How Poll Bias Obscures Trump's Likely Election

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 Milton Rosenberg, American Spectator, October 7, 2016

Be mindful of secret rejecters and false positives. “Put not your trust in princes” as Psalm 146 advises… nor put such trust in princesses or polls. For “princess,” awaiting a queenly coronation, read Hillary C and for “polls” include any of those focused on the current presidential race. In point of fact, as the Brits would say, the proper way to read the current presidential polls may be with a modicum of cryptographic decoding and guided by a few essential considerations.

The first is the obvious fact that a respondent answering the pollster may not rank toward the top of the ingenuousness scale. That is to say, he (she) may be directly lying about, or incorrectly predicting, his (her) ultimate vote… and that includes, as well, the possibility of not voting at all. The second pertinent fact is that such inauthentic self-reports are not randomly distributed so as to generate mere statistical “noise” of the sort reflected in the reported “error limits” of the particular poll. To the contrary, the majority of those who misinform the interviewer may go in one direction rather than the other, whether the choice is between classical or country music or between Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

The second pertinent fact is that such inauthentic self-reports are not randomly distributed so as to generate mere statistical “noise” of the sort reflected in the reported “error limits” of the particular poll. To the contrary, the majority of those who misinform the interviewer may go in one direction rather than the other, whether the choice is between classical or country music or between Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

From what precedes there follows this crucial assertion: considerably more pro-Clinton respondents in the current polls will, in ultimate fact, vote for Trump than will “Trumpers” vote for Clinton. A much smaller number of  READ it HERE. 


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