r/neoliberal • u/BastianMobile NATO • Nov 17 '24
Pollster Ann Selzer ending election polling, moving 'to other ventures and opportunities' News (US)
https://eu.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/2024/11/17/ann-selzer-conducts-iowa-poll-ending-election-polling-moving-to-other-opportunities/76334909007/343
u/WesternDrop3321 Nov 17 '24 edited Nov 17 '24
"Over a year ago I advised the Register I would not renew when my 2024 contract expired with the latest election poll as I transition to other ventures and opportunities.
Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course. It’s ironic that it’s just the opposite. I am proud of the work I’ve done for the Register, for the Detroit Free Press, for the Indianapolis Star, for Bloomberg News and for other public and private organizations interested in elections. They were great clients and were happy with my work."
I get dunking on her for her 17 point error, but to be fair to her, that's not why she's ending polling.
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u/DrunkenBriefcases Jerome Powell Nov 17 '24
Yup. We've known this was her last cycle for some months now.
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u/justbuildmorehousing Norman Borlaug Nov 17 '24
Ill forever be shocked that ‘the best pollster in America’ missed her final poll by 17 points when she had been so accurate every other year. Man I thought that (and some other indicators) meant we were finally getting a general polling error in our favor
Now we have a pedo getting nominated for AG
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u/Goldenboy451 NATO Nov 17 '24
Yeah I don't think it was at all unwarranted to think that she was on to something with her poll that other outlets had missed given her track record. Being off by 17 points is an astonishing break in form.
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u/KillerZaWarudo Nov 17 '24
Not to mention, after that polls Trump team even show his own internal that he was up by 5. Which was still be Selzer biggest miss and a Harris win. I feel like even Trump own team didn't expect them to win so comfortably
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u/rykahn Nov 17 '24
Yup, he definitely didn't. He was ranting about fictitious voter fraud in PA and trying to suppress the vote with threats of law enforcement well into the afternoon - a sure sign he didn't like what he was seeing at that point.
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u/DrunkenBriefcases Jerome Powell Nov 17 '24
Yup. The guy was spamming North Carolina in the final days, but everyone wants to pretend the outcome was obvious. The trump campaign obviously didn't believe that going by their actions.
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u/rykahn Nov 17 '24
They were definitely worried about NC. And rightfully so, given how the rest of the statewide races went!
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u/Objective-Muffin6842 Nov 17 '24
There was an article from Tim Alberta a few days before the election and the general vibe from his campaign was not a great one (they didn't think they were going to win)
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u/Reginald_Venture Nov 18 '24
Yeah, it's just, 2016 again, but much worse. It's really just a nightmare.
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u/Khiva Nov 18 '24
It was never crazy to think Trump was likely to lose because by all accounts Trump thought he was likely to lose.
The clip of him walking out to accept in 2016 looked like a man who'd gotten the shellacking of his life.
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u/PleaseGreaseTheL World Bank Nov 17 '24
They didn't. If you were watching early election day coverage, trump was interviewed (well, approached in public during the casting of his own ballot) and even he himself seemed not too sure or confident how the election was gonna go, and said something relating to how it couls go euther way if I remember correctly. Nobody thought it was gonna be an evisceration.
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u/KillerZaWarudo Nov 17 '24 edited Nov 17 '24
I did watch his fox news interview, he was low energy (as usual) and getting mad at fox for keep showing Oprah, both him and JD Vance didn't look THAT confidence like their usual gung ho self. There was article about the infighting between the current and ex campaign manager and chaotic last few weeks of the election with alot of people quitting. You even have a bunch of right wing grift panic about women voting for Kamala in secrets
Its just so shocking too see all the traditional norm to predict who would win an election get broken. But then again Trump is a once in a generation earth shattering GOP candidate
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u/DoTheThing_Again Nov 17 '24
In what world was this an evisceration? The election was close. Just like everyone other one where obama was not on the ballot
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u/PleaseGreaseTheL World Bank Nov 17 '24
My brother in christ if you don't think this was a horrible election you haven't paid attention, in many states this was nothing near close and we lost ground in ways we never thought possible; we lost the popular vote for, what, the second time this century so far? And had a worse electoral college defeat than in 2016, which we had won the popular vote in. GOP has a trifecta now as well.
