this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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politics

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[–] [email protected] 148 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lol Republicans want no penalty if he's convicted, but I'm willing to bet those assholes would throw the whole library at any minority breaking the law or woman seeking an abortion.

[–] [email protected] 92 points 1 year ago (16 children)

you don't need to bet on that at all it happens every fucking day

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (16 children)

I'm not super trusting of polls anymore, especially because they're usually done by telephone. However-

The poll had a sample of 1,032 adults, age 18 or older, who were interviewed online; it has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points for all respondents.

This makes me a little more trusting despite that whopping MoE. It sounds like bad news for Trump overall.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I have a related degree. The reason people distrust polls, is because the media frequently misreports or misrepresents them.

Eg. aggregated polling from the 2016 suggested Trump had a 1/3 chance of winning. If you believed some media coverage every poll said Clinton was certain to win. That was how the media reported on the polling, not the polling itself. Invariably Trump winning in 2016 was within the margin of error.

that whopping MoE

Not a large margin of error. You're extrapolating from 1000 people to 300 million. It's astonishing it's that low if you think about it.

because they’re usually done by telephone

Not that common anymore. Often they'll do a a telephone poll then supplement it with online or other methods. Here's IPSOS's article about this poll:

The study was conducted online in English. The data for the total sample were weighted to adjust for gender by age, race/ethnicity, education, Census region, metropolitan status, household income, and political party affiliation. The demographic benchmarks came from the 2022 March Supplement of the Current Population Survey (CPS). Party ID benchmarks are from recent ABC News/Washington Post telephone polls.

https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/politico-indictment-august-2023

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I remember reading 538 leading up to the 2016 election, and hearing them say repeatedly that if Trump has a 1 in 4 chance (or whatever amount) of winning the election, not only is it possible for Trump to win, but in fact it means you actually expect it to happen in 1 out of 4 times.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Yeah I remember this too. I think the problem is that people simply don’t understand statistics and don’t realize a 70% chance of winning is totally different from getting 70% of the vote. I like what 538 has been doing in recent years by presenting odds rather than percentages, but people like echo chambers that confirm their biases so idk if this “polls don’t work” narrative is going to go away any time soon.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's the article that has caused me to trust 538 above any other election prediction source. When HRC was doing a preemptive victory lap in Texas and HuffPo was publishing articles that said she had a 99% chance of winning, Nate Silver and Co were the only ones willing to admit the possibility of what would later become reality.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

And then the big companies came in and wrecked 538.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Ok, fair enough. I defer to your expertise.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Indeed, the problem isn't polls themselves, assuming they're well constructed they're generally sound data, it's the interpretation and packaging of it as reported to the larger populous that gets in the way. Sometimes it gets to the point of funny when someone does an infographic where 30% and 60% somehow appear to have the same weight.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics...

[–] Mouselemming 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not that it matters here, but in case you want to use them somewhere serious:

Populous is an adjective

Populace is a noun

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thus why I'm not a writer, but at least the intent was there 🙂

I'm doing good if it doesn't look like a drunken baboon wrote it sometimes due to fat finger typing.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My biggest issue with polls is that the media tout them as predictions, ignoring the fact that even if the data is 100% valid, circumstances can change dramatically in just a couple of days.

I maintain that polls are not actionable data for voters. They can help campaigns see trends and gauge the effectiveness of messaging, but they are useless to voters.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They can and do change in just a couple of days, but the real issue is that the media invariably fails to mention the margin of error or confidence interval.

It's always Candidate A 51%, candidate B 49%. When in reality it's inevitably something like "There's 19/20 chance that candidate gets between 48.5-53.5% of the vote, and that candidate gets between 46.5-51.5% of the vote."

And then when candidate B wins, the media will go "Why did the polls get it wrong?" when the election was always to close to call definitively.

Oh, and this is obviously ignoring the far more sinister use of misrepresented polling data, micro-demographically targetted thanks to big data harvested from social media. Think Cambridge Analytica algorithms which have determined that women in village X with one child and dog, being more likely to vote party Y, and then targetting them on social media with stories about the polls showing the result is a foreglone conclusion and that there's no point voting.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The 2 percent of Democrats who don't think he's guilty are suspect at least.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Bad news, the court of public opinion has or should have little to no bearing on legal proceedings.

But hey great news, the court of public opinion has or should have little to no bearing on legal proceedings.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The court of public opinion has a lot to do with an election, however. And that's the problem for Trump now.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yep. Trump's only way of actually staying out of prison at this point isn't winning in an actual courtroom. It's delaying the trials for as long as he possibly can and then winning the general election.

So polls that show he's unlikely to be able to do so are indeed bad news for him.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Luckily for us, that can't keep him out of Georgia prison. He can only pardon himself of federal charges. Granted I don't think he has a chance in a general election. The Republican party is so screwed up they keep picking more and more extreme candidates even though those candidates usually lose in the general.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When you get to the second question, "Do you believe that Donald Trump is guilty of the alleged crimes in the federal 2020 election subversion election case?" and 14% of Republicans think he is guilty. If they are unwilling to vote for Trump, that's potentially an election flusher. While popular vote doesn't win elections (Hillary pulled 2.1% more of the popular vote than Trump in 2016), it can shift the electoral college votes in states, turning red states (potentially) to blue.

In the 2020 election, Trump won North Carolina (15 electoral college votes), Trump got 2,758,775 votes, Biden 2,684,292. If 14% of the republicans abstained from voting in 2020, Trump would have received about 2,372,547 votes, losing the state to Biden rather than winning it.

Yes, Trump lost to Biden anyway in 2020, but Republicans that won't vote for Trump, nor a Democrat, just won't vote. And voters not voting can shift Electoral College votes in states.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Relatively small shifts on the margins can have huge consequences in the electoral college.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It has a lot to do with it. Where do you think a jury comes from?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Jesus fuck, look at those republican numbers. Fucking cunts live in an imagined fascist state that they’re trying to make real.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have some MAGA family who brush away all these indictments by saying, "The deep state doesn't want him to win."

I have no idea what it's going to take for these cultists to drop their Trump

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Nothing. We win elections in 2024 and exceed how many voted last time. Volunteer with voting groups and get people registered and aware of how important it is.

Once some normality is restored, only then do these people realize the world moved on without them and possibly stop.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

looks exactly like every other poll about him since like 2015

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I don't care what anyone thinks, including myself. I want the legal system to do its job correctly. Nothing more, nothing less.

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