyes at polling data. I do love to see how many people got polled. Then I roll my eyes once again!

[SlimJimmy]

7. If I see that the pollng is something like N-400,

then I just ignore the results altogether.

[brush]

2. They do poll cell phones now. They better as most younger...

voters have cell phones, and even landline geezers often don't answer their phone if they don't recognize the number, which would leave poll results completely invalid.

[agingdem]

15. younger voters "live" on their phones...

and unless the caller is in their "contacts" the call goes unanswered and blocked...pollsters can't reach them...they get their news and information from podcasts while ignoring cable networks with their incessant blathering hosts and rotating go-to guests..as for online national newspapers..wha's that???

[usonian]

3. I call polls Voodoo math. (Toss out any data that doesn't amplify the agenda)

Ignore polls and you're

Pay attention to polls and you're

SCOOTIN WITH PUTIN.

Remember the 5 D's of the repubs and their masters:
deny, delay, distort, deceive and distract
✔︎✔︎✔︎✔︎✔︎

GOTV WINS!

[sheshe2]

4. Oh Snap!

[Cha]

5. Brillaint.. I love it..

Mahalo, PT!

[PortTack]

16. Mahalo Cha...hope you are doing well!

[Cha]

17. I hope the same for you!

On Pins & Needles like everyone else who loves our Democracy.

[iemanja]

6. They don't just use land lines anymore.

And I disagree about sample size. Medical research is typically done with much smaller samples, as is most social science research. I suspect that person never published a peer reviewed article.

The problem isn’t the polls. It’s that people don’t know how to read them and that includes the media. For the results of any poll to be statistically significant, they have to be more than twice the margin of error. In a country as tightly divided as ours, that is almost never the case. It’s time for citizens to quit acting like the polls say something they actually don’t. We can’t change the media, but we can educate ourselves.

[plimsoll]

9. That's absolutely correct.

The polls are still crap, but for different reasons. Back when I did answer calls from random cranks half would be deliberate push polls, and of course I'd for the Republican candidate before I'd vote for Charles Manson. The other half were so poorly designed that they could tell if the respondent was deliberately yanking their chains, and plenty of people will do that.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

8. Polls worry political viewers. Worried viewers tune in. Tuned in eyeballs generate ad bucks & profit

[LT Barclay]

10. They also satisfy a need people seem to have to "know" the future, so they can feel that it is under

control.
Many of the humans we share this planet with have not progressed beyond the days when they gathered around the soothsayer to find out the will of the gods by "reading" goat entrails.

[moniss]

11. "Organizations"

will know ahead of time when they are going to hire a pollster. Before they do that they hire other people to do push polls in those areas (states etc.) because they know that if you shove the propaganda in front of people first and then ask questions later you get a higher result for the way you want the poll to go. Polling and opinion shaping is a dirty business. Notice how almost no political ads talk anymore about specifics of a plan or policy being promoted by the candidate? All you get now are references to murderers/rapists being let out of jail and coming to get you or claims that the government is going to tax you to death etc. The campaign managers don't want the battle of nuts and bolts ideas and proposals because that can't be used to manipulate voter sentiment/emotions as easily as the fear-mongering and false claims. So the campaigns put out the fear talking points in ads, then conduct push polls, appear on talking head programs and avoid debates. So after being inundated during a campaign voters come away learning almost nothing factual but with an anger, fear and resentment created in large part to purposely mislead them. They don't care that they do this to people and our democracy because to them it's only about money, power and being successful by any means necessary so they can have more money and power. Meanwhile Nero plays on.

[calimary]

14. MAN-oh-MAN did you ever nail it, moniss!

That’s exactly what happens, how it’s manipulated, and how it works.

[keithbvadu2]

12. Poll accuracy

I read once that poll accuracy is determined by the number of folks polled.

Take the square root of the number polled.

Divide 100 by that square root.

It gives you the approx +/_ accuracy.

400 folks polled is +/_ 5% accurate.

1600 folks polled is +/_ 2.5% accurate

Very rough and simplistic.

A statistics class would hammer you with more details.

Especially; are the folks polled a valid cross section of the voters?

Or; are they mostly true believers in the issue/candidate or mostly non-believers?

Is it a neutral poll or a push poll that guides you toward the answers they really want?

(from Statistics 101 class) A telephone poll taken in the 20s or 30s indicated that a certain candidate would win.
Didn’t happen. The other guy won.
Turns out that it was not a sample of the general population.
Only the relatively well-to-do could afford phones so they did not sample the ‘common folk’.

[iemanja]

13. Different questions will have different margins of error.

The infamous suburban white women questions, for example, likely have a very wide margin of error because the samples are small.