This was a horrible election.
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u/DoTheThing_Again Nov 17 '24
“A horrible election” i agree with bc trump won. In no way was this an evisceration. The dems on average have won by larger margins in the current millennium.
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u/FriendsSuggestReddit Nov 17 '24
150 million votes and Harris lost by less than 3 million.
It was much closer than you’re framing it to be.
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u/CarpeDiemMaybe Esther Duflo Nov 17 '24
Was it that close? I thought it was a landslide
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u/ManicMarine Karl Popper Nov 17 '24
Trump won the PV by 1.5% and the tipping point state by a little over 2%. That's quite close by historical & international standards, it's just that our concept of close elections is all messed up because we have had so many ultra close ones recently (2000, 2016, 2020).
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u/eliminate1337 Nov 17 '24
'I don't like the result' doesn't mean it was a landslide. 312-226 and less than 2% popular vote margin are very normal numbers for an American presidential election. Obama won in 2012 by more.
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u/Andy_B_Goode YIMBY Nov 17 '24
Yeah, being off by 3 would be a normal statistical error. Being off by 6 would be "well everyone makes mistakes sometimes". Being off by 17 means you may as well be reading tea leaves.
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u/JeromesNiece Jerome Powell Nov 17 '24 edited Nov 17 '24
It was unwarranted.
Polling is a crapshoot. There is no such thing as a pollster that has some brilliant methodology or sixth sense that can lead to consistently better results than other pollsters. Her "track record" was nothing more than a series of dumb luck.
Every local pollster in the country has been engaged in a coin flipping competition, and you all fell for the "winner" that got the most heads in a row.
This is why you need to just throw every result into an average and not get too excited.
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u/justbuildmorehousing Norman Borlaug Nov 17 '24
I think thats really diminishing that she had stuck her neck out from the pack in several elections previously and ended up basically nailing it. Its not a random number generator out there and she really did seem to have a good method for polling Iowa really accurately
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u/West-Code4642 Gita Gopinath Nov 17 '24
I still don't get how her poll shifted so much in one month. She has trump up s month before. Guess she had loud Harris voters and shy trump voters
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u/Khiva Nov 17 '24
I would really love for her - or someone - to give a breakdown on this.
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u/eetsumkaus Nov 17 '24
Didn't she for her interviews after the results came out? Basically older women were driving the Harris +4.
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u/jaydec02 Trans Pride Nov 17 '24
Her sample was basically Biden +3. She polled a collection of Biden voters.
Pollsters began weighting recalled vote this year but she never had a more stringent methodology than dialing random people, and weighing by age, sex, and location. Her methodology was from the early 2000s and it finally bit her.
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u/PM_me_ur_digressions Audrey Hepburn Nov 17 '24
She said something about how none of her initial respondents had changed their minds, but that the new additions to the poll were women who seemed very fired up, or something along those lines.
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u/ThePevster Milton Friedman Nov 17 '24
Nate Silver talked about it on his blog. Basically she uses an older polling methodology where you randomly dial numbers, and that methodology tends to skew quite Democratic.
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u/WOKE_AI_GOD NATO Nov 17 '24
I agree, I always find it annoying when people attempt to demonstrate the predictive power of some signal by being like they got it right X times in a row. Like Lichtman and his keys. Think about how many people over that period of time had a similar idea - I'll come up with a series of factors, and it they go this way or that it predicts the election. How many of them have up after it failed on the first or second try? Somebody was going to get a win streak eventually.
