
How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages - ptrkrlsrd
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/upshot/how-one-19-year-old-illinois-man-is-distorting-national-polling-averages.html?smid=tw-upshotnyt&smtyp=cur&_r=0
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aetherson
Nate Silver at 538 talks about the whole dissecting polls deal, or "unskewing"
them. All polls must make methodological choices, and all of those choices
have advantages and disadvantages. Spending a lot of time trying to dissect
those choices and passing judgment on them is not as productive as:

1\. Looking at aggregates of lots of polls.

2\. Looking at the variance that a poll captures from one iteration of it to
another.

Or at least, so he claims. Obviously, he runs a poll aggregator, using a model
that heavily weights the trendline of individual polls, so he has a dog in
this fight.

~~~
erickhill
His dog won pretty handily in the last election, though. It's not an exact
science, but his methodology seemed to eliminate a fair amount of doubt from
the equation.

~~~
throwaway729
I think it will be really interesting to see what happens in election
forecasting if Trump wins this election -- doubly so if there's no major
scandal for Clinton between now and election day.

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inimino
If the polls stay as they are and the election goes the other way, it means
that polling as practiced is somehow fundamentally broken, which would be very
surprising.

If there's a gradual shift in the polls, I'm not sure what that would mean.
Which scenario did you have in mind?

~~~
ddalex
BRexit will likely want to have a word with you.

I have a feeling that polling is used now a political weapon not a measure of
reality.

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tankenmate
One thing I noted is that NY Times says that most polls have four categories
of age and five categories of education; except these aren't categories, they
are ordinal variables.

Age and level of education are slightly co-variant (you don't get many 18 year
olds who have a PhD). Because the age classification and education levels are
ordinal you should use an ordinal smoothing [0] function to turn them into
pseudo continuous variables. Given the continuous and co-variant independent
variables (as well as other categorical independent variables) and a
categorical dependent variable the best analysis is probably to use a
quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

[0] [http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/2100/1/tr015.pdf](http://epub.ub.uni-
muenchen.de/2100/1/tr015.pdf) and
[http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ordPens/ordPens.pdf](http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ordPens/ordPens.pdf)

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jakub_g
Side rant: what the heck did they implement on NYtimes.com ?! When I quickly
click the text (which I compulsively do to select a paragraph etc.), it
_changes the font size_ (sigh)

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rsoto
Ugh, what were they thinking? I can't even imagine what this _feature_ would
be for!

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MichaelGG
I think it's some sort of idiotic tap-to-zoom, like for mobile/touch browsers?
Since browser zooming is hit and miss, they probably thought they were oh-so-
clever. As Raymond Chen says, someone probably got a raise for this.

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matthewbauer
This is really fascinating. I get why the poll creators made these decisions,
but the results of the weighting lead to a ridiculous result compared to other
polls. Supposedly this poll was extremely accurate in 2012, so who knows?

~~~
SpikeDad
Then the poll creators made bad decisions. Even with transparency there's no
reason why a poll can't be constructed specifically to heavily favor a
particular candidate which it seems is just the case.

It's very humorous when Trump cites this poll considering what an outlier of
civilized humanity he is. Matches nicely.

~~~
jacquesm
Interesting use of the word 'civilized' that I wasn't previously aware of.

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bbctol
I'm not sure if he doesn't know his role, and I'm curious how tracking polls
like this try to account for the large media attention paid to the poll and
its methodology. This guy is known to stats nerds, and they've been tracking
his moves and (rather mean-spiritedly) calling him "Carlton" for a while now.

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eatbitseveryday
Will the era of click-bait titles come to an end?

~~~
succstressful
As soon as it stops working, it will stop being employed.

~~~
flomo
Sadly, when I first clicked on this, it had a much better headline. Something
like "LA Times poll, how sample sizes make it an outlier".

Maybe clickbait++, or maybe the NY Times felt better about fingering a young
black guy than a competing paper.

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sytelus
TLDR; The 19-year black man is very small demographic and would have small
sample size. Apparently, the sample for LA Times poll includes and outlier who
favors Trump which then gets weighted disproportionately to arrive at
conclusion that trump is favored by young black voters.

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chmullig
It's not that the cell is small. It's that it has a single respondent
representing it, so his weight is increased enough to be the equivalent of 30
respondents.

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artursapek
This makes me feel so much less confused about that poll

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throwawayqwe
I'm posting under a throwaway account just to say I agree with you; if that
says anything.

~~~
sctb
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12696142](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12696142)
and marked it off-topic.

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blank_dan
Let's go find the really heavily weighted members of _all_ the polls and dox
them too. This way we can screw them all up. Not just one that is influenced
by a potential Trump voter.

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roywiggins
This isn't doxxing.

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blank_dan
'Spose not. I think it is an attempt to subvert the authenticity of the poll
though.

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maxerickson
The article does not question the authenticity of the poll. It complements the
pollsters on their documentation and sharing of data:

 _It’s worth noting that this analysis is possible only because the poll is
extremely and admirably transparent: It has published a data set and the
documentation necessary to replicate the survey._

It does point out an aspect of the poll that may undermine its utility in
accurately predicting the result of the election, but it's a pretty dry fact,
the repeated inclusion of a heavily weighted voter.

If Trump takes 10-20% of the black vote, then the poll did a good job
predicting the results. I don't expect that to happen.

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MrZongle2
Regarding the _Times_ ' decision to run this article, I wonder how much of it
was based upon "hey, polling is kind of goofy" and how much of was "look!
Here's another way we can show that Trump isn't really resonating with
voters!".

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untog
Does it matter? The point is that they published an article that is factually
accurate. If they were publishing an opinion piece based on such motivations
there might be an argument here. But they aren't.

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whamlastxmas
You're completely missing the point. Publications show bias _all the time_
based on what factual information they report (or don't report). Look at
CNN.com right. Literally nothing about the new wikileaks that came out today,
even in a factual manner. Plenty of opinionated anti-Trump garbage.

This is what your parent comment was referring to.

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mwfunk
Either that, or you are the one with bias, and the news outlets you go to
and/or the people you associate with feed into that bias. You can see just as
much bias in the opposite direction on any number of news sites. They're all
biased in different ways, some knowingly and some unknowingly.

Individuals are usually even more imperfect than most news outlets when it
comes to having limited sources of information and unexamined preconceived
notions about things. No one is off the hook for being personally responsible
for trying to understand all sides of a debate or being as educated as
possible on all sides of an issue. I only say this because I see huge
correlations between people complaining about bias in news outlets (regardless
of political leanings) and people who don't see just as much bias in their own
preferred media inputs.

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quickben
"They're all biased in different ways, some knowingly and some unknowingly."

All are biased _knowingly_. We don't live in utopia, newspapers/media are
_paid_ enterprises.

