Poll: Who Would Make a Better President, Clinton or Trump?

Wasn’t poll rigging revealed in the wikileaks email dumps?

No, you brainless halfwit. I explained this above. I will be happy to go back and repost it once I finish my reply to dchris here.

Excellent question.

As noted, the convention in most polling is to use a sample large enough that the margin of error is about 3%. So fluctuations within that range from week-to-week would not really be that surprising. As far as I am concerned, a single poll that shows Clinton 45% - Trump 42% and then the next week shows Trump 44% - Clinton 43% is not indicative of any real change within the race. That’s just normal polling variation within the expected margin of error.

Again, this is why aggregating many polls is useful. If a whole bunch of polls are all moving in the same direction, that’s less likely to be a mere polling fluctuation and more likely to represent a real shift in the race.

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I agree they aren’t polar opposites, but their policies are quite different.

More what I mean is that they are both authoritarians that think they should be able to run everyone’s lives. The fact that what they would try to make us do is different, is largely inconsequential in my opinion. And even then their policies have only diverged in the last couple of years.

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So the supposed “poll rigging” brought up in the email dumps was not anything of the sort, although it’s not surprising that babbling buffoons like you eager to declare the election “rigged” thought so.

It referred to “oversampling” certain demographic groups. The reason idiots like you read this and think the polls are “rigged” is that you read this and think “See, they’re rigging the polls to include more people that will vote Hillary!”

Except that’s not how polling works. The reason for “oversampling” certain groups is to make polls more accurate by ensuring that you have a sufficient number of those small groups to get an accurate estimate. The full calculations of the % supporting each candidate are then performed using sampling weights which appropriately up-scale the groups to represent an approximation of that state’s / nation’s population.

Edit: read this.

Specifically:

Oversampling

For some surveys, it is important to ensure that there are enough members of a certain subgroup in the population so that more reliable estimates can be reported for that group. To do this, we oversample members of the subgroup by selecting more people from this group than would typically be done if everyone in the sample had an equal chance of being selected. Because the margin of sampling error is related to the size of the sample, increasing the sample size for a particular subgroup through the use of oversampling allows for estimates to be made with a smaller margin of error. A survey that includes an oversample weights the results so that members in the oversampled group are weighted to their actual proportion in the population; this allows for the overall survey results to represent both the national population and the oversampled subgroup.

For example, African Americans make up 13.6% of the total U.S. population, according to the U.S. Census. A survey with a sample size of 1,000 would only include approximately 136 African Americans. The margin of sampling error for African Americans then would be around 10.5 percentage points, resulting in estimates that could fall within a 21-point range, which is often too imprecise for many detailed analyses surveyors want to perform. In contrast, oversampling African Americans so that there are roughly 500 interviews completed with people in this group reduces the margin of sampling error to about 5.5 percentage points and improves the reliability of estimates that can be made. Unless a listed sample is available or people can be selected from prior surveys, oversampling a particular group usually involves incurring the additional costs associated with screening for eligible respondents.

An alternative to oversampling certain groups is to increase the overall sample size for the survey. This option is especially desirable if there are multiple groups of interest that would need to be oversampled. However, this approach often increases costs because the overall number of completed interviews needs to be increased substantially to improve the representation of the subgroup(s) of interest.

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I thought I made that distinction in the original post. The difference between the two, reminds me of the show Billions. A billionaire who doesn’t answer to anyone vs. a powerful government official. Neither, really representing the people, but pandering to different sides of the aisle for support. Demagoguery at it’s finest.

I continue to be grateful to you for affording the rest of us an unobstructed view of Trumpism’s four unprecedentedly essential pillars of stupidity, incuriosity, gullibility, and disinterest in objective truth.

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Now watch, ActivitiesGuy just explained this in detail, but next Monday when HRC is up in the polls it’ll be brought up again…

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Dang kinda harsh,

Hey @smh_23, did that article come out on Financial Times? Paywalled

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Here’s the one I was talking about yesterday (can you get around the paywall in incognito mode?):

As I suggested a few days ago, there are rumors about three separate oppo drops on Trump, two of them bad and credible, one of them just straight crazy. This latter relates to Russia and it’s already out there on the public rumor mill so I’ll just go ahead and say it: there are non-nutjobs whispering about Trump’s having fallen into an FSB honey trap during one of his Moscow visits. It is consistent with how the Kremlin works – a senior British diplomat had to resign a few years ago after film of him enjoying the services of two Muscovite prostitutes surfaced online. And it would explain everything about Trump’s ludicrously faithful Putinism (aside: if Putin doesn’t have blackmail material, Trump’s Russia stance becomes a matter of sincerely-held ideological affinity…I don’t know which would be worse).

BUT, like I said, it’s crazy, and I have heard it only as a rumor, and how would anyone prove it w/o a video, anyway? So disregard that one as barely more credible than “Clinton is a demon.”

Anyway, I don’t work in electoral politics anymore and have no idea what is and isn’t going to happen beyond the rumors I hear from people still connected to that whole miserable world. Lots of variables, including legal ones. If I had to bet I would say I expect at least one to fall before Friday night, but in the end WTF do I know? Also there’s always the strong possibility that it’ll be a flop (see O’Keefe’s much-hyped OMG RACIST HRC video, which flopped this morning).

Unfortunately no…

Try Googling “The shadowy Russian émigré touting Trump” and clicking on the Google AMP version. Idk wtf AMP actually is or how it works but it seems to get me around paywalls left and right.

Depends on how you look at it. I would consider the opposite of an authoritarian policy to
be a liberal (not the political ideology) policy.

You can read it on reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughTrumpSpam/comments/5aij1t/the_shadowy_russian_émigré_touting_trump_us/

Is that it?

Looks like it from first the few paragraphs.

Putting this here again so as to be sure it isn’t missed:

Pew Research’s description of “oversampling” and why it is used:

Right, it’s the +10% change that always seems odd. As if a few emails change people’s minds vs. confirming already established PoV.

In other news, I’m ready for the election to be over with, and wish that there were restraints on the time that was allowed for campaigning. It seems everyone has made their opinion, all crazy stories have been found (although, held until the last minute). If the process was shortened, I would assume many people would be less apolitical. Although, I don’t know that I see that happening as I’m sure the news companies love the advertisement revenue they receive for the long drawn out process.

It is a ridiculously long process.

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Just to be fair - it could be a combination. Suppose that in my state’s population, 45% of “likely voters” are planning to vote Hillary and 45% are planning to vote Trump as of Day 0. I conduct my poll on that day and get a poll result that says Trump 47% and Hillary 43% - which is not an unreasonable poll result if the split is 45/45. Now, the biased liberal media drops a report that Trump once grabbed another woman by the pussy, and the true support in the population shifts to 48% Hillary to 42% Trump (so the population opinion has only shifted by three points). I conduct a new poll and get a result that shows Hillary ahead 50% to 39%. That looks like a huge shift in the polls (Hillary’s support going from 43 to 50, Trump’s support going from 47 to 39) but it was partially driven by polling variation and partially driven by actual changes in opinion.

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So what takeaway?
Millian is a long term SVR plant to recruit businessmen for spying?
Or to develop channels to launder money through real estate purchases?
Or legitimately foster some economic ties to give some semblance of normalcy?

The catch to tying Trump politically (for me) is that this relationship goes back 9+ years. Perhaps financially quid pro quo for Trump, but not seemingly motivated by getting inside our government.

What’s your view? or link this to GeoPolitical Catchall thread if you want to burrow into deeper.