Colin Powell endorses Barack Obama

[Ben Kenobi]

Actually, every news source has bias.

"unbiased" is a myth like unicorns and pink elephants.

[Q Classic]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
Actually, every news source has bias.

"unbiased" is a myth like God.

I suppose you have a point.

[-Jrabbit]

Ben was a history major. He knows that history is written by those in power.

I disagree with his assessment of what constitutes media bias, but this is a bad time to make that judgment. It's a topic that's twisted most by political campaigns, where everything said -- by the candidates, their organizations and surrogates -- is really just a giant exercise in spin.

[Naked Gents Rut]

Clinton would have been better to win with, but she is a ******** in office (spectacular failure on health care and even in running her own campaign).

Biden won't be any better. Senators make terrible executives and he's the uber-Senator.

And ironically, he's having trouble finding any real dirt on Obama because he hasn't been in politics long enough to have the inevitable record of compromise and flip-flopping that most experienced candidates have as baggage.

There's plenty of dirt on Obama; the problem is that no one in the media is interested in it. They'd rather dig through Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber's garbage...

[MrFun]

I always get a chuckle from the fanantical Obama voters who believe Obama is virtuous and will be able to carry out all of his campaign promises as president.

The difference between Obama fanatical voters and Obama voters such as myself is that I and other realists know that you don't become a successful politician without some level of corrupt activities and also, that no president candidate can carry out half of what they promise in their campaign.

Seriously - vote for Obama, but get your head out of the clouds.

[Q Classic]

Oh, I'm only holding Obama to a few parts of his platform.

Like Net Neutrality. And he'd better keep his eloquence.

[Darius871]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
25%?



I'll take 3-1 odds with you any day of the week on that.

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
What it works out to is that McCain needs a 7+ point swing nationally in 2 weeks. While being outspent 3-1 or so. With no debates left.

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
Today's national polls have Obama up by~9 (weighted average)

While I don't discount the weighted averages (though they do tend to favor the most "popular" methodologies which could do more harm than the law of averages does good), it's halfway notable that IBD/TIPP came out with 44.8% vs. 43.7% today; now before you dismiss the entire source as an outlier, keep in mind that they were previously in line with the weighted averages with +7.3 Obama on 10/18 and +6.0 Obama on 10/21, before sliding to +3.7 Obama on 10/22 and +1.1 Obama on 10/23 in what appears to have been a gradual progression rather than a sudden fluke.

Normally I'd still dismiss this as an outlier, but since they claim that "In 2004...TIPP, a Division of TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, came within 3/10 of 1% point of President Bush's actual margin of victory, thus winning the title of 'Nation's Most Accurate Pollster,'" it's worth raising an eyebrow. If you have any particular gripes with their methodology I'd be interested in hearing them.

Bottom line I'll never cease to underestimate the fickleness of the American voter, particularly with respect to cliched & simplistic icons like Joe Wurzelbacher, so I'll quadruple any losing candidate's 6% Vegas odds to 25% any day of the week if there's still two weeks for the fickle mushheads to pull a 180 out of the usual FUD. Maybe I'm a pessimist just to be either right or pleasantly surprised, but there it is.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Darius871
While I don't discount the weighted averages (though they do tend to favor the most "popular" methodologies which could do more harm than the law of averages does good), it's halfway notable that IBD/TIPP came out with 44.8% vs. 43.7% today; now before you dismiss the entire source as an outlier, keep in mind that they were previously in line with the weighted averages with +7.3 Obama on 10/18 and +6.0 Obama on 10/21, before sliding to +3.7 Obama on 10/22 and +1.1 Obama on 10/23 in what appears to have been a gradual progression rather than a sudden fluke.

Normally I'd still dismiss this as an outlier, but since they claim that "In 2004...TIPP, a Division of TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, came within 3/10 of 1% point of President Bush's actual margin of victory, thus winning the title of 'Nation's Most Accurate Pollster,'" it's worth raising an eyebrow. If you have any particular gripes with their methodology I'd be interested in hearing them.

Bottom line I'll never cease to underestimate the fickleness of the American voter, particularly with respect to cliched & simplistic icons like Joe Wurzelbacher, so I'll quadruple any losing candidate's 6% Vegas odds to 25% any day of the week if there's still two weeks for the fickle mushheads to pull a 180 out of the usual FUD. Maybe I'm a pessimist just to be either right or pleasantly surprised, but there it is.

Take a look at the 18-24 age bracket results. McCain winning over 70%? Laughable.

Nate Silver at 538 takes this poll on quite well:

But fluctuations of this magnitude are an entirely different matter.

Suppose that the true distribution of the 18-24 year old vote is a 15-point edge for Obama. This is a very conservative estimate; most pollsters show a gap of anywhere from 20-35 points among this age range.

About 9.3 percent of the electorate was between age 18-24 in 2004. Let's assume that the percentage is also 9.3 percent this year. Again, this is a highly conservative estimate. The IBD/TIPP poll has a sample size of 1,060 likely voters, which would imply that about 98 of those voters are in the 18-24 age range.

What are the odds, given the parameters above, that a random sampling of 98 voters aged 18-24would distribute themselves 74% to McCain and 22% to Obama?

Using a binomial distribution, the odds are 54,604,929,633-to-1 against. That is, about 55 billion to one.

So, there is an 0.000000002% chance that IBD/TIPP just got really unlucky. Conversely, there is a 99.999999998% chance that one of the following things is true:

(i) They're massively undersampling the youth vote. If you only have, say, 30 young voters when you should have 100 or so in your sample, than the odds of a freak occurrence like this are significantly more likely.
-or-
(ii) Something is dramatically wrong with their sampling or weighting procedures, or their likely voter model.

My guess is that it's some combination of the two -- that, for instance, IBD/TIPP is applying a very stringent likely voter model that removes you from the sample if you haven't voted in the past two elections, which would rule a great number of 18-24 year olds out.

A pollster could get away with a turnout model like that in 2004 (when IBD/TIPP did well in estimating the national popular vote), when the split in the youth vote was relatively small between John Kerry and George W. Bush. They can't get away with that this year, when the split is much larger.

But the basic takeaway is this: you should absolutely not assume that just because someone has published a poll, they have any particular idea what they're doing. Pollsters should be treated as guilty until proven otherwise...

[Darius871]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov


Take a look at the 18-24 age bracket results. McCain winning over 70%? Laughable.

Yes, that jumped out at me too, which is why I didn't purport to hang my hat on it. My basis is simply that people are fickle idiots.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Darius871
Yes, that jumped out at me too, which is why I didn't purport to hang my hat on it. My basis is simply that people are fickle idiots.

I'd say the more logical conclusion is that pollster doesn't know what they're doing.

[Naked Gents Rut]

I'd say the more logical conclusion is that pollster doesn't know what they're doing.

No, Darius had it right earlier. The logical conclusion is that this is a statistical outlier.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Darius871


Yes, that jumped out at me too, which is why I didn't purport to hang my hat on it. My basis is simply that people are fickle idiots.

Your real point should be that individual polls should not be trusted.

[Naked Gents Rut]

That's a good point.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Naked Gents Rut


No, Darius had it right earlier. The logical conclusion is that this is a statistical outlier.

Statistical outlier? From Obama +15 (?) say to McCain +some ridiculous number?

Any reasonable sample size would have protected against this. And that's speaking as somebody who publishes **** that depends on stuff like that. And who's teaching the Statistical Mechanics course at Hopkins this semester.

[Naked Gents Rut]

The drop was only from Obama +6 to Obama +1 in a couple days.