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/
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1.3k

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

603

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.

280

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

163

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.

11

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.

8

u/rykahn Nov 17 '24

They were definitely worried about NC. And rightfully so, given how the rest of the statewide races went!

23

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)

6

u/Reginald_Venture Nov 18 '24

Yeah, it's just, 2016 again, but much worse. It's really just a nightmare.

2

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.

1

u/Evilrake Nov 18 '24

They were doing everything wrong except the one thing they KNOW how to do (energise angry white people) and by golly it worked.

1

u/Objective-Muffin6842 Nov 18 '24

He knows how to engage low info voters

136

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.

66

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

34

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

16

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.

45

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.

1

u/Khiva Nov 18 '24

I think the evisceration narrative set in because counting hadn't finished and word spread that she was down by 15 million. And you know how people never follow up or wait for data to inform their take. Bernie was sprinting towards a mic like he was waiting for a starting gun to fire.

That plus Trump winning the popular at all certainly does feel like a gut punch.

22

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.

2

u/CarpeDiemMaybe Esther Duflo Nov 17 '24

Was it that close? I thought it was a landslide

8

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).

11

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.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 17 '24

[deleted]

1

u/WOKE_AI_GOD NATO Nov 17 '24

We weren't that far from winning the electoral vote. They don't care about the popular vote, I don't see why I should.

7

u/userlivewire Nov 17 '24

Trump is very superstitious about a lot of things.

46

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.

119

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.

187

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

57

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

22

u/Khiva Nov 17 '24

I would really love for her - or someone - to give a breakdown on this.

20

u/eetsumkaus Nov 17 '24

Didn't she for her interviews after the results came out? Basically older women were driving the Harris +4.

10

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.

5

u/ArcFault NATO Nov 17 '24

Like all polling methodology - it works until it doesn't.

1

u/Khiva Nov 18 '24

Her methodology was from the early 2000s and it finally bit her.

Wild that it worked even in this cycle until the very end though, no?

3

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.

5

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.

1

u/Khiva Nov 18 '24

Interesting. I remember reading that her unique skill came from her ability to assemble a sample set. If it was all just random then I got something wrong somewhere.

Still, wild that this methodology would be so right until it was unfathomably wrong.

-16

u/JeromesNiece Jerome Powell Nov 17 '24

"She got heads 7 times in a row, she must have the best coin flipping technique. The results speak for themselves."

70

u/ddddall Nov 17 '24

She wasn't just directionally correct, she was within a certain range of the final result too. That's not something you can model with a coin flip

-20

u/JeromesNiece Jerome Powell Nov 17 '24

Add more dimensions to the coin, then! Roll a six-sided die, whoever rolls the most sixes is the most skilled!

The point is that her success was entirely indistinguishable from luck. With hundreds of local pollsters, one of them is going to look the best over the course of several election cycles by dumb luck alone. But that "best" pollster is not any more likely to be predictive going forward.

37

u/cc_rider2 Nov 17 '24 edited Nov 17 '24

You say that methodology doesn’t matter when it comes to pollsters but do you have anything to back that up? Nate Silver and the folks at 538 do seem to think that certain pollsters have better methods and results. You’re just asserting it without giving any evidence or reasoning.

15

u/Stanley--Nickels John Brown Nov 17 '24 edited Nov 17 '24

If her methodology were exactly perfect with no response biases, she’d have had a 1 in 7 chance of missing the margin by 10 points. And even the best pollsters are nowhere near perfect.

0

u/cc_rider2 Nov 17 '24

Uh, no? Assuming a +/- 3% margin of error and 95% confidence interval, the odds of being off by 10 points is 1 in 1164.

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10

u/PersonalTeam649 Nov 17 '24

The truth is that it can be extremely hard to know whether a forecaster or pollster is getting lucky or is genuinely skilled, and I don’t think we have enough data to make an extremely confident call on how good Selzer is.