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u/jquickri Nov 17 '24
Seriously this. People really don't understand that polls have to be understood in aggregate and there's no person out there who is some kind of poll savant. Hell Nate silver has made an entire career off the fact that he called every state once despite being wrong many times before and after.
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u/PM_me_ur_digressions Audrey Hepburn Nov 17 '24
And we had all the alarm bells ringing about herding being a thing so having an outlier triggered all of the like "oh those other polls are just herding, Selzer is right"
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u/Tyler_Zoro Nov 17 '24
This is just a reminder of what we always knew, but few in the field like to acknowledge: polling is a weathervane . It tells you which way the wind is blowing, at the location you set it up and under the conditions you expose it to, but if you want to predict the weather you have to contend with the fact that that weathervane isn't "aware" of the larger scope of its measurement.
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u/creaturefeature16 Nov 17 '24
I think that's why a lot of leftists are falling to the same election fraud conspiracies as Trump supporters did. Between polls like Selzer, Jon Ralston election prediction (first time he was wrong in 10 years), Trump's weird comments about "we don't even need your votes" and acting like he didn't even care towards the end...it seems surprising that he won.
But at the end of the day, I think the polls were indeed correct this time. It was very close with a MOE that bent in Trump's favor....CNN did a bunch of forecasting and showed this exact scenario playing out if the polling error was in Trump's favor.
Turns out: the American electorate is far more binary than we thought, and having your unpopular candidate drop out of the race in the last 3 months if an election, only to be replaced by another unpopular candidate that nobody asked for, demotivates a big chunk of your base.
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u/Kindly-Weather-571 Nov 17 '24
How do we square the notion of an unpopular candidate against Harris running ahead of Dems in swing states
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u/LeoCrow Nov 17 '24
The answer is, Trump is not unpopular. Polarizing, but not unpopular.
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u/zth25 European Union Nov 17 '24
He is unpopular, there are many Trump voters who dislike him but still vote for him in the end. The question is, why do these people think Democrats are even worse?
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u/mapinis YIMBY Nov 17 '24
Because the Democrats, since 2016 if not earlier, are forever tied to woke in their heads, and all these people needed to hear was “Harris is for they/them” like some sort of sleeper cell activation phrase.
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u/Khiva Nov 18 '24
Gotta fire up the links again.
Because somehow it's still not sinking in that there is a global trend, the US is not some special snowflake outlier, and the primary driver is inflation.
Most recent UK election, 2024. Incumbents soundly beaten.
Most recent French election. 2024. Incumbents suffer significant losses.
Most recent German elections. 2024. Incumbents soundly beaten.
Most recent Japanese election. 2024 The implacable incumbent LDP suffers historic losses.
Most recent Indian election. 2024. Incumbent party suffers significant losses.
Most recent Korean election. 2024. Incumbent party suffers significant losses.
Most recent Dutch election. 2023. Incumbents soundly beaten.
Most recent New Zealand election. 2023. Incumbents soundly beaten.
Upcoming Canadian election. Incumbents underwater by 19 points.
Conservative, liberal, woman, man, big country, small. All unique in their own ways, all with their own local issues, all with the same outcome.
There are lessons to be learned and woke certainly deserves scrutiny but no honest reckoning can occur without taking into account the massive role that inflation played.
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u/Stanley--Nickels John Brown Nov 17 '24
Trump is more popular with Republicans than Reagan was
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u/zth25 European Union Nov 17 '24
There are millions of non-Republican Trump voters that made the difference though.
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u/Stanley--Nickels John Brown Nov 17 '24
Sure, but every Republican gets non-Republican voters. He might have just done better at turning out his 2020 voters than we did.
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u/arnet95 Nov 17 '24
That's just not true. Dems won senate seats in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin.
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u/AnnoyedCrustacean NATO Nov 17 '24
But, they wouldn't have won those if the bullet ballots were all in favor of the R candidates.
