Congratulations to those of you who supported Obama. I will be happy to make my contribution to a children's charity to pay off my friendly bet with MrBill. Congrats to the pre 1st debate Ricter Full congrats to AK. Progam Note... The jem balance algo has been terminated. The jem polling blog will not be started.
Finally, right wingers would stop calling it 'most accurate' or whatever. Rasmussen is done. PPP did fantastic by the way.
lets just hope you learned something. you did the same thing in this thread that you do on the religious threads we debate on. you latch on to an idea and only look at evidence that agrees with what you already believe.
Great thread Jem. Kept ET'ers in the know on a host of big topics and general polls. Well done and thank you.
Over the last few months, a strange pattern emerged. A data-driven political analyst like Nate Silver would reiterate that President Obama had a solid lead. Then, immediately, on cue, Silver and anyone who wrote about him would be dismissed as partisan hacks who would soon be exposed as charlatans and fools. As the months progressed, one by one, an array of serious and respected people lined up to explain why the polls were wrong and why Romney would cruise to victory. Sites that promised to "unskew" the polls became nationally famous. The "polls are wrong" view became common sense for every right-leaning media outlet and pundit. And so on. And then, we had the election, and it came out EXACTLY as Nate Silver and other data-driven analysts had predicted. So, I have some questions for those who dismissed the polls. And I mean them in all seriousness. I am curious as to what happened here. First, did you actually believe that Romney was going to win? If you did, that's fine. Just proceed to the next question. If you believed Romney was going to win, why did you believe that? Did all the media outlets who said the polls were skewed and wrong persuade you that the polls were skewed and wrong? If right-leaning media outlets persuaded you that the polls were wrong and Romney was going to win, are you now mad at the media outlets? After all, more neutral media outlets and analysts like Silver have predicted for months that Obama was going to win or, at least, that the election was going to be a "toss-up." Given that the polls appear to have been dead-on accurate and not in the least skewed, are you going to believe the polls next time? OR Were you just rooting and hoping for Romney despite the bad poll news? If that's what you were doing, that's also fine. Elections are to some extent a confidence game, and political teams know they have to project confidence even in the face of overwhelmingly negative odds. Again, I am seriously curious about this. Every time I wrote about Nate Silver's odds over the past few months, I was immediately hammered with tweets, emails, and comments declaring Nate Silver--and me--to be fools. I would like to understand whether all of these attacks were just partisan rooting... or whether I should have done a better job of explaining why I, at least, found Nate Silver's analysis persuasive. http://www.businessinsider.com/questions-for-those-who-scoffed-at-the-polls-2012-11