Archive for political polls
the polls weren’t wrong [alt book review]
Posted in Statistics with tags applied mathematics, April fool, book review, CHANCE, Chapman & Hall, conspiracy theories, CRC Press, Donald Trump, FiveThirtyEight, political polls, polls, Significance, statistical literacy, US elections 2016, US elections 2020, US elections 2024 on April 1, 2025 by xi'an
it figures [the return]
Posted in Kids, pictures, Statistics with tags baby Trump, Democrats, Donald Trump, Dover cliffs, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, majority rule, NYT, political polls, predictions, presidential electoral college, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Tilt, US elections 2024, votes on December 23, 2024 by xi'an
An article in The Guardian on 03 December pointed out the fallacy of reporting landslides and massive victory of Donald Trump
- he did not win the majority of the votes, albeit getting more popular votes than Kamala Harris
- his margin of victory is a mere 1.6 percent
- the 312 votes in the electoral college are par both Trump’s result in 2016 (304) and Biden’s in 2020 (306)
- he won the blue wall states by 231,000 votes total, hence would have lost had only 116,000 voters (0.7% of the votes) switched.
While Nate Cohn of The New York Times reflected on the poll strengths and misses, since
- polls predicted shifts in several voting groups towards Trump
- they underestimated him by about two percentage points, which is the average poll error along years
- and they did not do well at predicting turnout in Democratic districts
the problem with non-stationary processes [xkcd]
Posted in Statistics with tags Agent Orange, Donald Trump, political polls, predictions, Stand Up To Trump, stationarity, US elections 2024, US politics, USA, xkcd on November 7, 2024 by xi'an
Why forecast an election that’s too close to call?
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags Andrew Gelman, Columbia University, electoral forecast, electoral systems, FiveThirtyEight, forecast uncertainties, political polls, predictions, The Economist, The New York Times, US elections 2024, World view on November 3, 2024 by xi'an
the polls weren’t wrong [book review]
Posted in Books, R, Statistics, University life with tags book review, CHANCE, CRC Press, Des Moines, Donald Trump, drunkard, FiveThirtyEight, Jakob Bernoulli, plane trip, political polls, polls, statistical literacy, The New York Times, University of Warwick, US elections 2016, US elections 2020, US elections 2024 on November 1, 2024 by xi'an
While Nate Silver and his colleagues (as The New York Times Nate Cohn) have brought (part of) the general public to adopt a (more) scientific perspective on political polls, the way to combine them, and the need to keep uncertainty fully quantified (witness this recent “Two Theories for Why the Polls Failed in 2020, and What It Means for 2024” by Nate Cohn for the NYT’s Tilt), the author of this book embarks upon a crusade (and a lengthy rant) against pollsters and analysts and media reporters, with the single, many times repeated, argument that non-responses and undecided voters are crucial for the final election outcome… And that a poll gives a snapshot of the current (time) population opinion, not a prediction of its future state. There is not the slightest trace of statistical depth, there is actually no statistics at all found throughout the book, apart from a section (p.281) entitled “Threats to inferential statistics” (with not no maths either, as a few ratio manipulations and a chapter title invoking Jakob Bernoulli!) do not count as maths!, but a lot of repetitions on the same theme and dismissal of statisticians’ analyses, like Nate Silver’s. Opposing to them the theories of Nick Panagakis, a 1990’s pollster. (Funny enough, the Amazon reviews include one “expert in inferential statistics, the major tool employed by Carl [Alen] in this book” and another one stating that “Carl Allen takes the reader through a journey towards statistical literacy“!) And an R code (p.52) for plotting the outcome of 30 Binomial random draws.
“Unless my efforts achieve far more notoriety than even my most optimistic forecast would predict, [the Proportional Method] is unlikely to go away any time soon.” p.183
“If it seems like I’m picking on FiveThirtyEight a lot, it’s not because there are no other forecasters who are better or worse.” p.235
“Sounding eerily like myself, [Nate Silver] pointed out [in 2008] that `many things can happen’ months before the election.” p.208
Reading through the book (during a trip to & from Warwick) was painful, both for the feeling of being stuck in a plane with a perfect unknown, next seat, trying to force their weird theory upon you and no way to escape their rant, as well as for the terrible style of said book, full of repetitions and one-sentence paragraphs. (Of course, nothing as bad as this time near the 2012 US elections I flew to Des Moines next to an inebriated woman that would not stop blathering about her life!) Or as I imagine a card game addict defending their martingale as a sure way to win against the casino. It is also the first time I see references repeated (in postcripts) as many times as they are cited within a chapter. There is no true insight on how polling companies construct their polling samples, how they post-process outcomes by regression techniques, and no reflection on the unique weirdness of the US electoral system in that a few States determine the outcome (rather than majority votes) and thus how a tiny number of voters (escaping the law of Large Numbers) hold the overall result in their hand.
Thus (as most readers will have forecasted) concluding by not recommending the book!
[Disclaimer about potential self-plagiarism: this post or an edited version of it could possibly appear in my Books Review section in CHANCE. Most unlikely though!]
