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Comment by general_ai | Hacker News Reader

The "statistics" is only in decline because it was blatantly used to try and sway the election. As in, oversampling demographics to get the necessary conclusion, phrasing the questions such that you're "literally Hitler" if you answer them "wrong" and so on. I quoted "statistics" because it's not statistics, it's pretty obvious propaganda, using the most shameless tricks in the book. Editors of Soviet Pravda would be proud. We know much of this thanks to Wikileaks now, as well as because it was so blindingly obvious that only a complete moron would think the polls were impartial.

I'm not afraid of "what's next" because as far as political polling is concerned (calling it "statistics" is way too generous), it just can't really get any worse than it already is.

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The polls were no better or worse than past years. Reporting on the polls is a different story.

Even the polls were cooked. E.g. to improve the odds of polls fitting the narrative, democratic leaning pollsters would disproportionately sample minorities known to vote predominantly democratic. The patron saint of pollsters, Nate Silver, was consistently wrong about everything all the way through the campaign. Now, if his main goal wasn't to peddle a particular narrative, one would expect him to make corrections to his models after getting things wrong, but no, he sacrificed his professional integrity instead.

I'm sure this is not the first time this happened, but this year it was particularly obvious, and I don't really trust the polls at all anymore except when it comes to completely non-political topics.

I was about to point out that your use of "oversampling" didn't refer to the standard statistical technique, but rather to the right-wing conspiracy theory about polling being intentionally altered, but you've pretty much made that clear with your reply.

I think this first became a "thing" back in 2012, when the polls were predicting Obama to beat Romney, and that just didn't seem like it could be true, and it was blamed on "oversampling".

Also, Nate Silver isn't a pollster, he just uses their output as input to his models.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/26551

wow. Unbelievable. This kind of collusion between pollsters and campaigns should be illegal.

We'll need to conduct a poll to see what people think about this... oh wait.

Campaigns often conduct private polling that they pay for, why should this be illegal? I don't see anything wrong in that email - all it means is that they wanted to get more resolution for certain demographics, I think.

No, they didn't want "more resolution" for "certain demographics". They wanted these demographics overrepresented in the final sample, without disclosing the fact they are overrepresented. These are polls for external consumption, the kinds you'd then find on CNN, HuffPo and MSNBC. I'm sure they also had their own private polls which, while probably also cooked, were more accurate.

Is there more context here I'm missing? The emails don't say much, but they do refer to "our polling".

"Donald Trump absurdly claims Clinton campaign chairman rigged the polls."

Politifact rating: Pants on Fire!

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/...

Just another officially sanctioned conspiracy theory.

Nate Silver gave the eventual winner a 30% chance of victory, and his prediction for the popular vote was off by only 1% for Trump and 0.5% for Clinton. That's a damned good job if you ask me.

I can't fathom people who look at the results of this election and conclude that the polls are all horrible. They got very close to what happened. Many places took those poll results and interpreted them far beyond what they should have, saying Clinton was a lock when she wasn't, but that's a different matter. (It seems like they assumed that errors in swing state polls would be uncorrelated, thus vastly underestimating the chances that a lot of them would flip together.)

If you were trying to sway the election for Clinton, talking about how her victory is assured would be a bad way to go about it. That just encourages her voters to stay home. If the polls were biased that way, and if it was a deliberate attempt to sway the election, then if anything it would be an attempt to sway it for Trump. Which really doesn't seem likely at all.

Silver gave Trump 2% chance of winning the primary. He also wheeled out this doozie a day before the election when it was pretty clear that Trump knew he would win. You don't do 5 rallies a day if you know you're losing.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/

He screwed up in the primaries, and admitted as much.

Did you intend to link to something else? That "doozie" is just the final projection for the 2016 results whose numbers I referred to above.

They came out with the wrong result and that is all that matters. I don't care how close a surgeon is to cut out my tumour, either it is gone or not.

How is giving a 30% chance of winning to the person who won "the wrong result"? Do you think that anything over 50% odds means a guaranteed win or something?

For the polls to be cooked you would need the active participation of literally hundreds of different polling companies, coupled with none of the employees of those pollsters deciding to reveal the vast left-wing conspiracy.

I don't think most of those complaining about the polls have any idea just how hard polling is to get right, even if you're being completely honest. There is a shit load of educated guesswork in the turnout modeling and the demographic adjustments, and that the polls get as close add they do is a minor miracle. Go and read the British Polling Council postmortem of the 2015 General Election failings if you want to look at the gory details: it's really quite transparent.

Not to say there aren't careless and partisan pollsters in the world: there are lots of both. But there's no need for conspiracy theories when the reality looks like this.

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