It was only Trump that got that bump
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u/mkohler23 Nov 17 '24
Which swing states did she run ahead of dems in? She ran ahead of leftist dems in safe blue states but she ran behind a lot of dems who picked up swing states seats
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u/YoullNeverBeRebecca Nov 17 '24
Exactly. I’m in NC and Dems smashed it here with the exception of Harris. I think she helped us, really. Not sure if we’d have done us well if Biden was top of the ticket. That being said, the biggest credit goes to Anderson Clayton and our other Dem organizers and politicians (like Jeff Jackson).
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u/Sspifffyman Nov 17 '24
Nah, Kamala wasn't really the problem. Remember, every incumbent party in a democracy worldwide has been getting hit hard this cycle. The reason? Inflation. Dems on average have a two point or so advantage in the popular vote, and this year inflation caused a 4-5 point red shift, meaning we lost by 1-2 points. That's actually better than most other democracies worldwide. So it's possible Harris was actually a better candidate than most. (Not saying she was for sure, but it's certainly possible)
It was just a horrible environment.
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u/CapuchinMan Nov 17 '24
I'm regurgitating Ezra Klein here, but that's because I think he was right. The problem was also that the means by which democratic candidates do the fact-finding to find out what they will need to do to turn out their base, and what will resonate with independents - primaries - couldn't be performed.
Kamala was accepted because of the narrow timeframe, and access to the electoral funds that Biden had raised, but that too, so late that there wasn't sufficient time to build what might have been a more robust campaign.
Additionally, an anti-incumbency bias meant that there was no room for her to both tout her administration's accomplishments but denounce their failures. A different democrat could have done that. Fucking Manchin, concerning whom there was speculation about a Presidential bid, could have done that with ease. And he would have been better than the current situation.
So much of this has to be laid at the feet of the Biden team - they lied about his ability, and his hubris prevented the party from finding a more able candidate, one that might distance themselves from his administration, but still present a viable alternative to Trump.
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Nov 17 '24
Reelecting someone who tried ending American democracy and still patting yourself in the back by concluding that this is better than most democracies worldwide is hilarious.
Trump is more extreme than every far right party in Europe and unlike them, he's actually in power.
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u/Khiva Nov 17 '24
Trump is more extreme than every far right party in Europe
This is a shallow, basic, misinformed a take as "Bernie would be center right in Europe."
Hungary is a blueprint because Hungary is already Hungary.
And even then, Jesus, Golden Dawn. End of story.
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u/creaturefeature16 Nov 17 '24
I didn't say she was THE problem.
And 7.5 million less votes...is pretty bad.
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u/MasterRazz Nov 17 '24
CNN did a bunch of forecasting and showed this exact scenario playing out if the polling error was in Trump's favor.
This was also Nate Silver's most likely scenario for the election based on his model, that Trump wins every swing state.
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u/AnnoyedCrustacean NATO Nov 17 '24
I am not surprised he won
I am surprised he won the popular vote, and 7/7 swing states
That just seems like he's feeding his own ego
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u/TheGhostofJoeGibbs Milton Friedman Nov 17 '24
The 7/7 swing states is the most likely scenario once you figure out which way the polling error goes. Either candidate was likely to win all the swing states once you figure out which way the voting was breaking.
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u/MasterRazz Nov 17 '24
She didn't weigh her polls, so you can just attribute it to a sampling error. It happens.
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u/Forsaken-Bobcat-491 Nov 17 '24
There was no reason to think she would be correct if you looked at the evidence.
No other poster had shown any swing towards Kamala either nationally or in Ohio but she was saying that there had been a massive swing from her previous polls that election cycle. It just made no sense, previously she had done a great job without weighting in capturing a representative sample but that has its limitations.
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u/Evilrake Nov 18 '24
If only Ann had been a little more brave and boosted Kamala a little more, we’d be horrified and disgusted at 4 more years of Merrick Garland instead.
