Comment by Amezarak
20 hours ago
Polling can’t even accurately figure out if people are going to vote R or D two weeks from the poll. Color me skeptical that public opinion polling in anything more complex is more accurate and not simply used to itself shape public perception and opinion.
Even polling “experts” like Silver regularly make huge misses on binary questions (his Florida bet) let alone stuff like the Selzer poll. It’s really hard to take any complex issue polling seriously. It’s a tough sell to convince me that sure, these binary choice election polls with a verifiable result (the election) are wrong, but totally unverifiable public opinion polling with possibly framed questions represent reality.
That's actually an indication that what I'm saying is true. Polls aren't sensitive to pick up the subtle differences that divide the two-party system in the USA.
For all that the people in the tails of the distributions want to believe otherwise, the difference between "red state" and "blue state" is a few percentage points, nationwide.
These polls are just asking “who are you going to vote for”, there’s no subtlety to them - and the Selzer poll was still off by 16 points. Nate Silver after all his polling meta analysis bet 100k that Trump would win Florida narrowly at best. He won it by 15 points.
They aren’t deducing voting behavior from your positions. They are just asking you who you were going to vote for and they can’t get it right.
Given those facts, I can’t see any reason to believe even the results of a fraught question like “do you consider yourself a moderate?”