675
Biden supporters mostly back him in 2024 election because they oppose Trump, poll finds
(www.theguardian.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
675 points (94.5% liked)
News
21721 readers
4608 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. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
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. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. 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 1 year ago
MODERATORS
If you think polling relates to reality then look into polling and how it doesn't.
The Polls Were Historically Accurate In 2022
"Polls have “called” elections correctly 78 percent of the time" according to that article. Just because they are more accurate than in another time frame does not mean they are accurate overall. This is an incredibly poor rate in the larger picture. Independent groups are notoriously hard to poll and they are the ones that decide elections. If it's a landslide then of course the poll will be correct. Completely unreliable in close elections. However they make excellent time filters for news networks.
Maybe you should just read their argument as to why this is a garbage metric. Especially if you are arguing they don't even "relate to reality."
If always predicting who will win is the requirement for polls, the problem isn't the polling itself, but your understanding of what a poll means and how statistics work.
Polls only predict well in places where you don't need polls... hence their 78% success rate. What is their rate in closer elections? Likely right at 50%...useless.
The article talks about this and why it's a bad metric. If you're going to ignore their descriptive argument, you'll just ignore my less than descriptive argument here.
But rest assured that at least part of the problem here is that you don't understand statistics and probability.
This is a thread where someone made the statement "Trump would win if the election was today." based on polls. You said yourself, that's not what polls are for. Take it up with the person who is misusing the poll to make definitive statements like that rather than the person saying you can't trust the polls for that.
Both that poster and this one can be wrong.
The difference is that the other poster is just conflating will with favored and it's kind of pedantic to argue with that.
This poster is claiming that they are no relationship with reality, which is just blatantly wrong.
The reason people go to "No relationship with reality" is because many people use the polls to say "will" instead of "favored" or conflate "will" and "favored." When that's the standard you are often presented, of course you are going to come to conclusion polling doesn't have all that much to do with reality. Because it isn't that predictive. Especially when you're looking at things where we take this somewhat fuzzy number and turn it into a binary yes or no while the cloud of possibilities comfortably encompasses both outcomes.
So when talking to some making definitive statements about the outcome of an election based on polls, how they are using polls only has a tenuous relationship to reality.
So, like I said, they don't understand polls and probability? I'm not sure why I have to be pedantic with the other poster, when this poster is just ridiculously wrong.
They're the exact same mistake. Since the commenter you were responding to wasn't the one to originally make the mistake, but instead was arguing with someone who's premise relied on that mistake, it's weird to only get on them about it.