Usually the staff at Blogistan Polytechnic Institute search for a tiny clue to the resident faculty’s intentions. This week they tricked us by leaving clues everywhere, pointing all over. We first tried to parse the clues logically, but then wondered: what if the avalanche of clues is itself the clue? (More)
First our usual thanks to last week’s guest lecturer. On Tuesday, Professor of Neuroholdemology Caractacus discussed What Disney Taught Me About The Tea Party. It sparked an interesting discussion and is well worth reading.
This Tuesday, Professor Caractacus continues his Things We Learned This Week series with the always-popular topic: To Be Announced. And on Wednesday, Professor of Jobdefilibrantology J Brunner Fan returns to the lectern with an update on the Ohio Secretary of State race. As always, Chef will distribute coffee and bagels and the Professor of Astrology Janitor will redistribute cleaners and buffers.
Note: We have Wednesday openings for Morning Feature starting next week. We also have openings for the BPI campus soap box Furthermore, our people-watching series Midday Matinee, and our evening environmental series Our Earth. If you would like to guest host Morning Feature or contribute otherwise at BPI, please volunteer in today’s Campus Chatter.
Also: Please share your stories of offline political activism in Things We Did This Week.
Reminder: Starting this week, Thursday and Friday Morning Features will be published only at BPI. Saturday through Wednesday Morning Features will still be cross-posted at DailyKos. If you have not yet been to the BPI Admissions Office, please stop in. We want to hear from you!
Thus we return to the many clues left by the resident faculty as they made their way from the wine cellar library where they spent the weekend drinking thinking on our motto of Magis vinum, magis verum (“More wine, more truth”) to the hot tub faculty lounge for their weekly game where the underwear goes flying planning conference.
Many of the clues were scribbled references to polls pointing this way and that, including their own BPI Campus poll of Likeable Voters which initially showed 80% of Americans want to keep the letter B in the English alphabet. The fifth person in that sample was the dentist who opposes sugarless gum and the resident faculty decided he’s not likeable after all, so the final poll showed 100% support for the letter B.
While most polls are more rigorous than the one conducted by the resident faculty, their results still vary widely depending on how questions are asked, statistical noise, and – especially common in political polling – how the sample is selected. For example, the September 20th Gallup generic ballot showed Democrats and TGOPers in a virtual tie among registered voters, while most other polls show a 6-point TGOP lead among so-called likely voters … yet last week’s Newsweek poll showed an 8-point Democratic lead among what they call definite voters.
The messy data left even TPM‘s Josh Marshall befuddled. You might think messy data usually leaves us befuddled, but more often it allows us to tell any story we want. Cite the data that support your story, dismiss or explain away the rest … and – voila! – you can parse messy data to ‘prove’ almost anything.
This week Morning Feature will look inside the Newsweek poll, and others, to explore what we can learn from polls, what we can’t, and how to tell the difference.
+++++
Happy Monday!
have been polled a number of times in recent memory, and I was always, invariably, appalled at the way questions were worded.
So often I would ask the poll-taker, “Do you want to know what I really think?”
And always the answer was, “Just please answer with yes, no, I don’t know.”
Well, political issues are far more nuanced than that, and there is no poll on earth that cares about your particular nuances. It was surprising how often I couldn’t answer honestly with a yes or a no. In someone’s book I must sure by down as an “I don’t know” voter.
Polls are at best grainy snapshots of public opinion. It’s difficult to estimate 100 million people’s opinions on any complex issue. Many won’t know enough to have an opinion, and those who do are less likely to be satisfied giving a yes-or-no answer. Yet most of us would like our elected officials to at least be aware of public opinion, and good polling approximates that better than, say, the letters that arrive at the officials’ offices. Those reflect only the opinions of those who felt motivated enough and had the time to write a letter … or increasingly, click a link on a viral email.
Good morning! ::hugggggs::
Sounds like the discussions here this week will be similar to the discussions I’ve been having in Theory of History in the last couple weeks regarding Quantitative Data. These should be interesting reads I’m looking forward to them =)
I’d love to hear more about that. I hope you’ll share those insights in comments this week. 🙂
Good morning! ::hugggggs::
I read Josh Marshall’s opinion column and he is generally echoing what we are reading everywhere…polls are a little crazy right now.
The “Likely Voter” is not much to hang your hat on. Every pollster defines it differently and it makes no more sense to base a decision on that model as it is to base investment decisions on economic models developed in Econ 101 courses.
At the end of the day, the pollsters who were accurate will get to crow about it…the ones who were inaccurate will blame it on something else and we will probably know no more than we now know about polling “science”.
Pulling it out of your anal orifice is probably just as accurate right now with the rapidly changing landscape. Obama has just now decided to engage and that may be a game changer. But the polls won’t catch up for a while and may never catch up depending on the hidden biases already in the “likely voter” list.
I agree, Jan. Come December we’ll see pollsters touting the races they predicted well and dismissing the rest as outliers. And should Democrats do better than expected, we’ll hear right-wing conspiracy theories on how the election was stolen because the results did not match the polls.
Rasmussen is the 800-pound gorilla in the room on polling this year, as he made his likely voter models on November 5th, 2008 and has been pushing them since to tell a story of Buyer’s Remorse. But issue-polling data simply don’t support the Buyer’s Remorse story.
Good morning! ::hugggggs::
That simply shows Rasmussen’s dishonesty. If his Likely Voter model has not changed since November 5th 2008 he is not sincere about polling but only sincere about pleasing his base…the Tea Party GOP.
I hope that this election spells his doom and that even those folks will have to realize that he has outlived his usefulness to them. If your lying polls are laughed at and ignored, at some point no one prints them.
Hey JanF, looking for that excellent picture you captured from the 10-2 event
To paraphrase Dems believe in we the people R’s believe in only the wealthy?
I will look at the 10-2 diaries as well
Thanks again
🙂
It was on the Campus Chatter for 10-4-2010
And here:

Awesome, thanks