• mozz@mbin.grits.dev
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    6 months ago

    But yes, if you can tell me what race specifically, it would take two seconds to find a poll for you.

    Sure thing.

    • New York’s 26th Congressional District on April 30, 2024.
    • New York’s 3rd Congressional District on February 13, 2024.
    • Utah’s 2nd Congressional District on November 21, 2023.
    • Rhode Island’s 1st Congressional District on November 7, 2023.
    • Virginia’s 4th Congressional District on February 21, 2023
    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      6 months ago

      New York’s 26th Congressional District on April 30, 2024.

      I was just going to do the first one, but that had 60k voters and Dems won it 2 to 1…

      They barely cracked 10% turnout…

      Not even getting into how the name “Kennedy” fucks up search results with the word “poll” in 2024

      But there just wasn’t time between the state party saying the candidate, and when the state party held the special election for a poll. And I’m not sure how anyone would be surprised.

      So let’s look at the second instead.

      I googled “NY3 polling” and immediately got this

      https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/house/2024/new-york/3/

      Most polls had Souzzio up 4, Souzzio won by 7.

      But, I’m really not sure why you want to explicitly and only look at Special elections, elections that occur “off season” with short campaigns and unpredictable turnout because nothing else is on the ballot.

      • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        6 months ago

        But, I’m really not sure why you want to explicitly and only look at Special elections

        It’s fair. My point in looking at that, is to overall test the assertion that polls are indicative of how people vote. It kind of seems looking at the methodology for the OP article’s poll, like if any accurate information came out of the poll about how the election would go, it would be more or less an accident (or a result of the fact that the poll and the election are both general measurements of how people feel politically overall, and not much more resolution than that.)

        You could flip what you said around, and say that because the special elections are much less complex, and the polls were done much closer to the actual election than polls today about the election in November, I’d expect the polls to be much more predictive of how the election will go, than the OP article.

        So, let’s analyze. As you said, it’s actually not that hard to find polls and results. I’ll follow your lead and look at 538 (for the first three, which is all the effort I feel like investing in it).

        Kinda looks like the polls have some methodology problems. I raised some plausible details for some of what those problems might be, and when we check, hey objectively do it seems like there are problems with the output? We find that, hey look, there are problems. Science!

        (Incidentally, that poll for Utah claimed a margin for error of 4.26 percentage points, with the use of three significant digits of claimed resolution adding an extra layer of hilarity when it turned out their final answer was off by a factor of 267%.)

          • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            6 months ago

            Dude you can’t explore with me a question about the accuracy of polling and find out that the answer is that modern polling is objectively shit, which was my point all along even before I started even looking at the question, and then get all condescending about how I don’t know what I’m talking about. 🙂

            Well, I mean, you can if you want, I guess. I’m happy with my conclusions from the day, though, you being rude about it notwithstanding.

              • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                4
                ·
                edit-2
                6 months ago

                You knew what the answers were and thats why you asked for those specific polls as a “got ya”?

                Not even slightly, no. Not sure how you got from what I said. I just picked the most recent 5 elections that have happened, and invited you to find polls for them. I genuinely had no idea what the results would be (and I wouldn’t have predicted that the polling results would have been so wrong, bordering on absurd.)

                Not sure how you got from me being unable to use Google and you have to teach me, to now I knew the truth all along and I just withheld it from you to trick you and so that means that all of a sudden it’s not the truth anymore. But good luck with things, in any case.