• Nobody@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Yeah, the polls had Hillary winning easily in 2016. Don’t trust them.

    • EatATaco
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      8 months ago

      They had her anywhere between a 70-90% chance to win. If you predict 90% chance that something will happen, and it always happens, your prediction is wrong because you should have predicted 100%.

      When I hear someone say “you can’t trust the polls because they got 2016 ‘wrong’” they are just telling me they don’t understand statistics.

      • KneeTitts@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        They had her anywhere between a 70-90% chance to win

        And its important to note that these predictions were for the pop vote, which she did actually win, so they were actually right.

        • EatATaco
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          8 months ago

          And its important to note that these predictions were for the pop vote, which she did actually win, so they were actually right.

          I’m not sure this is entirely true. Many polls just look at the popular vote, but most of the polls that claim “chance of winning” take into account the EC.

          • Pips@lemmy.sdf.org
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            8 months ago

            538 had her going into the election with a 70% chance of winning the electoral college. Nate Silver also went on multiple shows basically doing everything he could to get people to understand that meant 3 out of 10 times she loses.

        • nonailsleft
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          8 months ago

          No, 538 (and RCP?) actually has a rolling projection of ‘real’ chance to win the EC. But the chances of Hillary declined from >90% to 70% in the last week or so. When she was >90% everybody would say it looked like she was going to win, and that’s what people remember.

          • Furbag@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            But the chances of Hillary declined from >90% to 70% in the last week or so.

            Oh yeah, the Comey Probe. Back in the days when having the FBI open an investigation into you was enough to kill your presidential aspirations.

            Or at least that was the case for Hillary Clinton and the moderate voter bloc, but somehow Donald Trump is not held to such high standards.

      • sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz
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        8 months ago

        It’s been awhile since I read anything about that, but it seems like the last time I read about it, was something along: “80% of polls have Hillary projected to win”, but the actual polls that they were using were all almost within the margin of error.

        tl;dr 80% had Hillary winning by about 2-3%.

        • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          margin of error

          People in almost never speak about the margin of error when presenting a poll, especially one that’s favorable to them.

          f you look at the fine print, and see the margin of error percentage, then you apply the maximum amount to both people in the race, you’ll see a lot of times it’s a tie.

      • Nobody@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I understand the point you’re making about probabilities, but we’re speaking in the context of politics. Polls accurately predicted the results in 2008 and 2012. Something fundamentally changed in 2016, and the polls were off across the board.

      • Alien Nathan Edward
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        8 months ago

        they are just telling me they don’t understand statistics.

        You’re right, but in fairness to the regular person who gets their news from regular news outlets, they were being told that Clinton had a 98% chance of winning when in reality it was more like 75%. The fact is while everyone was cocky in 2016 and nervous in 2020 I was the opposite because I followed the polls and Biden in 2020 had consistently bigger leads on Trump than Clinton in 2016 with even bigger leads in swing states. His odds of winning were much greater than hers and the likely margin of victory was much higher, but they were being underestimated by a media machine that was absolutely snakebit after going all in on congratulating HRC in June for being the first woman president with a dem supermajority in both houses of congress and flipping Texas blue.

      • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        What are you talking about? Polls are not valid statistics, they are riddled with biases that can’t be eliminated.

        • EatATaco
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          8 months ago

          Funny that this was in response to me and not the above poster that claimed that something happened in 2016 that made them no longer reliable.

          Additionally, I suspect you don’t really know what you are talking about because the issue you point out is not a statistical issue, but that they are just not a good measurement to begin with. Which isn’t even a good point either because they do a pretty good job of consistently getting pretty close. In the last election the mean error was only about 4.3 and they didn’t seem to favor either side.

          • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Polls would be ok if the sample was peefectly random. However it is never fully random, and in practice they always overrepresent politically active people and underrepresent the poor.

    • KneeTitts@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      the polls had Hillary winning easily

      Well Hillary didnt pay off her hookers 2 weeks before the election… like that kinda means he cheated. So Id say its a lot harder to win when you play by the rules. And Im not defending Hillary cuz I know she shafted Bernie, but what she did is not even on the same scope as what donnie rapist did/does on a daily basis.

      • Alien Nathan Edward
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        8 months ago

        paying off hookers isn’t actually cheating, the issue is that he used campaign funds to do it and that’s fraud (but not electoral fraud)