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submitted 2 months ago by ZeroCool@slrpnk.net to c/politics@lemmy.world
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[-] teft@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The NBC News poll was conducted April 12-16 of 1,000 registered voters nationwide — 891 contacted via cell phone.


and the poll has an overall margin of error of plus-minus 3.1 percentage points.

[-] Silverseren@kbin.social 12 points 2 months ago

Did you have a point? That's a standard sample size for polls.

[-] teft@lemmy.world 14 points 2 months ago

1000 people with 89% contacted via cell phone isn't going to be representative of the US voting population. How many people do you know under 45 that answer random numbers?

[-] Silverseren@kbin.social 9 points 2 months ago

I mean, it's better than them using land lines like they used to. And, if they did it properly, then their calls should have caller ID saying it's the polling service. Also, they should leave a message to get called back.

I don't know if they did any of that, but it would be the right way to do it.

[-] tiefling@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 2 months ago

You can thank boomers for effectively destroying phone calls as a form of telecommunication

[-] ripcord@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

Man, what a weird thing to blame on a specific Boogeyman generation.

Pretty sure there were/are other people besides boomers involved in spam calls, creating text message systems, and other things that have led to a decline in voice calls.

Might as well blame them for literally everything that happened after the 1960s when they became adults.

[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world -1 points 2 months ago

1,000 registered voters nationwide — 891 contacted via cell phone.

We're used to that as a "low number" because it's easy to get.

But you know what?

That's a fucking giant sample size, it's more than enough for American voters, and while you can poll more, it quickly starts to dilute the worth.

Like, they're calling random people, it ain't like they're walking down the street asking everyone and taking the first 1,000 to respond, which explained why it wasn't 1,000 respondents...

But this?

How many people do you know under 45 that answer random numbers?

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24564257-240126-nbc-april-2024-poll-4-21-2024-release

Bruh, it's a legitimate poll, you don't have to "just ask questions" when it takes to clicks from the webpage you were already on....

[-] KevonLooney@lemm.ee 14 points 2 months ago

But the other guy is right. There's a problem with polling now because many people don't answer the phone. It doesn't matter how many people you have in the sample if it's biased.

In this case it's clearly biased against people who don't answer random numbers. The "not answering" cohort may be correlated with other population groups like people with higher education and higher earnings. The survey may be systematically missing this chunk of the population, making the results biased too.

Higher educated democrats not surveyed -> the survey misses their opinions -> the survey is wrong when the results come in at election time.

[-] MxM111@kbin.social -4 points 2 months ago

They are talking about couple percent lead one way or another. When there is 3.1% standard deviation. In short, it is in the noise.

[-] Fal@yiffit.net 7 points 2 months ago

3.1% is not the standard deviation

[-] MxM111@kbin.social 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

It is 1/sqrt(1000), which I think is std or close to it

[-] Fal@yiffit.net 2 points 2 months ago

You know just enough statistics to be confidently incorrect

[-] MxM111@kbin.social 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Why don’t you educate me? This is for sure not 95% confidence interval nor 3 sigma. This might be 80% but this is close enough to one sigma.

The reason why I said it is std, is because suppose that you have a single person instead of 1000. If we expect the actual numbers to be about 50% for Biden or Trump, then with one person you get 100% or 0%, which is +/-50% error over 50% median. Which gives std of 1. After that, std decreases as 1/sqrt(1000).

I understand that I might miss there small factors, but I could not be that far from correct answer. Where do I went wrong?

this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
308 points (97.8% liked)

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