11

u/JeromesNiece Jerome Powell Nov 17 '24

I didn't say that methodology doesn't matter. It does matter. But methodological quality tops out very fast. Once you're taking representative samples of the population in question there's not much else to do. Which is why Silver and 538 and The Economist's weights for pollster quality are not very large. Whereas this subreddit was convinced that Seltzer had some magic sixth sense that meant her methodology was worth 10x more than other pollsters. Even after factoring in Selzer's poll and giving it an appropriately higher weight for quality, every modeler still only gave Harris a ~15% chance to win Iowa and ~50% chance to win midwestern swing states. Way lower than what this subreddit was supposing.

5

u/IsNotACleverMan Nov 17 '24

But I thought this sub was data driven.

4

u/NeolibsLoveBeans Resistance Lib Nov 17 '24

Local man is loudly confident of his ignorance

12

u/PleaseGreaseTheL World Bank Nov 17 '24

Reminds me of people who still screech about nate silver even though he was right, and nobody could, or did, predict this electoli9n even remotely

Idk why some people hate him so hard.

3

u/NeolibsLoveBeans Resistance Lib Nov 17 '24

Because he’s an asshole

3

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.

11

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.

-1

u/blewpah Nov 17 '24

you all fell for the "winner" that got the most heads in a row.

Did anyone say with certainty that she was going to be accurate? Did she even say that?

7

u/MariaKeks Nov 17 '24

I don't think anyone claimed it was literally 100% certain, but that's asking too much. However, there definitely were a lot of comments hyping her up, implying she was a lot more accurate than other pollsters. A selection of quotes:

If I were a betting man, I would NOT be betting against the GOAT Ann Selzer. (475 points)

Look at the early voting number + the gender gap in Iowa…obviously Selzer is right (57 points)

The lady doesn’t miss. If she’s off 4 points this time around, then Blexas and Blorida are in play and Dems probably win a trifecta. (42 points)

It's pretty clear other pollsters care more about their perception than they do about being accurate. (57 points)

Go home and play with Fivey, Nate. The adults (key man and seltzer lady) are predicting the president. (17 points)

Note that a lot of these comments were downvoted after they turned out to be wrong, so before the election they would have been rated even higher.

Meanwhile:

The Ann Selzer Methodology:

Release an outlier poll favoring Democrats and enjoy the adulation for a few days. Once Kamala loses Iowa (duh?), who knows what she'll do, but I couldn't care less. (0 points)

9

u/Khiva Nov 17 '24

there definitely were a lot of comments hyping her up, implying she was a lot more accurate than other pollsters

Yeah look at this absolute clown:

Ann Selzer Is The Best Pollster In Politics

Five thirty .... something or other. Never heard of them. What do they know?

2

u/MariaKeks Nov 17 '24

Just because you read something on the internet doesn't mean it's true.

This is actually another great example of the cherry picking of evidence that is at the root of the issue. Let me explain.

You are citing a years-old fluff piece by relative nobody Clare Malone who put “best pollster” in the headline without actually quantifying that in the copy to justify your belief that the Selzer poll was right. The justification hinges on the fact that 538 published Malone's article, and this makes some sense, since 538 specializes in election predictions, so they have some credibility on gauging the accuracy of pollsters.

But if Clare Malone is credible through association with 538, then certainly that applies also to Nate Silver, the literal founder of 538, who wrote that “Selzer will probably be wrong”.

Why is it that you trusted Malone's old article more than Silver's analysis? My guess is that you wanted Selzer to be right, so you wanted Malone to be right, and Silver to be wrong. But wanting something to be true doesn't make it so.

And now you come here, posting sarcastically, implying that because you read Selzer is the best pollster on 538, you were totally justified in your belief that the Selzer poll would be correct. But what you didn't mention is that you chose to ignore all evidence to the contrary about Malone, just like you chose to ignore all evidence to the contrary about Selzer, and all evidence to the contrary about Harris.

3

u/Pristine-Aspect-3086 John Rawls Nov 17 '24

in the very nate silver article you're referencing he literally calls selzer and NYT/sienna the two best pollsters

2

u/MariaKeks Nov 18 '24

The thesis of that article is “Selzer is great, but this time she is likely wrong”.

If you read that and your only take-away is “Selzer is great” then you're guilty of exactly the kind of selective reading I am talking about.

0

u/Khiva Nov 18 '24

And the guy is complaining about "cherry picking."