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u/GC_Gee Nov 17 '24
blaming pollsters for outlier polls is how we get a thousand polls all within a couple point of each other
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u/Pongzz NATO Nov 17 '24
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u/TheChinchilla914 Nov 17 '24
>Be a reputable pollster for decades
>absolutely shit the entire bed in 2024
>refuse to elaborate
>leave
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u/HealthyPromise1441 Nov 17 '24
Normalize messing up then vanishing without explanation.
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u/Goddamnpassword John von Neumann Nov 17 '24
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u/incredibleamadeuscho Nov 17 '24
she did elaborate in this post
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u/Khiva Nov 17 '24
Not really. She re-stated that she'd already planned to leave but didn't give much a breakdown on how that last poll was such a wild miss.
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u/incredibleamadeuscho Nov 17 '24
her methodology is clear every time she polls. it didnt change. it’s an outlier poll.
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u/buyeverything Ben Bernanke Nov 17 '24
I’m going to start referring to my major fuckups as outliers.
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u/gnivriboy Trans Pride Nov 17 '24
She did the same thing she did in previous years. She got it really wrong. Now she doesn't feel like doing this passion project anymore.
All this makes sense to me.
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u/TheChinchilla914 Nov 17 '24
I think had a good pre-Trump cohort and/or sampling methodology that just aged out and broke over time
I don’t think she’s a lucky idiot like some said but I do question publishing such a prima facie outlier without explaining more how you got there
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u/UnfairCrab960 Nov 17 '24
She used to publish outliers all the time and be proven right. This one was just way off
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u/gnivriboy Trans Pride Nov 17 '24
but I do question publishing such a prima facie outlier without explaining more how you got there
Did you not watch any interviews with her? She reminded people she is just doing the same thing she always did. There is no secret sauce and it is public to everyone. They are welcome to do the same thing.
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u/namey-name-name NASA Nov 17 '24
Tbf if Trump did that after he shat the bed in 2020 we’d be in a much better timeline rn
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u/SuspiciousCod12 Milton Friedman Nov 17 '24
Deeply unfortunate she had to retire after this
"Congratulations to Donald J. Trump and J.D. Vance on their victory," Deputy Political Director Alex Latcham said in a statement. "After four years under Kamala Harris, Hawkeye state voters are eager for President Trump to fix what Kamala Harris broke. Starting on Day 1, President Trump and Vice President JD Vance will help to ease costs, secure the border, and protect Social Security for retirees like Ann Selzer."
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u/Sea-Community-4325 Daron Acemoglu Nov 17 '24
They're such fucking assholes
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u/Ramses_L_Smuckles NATO Nov 17 '24
Republican sycophant staffers, especially. They're the political version of production assistants - people in thankless roles with constant infighting and running mostly on ego, having convinced themselves that the big shot's power rubs off on them. There's a definite personality type and it is universally insufferable.
I knew one of the bigwig staffers in the Trump campaign (now White House) in college and he was the ultimate woman repeller.
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u/Replies-Nothing Milton Friedman Nov 17 '24
Nah that was a good burn. If it were the other way around you’d agree,
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u/OrganicKeynesianBean IMF Nov 17 '24
It’s genuinely a good joke, this sub is too sensitive lol.
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u/RayWencube NATO Nov 17 '24
No it just makes us angry that the worst people in the world can actually be funny sometimes.
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u/YoullNeverBeRebecca Nov 17 '24
No, it’s wildly unprofessional and a douche move. And for what reason? In addition to getting mad at pollsters being absurd on its face, in 2020, she predicted Trump would do better in Iowa than other pollsters did. Republicans are such hostile aholes for no reason.
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u/Replies-Nothing Milton Friedman Nov 17 '24 edited Nov 17 '24
Believe it or not, comedy can—and often does—come at the cost of another person (especially when your off by 17 points). It’s called a burn; and you’ve gotta suck it up.
