What does “Polls Say” in an Election even mean? How are they updated? No one has ever asked me my thoughts. Who are they asking and who is actually answering?
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I get called and texted by pollsters all the time but I hang up on them. A lot of them do “push polls” and I’m done with it.
A push poll is when someone pays to disguise a political ad as a poll.
Example: for my third question, when Joe Biden said babies are delicious, how did that make you feel?
The “answer” isn’t the point. The fake information in the question is meant to influence you. This happens a lot.
Your question as to who is answering the questions is valid. For awhile, polling was done mostly with landline phones which meant a certain age demographic. They do need to change and validate their methodologies if their goal is to match what the public actually thinks.
Think of it like this: if you run a polling company and your numbers don’t even come close to what actually ends up happening when the election comes around, that’s bad for business. You want to be accurate and you want your methodology to be good, unless you’re deliberately trying to fool people. An exception is if you are consistently off by a certain amount.
Imagine you never match the real outcome but you are always 5% off in the same direction every single time, then there is some value to your polls. They just need to be adjusted which is what people like Nate Silver do. They grade polls on accuracy but polls like I described are still used, just weighted accordingly.
Not Push Polls though, those are always unethical.
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