Friday, January 21, 2022

Calling out crap polling

Or more to the point, the misuse of it. There certainly is a lot of that out there.
Admitting that their polls may not be the best measure of public opinion, and in some cases may in fact be seriously flawed, would undermine the credibility, not just of the generic ballot measure or Biden’s approval rating, but of all the other questions in the poll as well.

In short, there is a financial/corporate incentive for media poll reports not to tell the whole truth about the state of public opinion. As far as the news organization is concerned, regardless of what other polls show, public opinion is what their new poll says it is.

This is, of course, a reason not to put too much weight on any single report about an outlets’ polling results. - FAIR
For what it's worth, I provided my own take on the overall state of contemporary political polling, in the U.S., here.

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