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u/ashsolomon1 NASA Nov 17 '24
Take a lesson from this, if you fail once just quit
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u/NonComposMentisss Unflaired and Proud Nov 17 '24
Good tip, but it works best when you are already 70 and had a successful career.
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u/nuanceIsAVirtue Thurgood Marshall Nov 17 '24
And announce your retirement a year before said failure
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u/persistentInquiry Nov 17 '24
Trump took the opposite lesson and it led him to the top of the world.
No matter how many times you fail and no matter how bad, deny accountability and keep coming back. Admitting you're wrong is a weakness. Reality doesn't matter. All that matters is will to power. And Trump has it.
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u/DrunkenBriefcases Jerome Powell Nov 17 '24
She had planned her retirement long ago. It was commonly referenced in reporting of her last couple polls.
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u/DoctorOfMathematics Thomas Paine Nov 17 '24
I give her +17 odds in her other ventures and opportunities
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u/the_walrus_was_paul Nov 17 '24
The comments on /r/Iowa were pretty funny when this poll came out.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Iowa/s/vslxXWD8RR
Every single other poll and the aggregators had Trump winning. This was clearly an outlier. I don’t care how good she has been in the past, it was so out of line with every single other piece of data, it was ridiculous.
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u/Juvisy7 NATO Nov 17 '24
Seeing that level of detail exuberance is literally depressing. I need a drink all over again 😔
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u/Superkebabi Nov 17 '24
She had the cojones to publish a poll and not just arbitrarily adjust the results she got when it was an outlier.
She’s probably bailing on the job because it’s labour intensive, and people expect her to be an oracle instead of just someone that’s good at getting people to answer questions in Iowa.
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u/Leonflames Nov 17 '24
The amount of hopium this sub had to one poll was wild. Anyone who even tried to criticize hedging your whole electoral prediction on this one poll was called a "doomer". I'm still shocked that her poll was off by more than +17 points though. It was a huge miss that wasn't even close.
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u/BachelorThesises Nov 17 '24
Then there was another guy on this sub always getting upvoted with his "own" forecast that was obviously waaaaaaaay too optimistic with his projected results that were based on vibes and historical results instead of actual polls.
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u/canes_SL8R NATO Nov 17 '24
That model was atrocious. Very clearly had every swing stats as an independent weighted coin flip that leant harris, and not at all tied together in their results as they are in reality. Harris never had an 85% chance of winning
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u/Leonflames Nov 17 '24
his "own" forecast
What happened to that fella anyway? I remember he was asked about his methodology but responded by saying that it's still being developed. This sub still supported his model nonetheless.
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u/freekayZekey Jason Furman Nov 17 '24
that dude was fucking hilarious. that’s when i sorta checked out of the sub; folks believed his bullshit
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u/AdFinancial8896 Nov 17 '24
Yeah there was more than one thread that was basically “give some hopium please, anything” lol
While the reasons all sounded plausible, it was obviously intentionally ignoring the wider context in hindsight
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u/SharkSymphony Voltaire Nov 17 '24 edited Nov 17 '24
If everyone would just follow my modest proposal that all Presidential campaigns are only 1 week long, we wouldn't need all this hopium. Either you're too frantically busy to worry about polls, or you can just check in in a week and get the actual result!
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u/DataDrivenPirate Emily Oster Nov 17 '24
I said it when her poll was released: someone's career was going to end on Election Night, either hers or Donald Trump's. She's approaching 70, if he won and she was that wrong, it's pretty easy to just close up shop and retire.
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u/YoullNeverBeRebecca Nov 17 '24
She had already planned to retire after this cycle before this poll was released.
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u/Godkun007 NAFTA Nov 17 '24
I still don't understand who pointed out that this poll made no sense got mass downvoted into oblivion.
Everything this subreddit predicted was wrong, and anyone that tried to point it out got mass downvoted. People here really believed that 80% of women would vote Democrat because of the abortion issue. But anyone with common sense could have told them that this wouldn't be the case.
