"FiveThirtyEight Politics" How To Make Polls Better (Podcast Episode 2020) - Movies, TV, Celebs, and more...
such as if it hasn't conducted enough polls in the past for us to rate it or it's brand new on the scene. In this case, we can't be certain how reliable the pollster is because it has little to no track record for us to judge it on. We recommend being cautious with these poll...
Sure, but national primary polls conducted in the calendar year before the election are actually somewhat predictive of who the eventual nominee will be. Earlier this year, fellow FiveThirtyEight analyst Geoffrey Skelleylooked at early primary polling since 1972and found that candidates who polled bett...
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY FIVETHIRTYEIGHT / GETTY IMAGES We’re about to enter the thick of general-election season, which means we’re about to get aboatload of polls. Problem is, it can be hard to know which polls to trust or how to make sense of them all. But don’t worry — it doe...
The first major difference is that, when calculating averages for our forecasting model,we also apply a convention adjustment to the averages. We have found that parties tend to enjoy a reliable temporary bounce in the polls immediately following their nominating conventions in the summer. For exa...
Source ConfusionAfter a short period of time we tend to treat information — of both the reliable and unreliable sort — similarly since we forget where we learned it. And if it comes to mind quickly (Availability Bias) we are apt to conclude it’s reliable even though we picked it up ...
Extracting information from every source. While some analysts might cherry-pick data sources according to whether they were qualitatively "reliable" or "unbiased", Silver incorporated them all. And with good reason: there's still information in the presence of bias. For example, Rasmussen is a re...
(if the state has polling). The model gives more weight to the polling when there is a larger volume of recent polling. Conversely, the model will give more weight to demographics if it deems the demographic analysis to be reliable based on how much data it has and how much the various...
The FiveThirtyEight model performs three sets of adjustments to the polls: a likely voter adjustment, a house effects adjustment and (usually the least important of three) a trend line adjustment. The rationale for the likely voter adjustment is explained at some length here. Polls of likely vote...
If a pollster isn't on our pollster ratings page, it could be for a few reasons, such as if it hasn't conducted enough polls in the past for us to rate it or it's brand new on the scene. In this case, we can't be certain how reliable the pollster is because it has little ...