Quote:
Originally Posted by tame_deuces
It doesn't really make sense as a conspiracy. If it was a conspiracy, you'd use a talking point that made specific voters more likely to show up and vote.
It can be bias. Which can creep into both data gathering and analysis, either by assuming trends that do not exist or failure to account for trends that do exist. That applies both to subjective bias and methodological bias.
Still, the "networking" approach is an interesting one. We know from social science that one of the strongest predictors for various views is your social circle. Studies that tell us this tend to rely on digital social media data however, not indirect reporting (which of course introduces a very real sampling problem, but such is life). Indirect questions introduce another layer of interpretation, which could be tricky to handle.
It’s possible there is a bias on their part. It’s possible it’s even intentional. But they have no more of a temptation to intentionally misreport than last time around and they just weren’t off by that much last time.
Our best estimate would be just to look at their previous mean reverted bias and apply it to their current poll figures. And similarly we’d want to do the same for pollsters that chronically overstate D support, which there are many of to the same degree that trafalgar has overstated R support.
I think this is what the betting lines reflect in most cases, and the biggest error the lines commit is the extent to which they over/underestimate sampling error from limited data. Ie: does being off by 1% represent a 40% or of the trailing party to win? 33%. Depends on the standard deviation of polls / how big the margin of error is.
As for the incentive for conspiracy conjuring - I think this is more to get publicity than anything. Kanye vote spoiling for trump in Pennsylvania? He needs only to look at his own polls where “someone else” captures only 2% of the vote of which Kanye is a small subset, and not all of his votes are coming from trump obviously. He likely doesn’t believe it. This is just an “any publicity is good publicity” thing.
Last edited by Abbaddabba; 11-03-2020 at 05:38 PM.