Friday, November 23, 2012

Romney Was Right, The Polls Were Skewed











Only they were skewed towards Mitt Romney:
We know that the national surveys tilted heavily against Obama. When we don't count any one survey date twice (that is, tracking polls such as from Gallup only have each day counted once), we can say that the average of national polls taken after the first debate through election day had Obama winning by 0.3 percentage points. President Obama currently has a 3.2pt lead nationally and it seems like he may finish with an edge above 3.5pt.
Apparently, this huge discrepancy was a result of a bad likely voter model. Most of the polling firms thought that more angry white guys would be voting. They were dead wrong.

SUNY Albany Professor Bruce Gyory had this to say back in September:
Since polls of registered voters have been more accurate than likely voter samples, news media outlets should demand that both sets of data be provided (as Pew Research, Marist and the Siena polls, to their credit, do). And the media should give greater reporting weight to the more accurate polls of registered voters -- unless and until likely voter samples reprove their empirical validity.
So, it turns out that there were academics who saw this coming, but it appears none of them manged to crack the Tea Party bubble encapsulating Mitt from reality. Not that I'm complaining. I'm totally down with the GOP losing more elections because they don't understand how math works.

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