
FiveThirtyEight: When to Freak Out About Shocking New Polls - dirtyaura
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-when-to-freak-out-about-shocking-new-polls/
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marcoperaza
> _There’s less to fight about when polls show similar results. But that
> doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll turn out to be more accurate. Instead, that
> consensus may reflect herding — pollsters suppressing results that they deem
> to be outliers, out of fear of embarrassment._

And there goes my entire faith in the process. Deciding which polls to release
based on the results is absurd. If the media is going to focus so much on
polls (and see my other comment for what I think about that) then they should
only source them from pollsters that share _all_ results, not just the ones
the pollster deemed "correct" because it fit with their expectations.

Nate Silver's strategy for dealing with it isn't encouraging either:

> _In fact, you should trust a pollster more if it’s willing to publish the
> occasional “outlier.” Clinton probably isn’t winning Colorado by 13
> percentage points right now or losing Pennsylvania by 6 points. But the fact
> that Monmouth and Quinnipiac are willing to publish such results are a sign
> that they’re letting their data speak for itself._

It sounds like he's admitting he doesn't even know what the practices of each
pollster are. For all we know, a pollster could be so sure in a Hillary or
Trump lead that they don't publish the outliers in the _other_ direction. How
can Nate Silver aggregate these results with any certainty whatsoever?

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marcoperaza
Not hating on FiveThirtyEight for the interesting work they do--and I
understand that covering this angle of things is their main purpose--but I
can't help but feel that the intense focus on poll numbers by the media
throughout the entire race is upside-down. The poll that matters is on
November 8th and we'll all get the chance to participate in it. Until then,
maybe we should focus on informing ourselves about the candidates and the
issues, and less on who's winning the rat race each morning.

~~~
toyg
But it's not a poll, it's a race with weird rules. Polls are a huge part of
that race: if you are winning state X by double-digit margins, there is no
point in flying there to campaign; whereas the swing state where you're down
by 1% needs ad-hoc policy announcements and lots of time spent on the ground.

Paying attention to the polls will often tell you where a candidate will stand
on certain issues, so it's part of the whole "understanding" bit.

