OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson <[email protected]> wrote: Well, Jed, you predicted final count would be 303. > > U wuz right. >
Plus I said 2% of the popular vote, which was right on the nose. Obama will probably take FL so I was too conservative. But FL is amazingly close. You might as well say both sides won it. I can't really take credit. I was just picking the pollsters I trust most, and Nate Silver, who sure knows a lot about statistics and s/n ratios. Gallup veered far from the other pollsters, but in the end fell almost back into line. It was almost right. You have to hand it to those people. As I suspected, their definition of "likely voter" (LV) was a little too conservative. See: http://www.gallup.com/poll/election.aspx Their LV is off by -3%; their registered voter number is off by +1%. The LV polling ended on Nov. 4. The gap was closing. If they had continued to Nov. 6 the gap might have been within 1% instead of 3%. I think their main mistake was to underestimate the youth vote and the Hispanic vote. It is uncanny how good modern polling has become. It is scary. The truth is, there were practically no surprises in this election for people who understand polling, statistics, margin of error, sample size and other issues. You should try to understand these issues. They are important in cold fusion and other experimental science. Rasmussen is controversial. I don't think they are so bad. Their number are reliable if you add +3% to the Democratic side. In other words, they have a fixed bias. This means they have good methodology for collecting data, with a proper random set of respondents, a good set of questions, and a large enough sample. But they introduce a bias in post-interview processing. This seems clear to me when I read the the actual questions they asked during the telephone interviews, and the processing methodology they describe in their literature. The questions they asked during telephone interviews and procedures seem well-designed. Every poster has to have some degree of postprocessing or the answers will be meaningless. For one thing, you have to adjust your responses to fit the population. For example, if you poll people at random and reach only ~5% Hispanics, you have to weigh their responses to represent ~10% of the likely voter (LV) population. Overly conservative posters put them at 8% instead of 10%, because they assumed Hispanic turnover would be lower than it was. This was a judgement call. This -- plus random variation -- is why there are differences between poll estimates. - Jed
