Wrong Element
Sentient Onion
- Joined
- May 5, 2002
- Posts
- 24,909
One would think the VP debate would be even more important considering the ages of the two candidates
It makes sense, except there's not a big track record of that being the case. McCain was older than Trump or Clinton, he was a survivor of melanoma, and his VP nominee was a certifiable idiot. But he still received 60 million votes. I'm sure there were people who voted for Obama because they couldn't stomach Palin, but that may have been canceled out by people who voted for McCain/Palin for history-making reasons and also because they're pro-idiot.
I think one of them would have to be truly horrible on Tuesday for it to make a big difference, and both are experienced enough that falling apart is really unlikely.
Finally, some analysts think the Daybreak poll is slightly tilted toward the Republican side because of how it accounts for the way people voted in the last election.
All pollsters weight their results somewhat to make sure their samples match known demographics — the right proportions of men and women, for example, or blacks, whites and Latinos.
The Daybreak poll goes a step further and weights the sample to account for how people say they voted in 2012: It’s set so that 25% of the sample are voters who say they cast a ballot for Mitt Romney and 27% for President Obama. The rest are either too young to have voted four years ago or say they didn’t vote.
The potential problem is that people tend to fib about how they voted. Polls have often found that the percentage of people who say after an election that they voted for the winner exceeds the winner’s actual vote.
If that’s the case this year, then weighting for the vote history would result in slightly too many Republican voters in the sample, which would probably boost Trump’s standing by a point or two.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to know for sure until we can compare the final vote to the poll’s final forecast. Given how long it takes to count all the votes, that answer won’t be available until at least a week after election day.
That's what Nate Silver believes, basically (I would also surmise that Romney voters are more likely to have died in the last 4 years than Obama voters). He's also on record as saying that the poll isn't totally useless, though, because it has tended to parallel the other national polls pretty closely, as long as you account for a Trump lean of around 5 percent.
I see some people on Twitter who regard this poll as something worth being furious about, but it really isn't.
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