In the end, Harris lost men (as a whole) by more than Trump lost women. This was always a predictable outcome if you actually paid attention to reality, but this sub refused. Even the Harris campaign campaign knew this was an issue because they were scrambling last minute to run ads directly targeted at men. The issue is that this doesn't work as a strategy, you can't ignore men your entire campaign and do a 2 week push for them at the end.
This sub needs to go outside and touch grass. Talk to people who disagree with them.
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u/Safe_Presentation962 Bill Gates Nov 17 '24
Kinda wild for her to just… quit. No attempt to adjust? Just donezo.
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u/whosthesixth NASA Nov 17 '24
She's approaching 70 now, I think she's got what she wanted from a career in the space
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u/Safe_Presentation962 Bill Gates Nov 17 '24
Fair enough. Thank you for the hopium, Ann.
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u/Khiva Nov 17 '24
Fucking no one, not even here, has time to read articles anymore.
Over a year ago I advised the Register I would not renew when my 2024 contract expired with the latest election poll as I transition to other ventures and opportunities.
This was also widely reported before her earthquake poll.
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u/DrunkenBriefcases Jerome Powell Nov 17 '24
If you read the article you'd know her retirement had been announced like a year ago.
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u/LukasJackson67 Greg Mankiw Nov 17 '24
The realclearpolitics polls, which were derdided here regularly for being “biased” were actually the most accurate.
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u/HenryGeorgia Henry George Nov 17 '24
During election season, this sub turns off the evidence based portion of brain and becomes an echo chamber. Nothing good is allowed to happen to/be said about the GOP
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u/Godkun007 NAFTA Nov 17 '24
Got mass downvoted for pointing this out multiple times.
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u/LordVader568 Adam Smith Nov 17 '24
This is really sad. She was one of the best pollsters.
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u/RayWencube NATO Nov 17 '24
She told the Register she was leaving after 2024 like a year ago.
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u/financeguy1729 George Soros Nov 17 '24
I mean. What is the point of continuing? Democrats no longer have their first primaries in Iowa, and betting markets have 50% probability that it's going to be J.D.
This error, multiple standard deviations off the mark, completely destroyed her pristine record. It was not just the last poll that was bad, each consecutive poll showed Ds getting votes, in an unprecedented way.
She's doing right. I suggest all the book Quit by Anne Duke. There are times when quiting is the best strategy.
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u/botsland Association of Southeast Asian Nations Nov 17 '24
You don't need hindsight to see how insane it was to put so much hope and copium in her poll solely based on her goldstar reputation.
She had trump leading biden in Iowa by 18 points in June. Suddenly, Harris led trump in Iowa by 3 pts in November. It's unfathomable that there would be a 21 pt shift in favour of the democrats in less than 5 months.
Moreover, her poll was a major outlier compared to the rest of the polling industry. All of these should have raised red flags to any objective viewer.
She gave democrats false hope which made many blindsided to Trump's victory
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u/ANewAccountOnReddit Nov 17 '24
But how did she get so off the mark though? Did she only poll Harris voters?
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u/HenryGeorgia Henry George Nov 17 '24
The poll was conducted basically right after MSG and Puerto Rico comments. Probably had a bad sample + some independent voters leaning trump being somewhat embarrassed
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Nov 17 '24
She said that her polling would break entirely at some point. It did. That's just how it is.
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u/sloppybuttmustard Nov 17 '24
Air traffic controller ending air traffic controlling after airliner collision, moving ‘to other ventures and opportunities’
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u/brtb9 Milton Friedman Nov 18 '24
Ann Selzer, like Atlas, is going to be the subject of the hot hand fallacy at some point. It's a matter of statistics.
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u/No1PaulKeatingfan Paul Keating Nov 17 '24 edited Nov 17 '24
That destroys my theory that she did this as a morale boost for the Dems huh