781
‘He’s underwater on everything:’ Fox News host breaks down Trump approval polling
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
781 points (98.9% liked)
News
27412 readers
4093 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I do think they need to have a good sample size to get results that make sense, yes.
Doing some research on it, seems like Quinnipiac's standard polling is conducted "in more than 20 states and cities as well as nationally" (particular locations not specified) and has typically 1,000+ respondents using random digit dialing. Meaning they just slap random numbers into the phone and see who picks up.
I can't say I can immediately come up with a better solution right off the top of my head right now, but I can identify several problems with their approach, namely being actual size of sample (1000 respondents is 0.000003% of the population) and the way they gather their responses (when was the last time you answered the phone for an unknown caller? Now when was the last time your grandmother did?).
From what I remember from university stats, 1000 is the standard sample size for these types of things and accurate to a reasonable margin of error (±3% iirc).
This is assuming that it's truly a representative sample though, and frankly I'm with you that I do have my doubts that over-the-phone surveys sufficiently represent the youth.
You are still showing your lack of understanding of statistics. It requires a large sample size, yes, and the larger it is the more accurate it will be, but the proportion of the total population doesn't have to be large at all. Margin of error and confidence are both controlled by the absolute sample size (assuming a random sampling). Here's a link that covers the basics. Most serious polls use a sample size of about 5000. Now, 1000 isn't terrible, but it isn't good, but not because it's such a tiny fraction of the population.
As for the methodology, which is also critical, I don't know what method for phone surveys is considered adequate, and it is well known that phone surveys are becoming less relevant even if they are more accurate than polls where the respondents are self-selected.