The internet is immune is irony.

2

u/Gooch_Limdapl Nov 17 '24

Sub-textually, yeah, every time her track record was mentioned to bolster the poll.

3

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"

15

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.

56

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

92

u/LeoCrow Nov 17 '24

The answer is, Trump is not unpopular. Polarizing, but not unpopular.

31

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?

82

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.

26

u/Stanley--Nickels John Brown Nov 17 '24

Trump is more popular with Republicans than Reagan was

12

u/zth25 European Union Nov 17 '24

There are millions of non-Republican Trump voters that made the difference though.

2

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.

4

u/ArcFault NATO Nov 17 '24

Bc prices high, vote the bums out.

1

u/justbuildmorehousing Norman Borlaug Nov 17 '24

Yep. People say Trump is unpopular. Not really true. He is extremely popular among certain people. Lots of people hate him, but just as many love him (sadly)

13

u/EclecticEuTECHtic NATO Nov 17 '24

Easy, Harris did not run ahead of Dems in swing states.

23

u/arnet95 Nov 17 '24

That's just not true. Dems won senate seats in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin.

4

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

17

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

8

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).

7

u/YoullNeverBeRebecca Nov 17 '24

She didn’t? At least not here in NC.

52

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.

15

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.

1

u/Khiva Nov 18 '24

A different democrat could have done that.

Nah, honestly unless they ran a complete wild-card like Terry Crews, there's no escaping the Dem label and voters were just mad the president didn't wave the Magic Inflation Wand.

1

u/CapuchinMan Nov 18 '24

The problem is the Dems didn't get a chance to that fact-finding at all. Someone not in the administration would have had a more credible position criticizing the administration than Kamala. In the end it still might have been Kamala to win the primaries but she perhaps might have had a more refined campaign. But because of the choice of the Biden campaign to hide his deficiencies, they never got to try.

31

u/[deleted] 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. 

28

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.

-9

u/[deleted] Nov 17 '24

Golden Dawn was literally convicted as a criminal organization, banned, and its leaders are sitting in prison right now.

Trump's rhetoric is significantly more extreme than that of Orban and Fidesz. 

 This is a shallow, basic, misinformed a take as "Bernie would be center right in Europe."

The american electorate is objectively, undisputably extreme far right in Europe given over 50% voted for an extreme far right fascist. 

2

u/Khiva Nov 18 '24

Golden Dawn was literally convicted as a criminal organization

Not even this is right. One of their traditional members was in the European Parliament until June, the party lost vote share and while it was described as such in a court case, it was never banned from standing. In any case, most of their membership has migrated to the Spartan party so the animus is alive and well.

On rhetoric, though - Trump says so much insane things that are nearly impossible to parse that, sure, fine, I don't have the willpower to even get into that. There is no politician firing off more nonsense per minute, and the US could certainly wind up far more worse off than Hungary, Turkey or god knows any other place.

I can't even begin to tell you what Trump means. I don't even think he can.

I can tell you what I'm afraid it means all day, and yes the most uncharitable take (and when has he deserved charity) is blood-curdling.

7

u/creaturefeature16 Nov 17 '24

I didn't say she was THE problem.

And 7.5 million less votes...is pretty bad.

4

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.

5

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

10

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.

-7

u/AnnoyedCrustacean NATO Nov 17 '24

Bologna

I cannot accept that a country as divided as we are would give nothing to the opposing candidate

10

u/TheGhostofJoeGibbs Milton Friedman Nov 17 '24

The swing states were not independent variables, they are correlated with each other.

-5

u/AnnoyedCrustacean NATO Nov 17 '24

What you're saying, is so long as everything is uniform, you're fine with accepting results, without verifying?

Reagan would be disappointed

6

u/creaturefeature16 Nov 17 '24

You don't have to accept it, for it to also be true.

-2

u/[deleted] Nov 17 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

5

u/creaturefeature16 Nov 17 '24

"scientific rigor" = conspiracies. Ironic.

The fact you're calling them "Elon's voting machines" shows you have not one iota of a clue how US elections are run.

-8

u/justthekoufax Nov 17 '24 edited Nov 17 '24

I personally don’t think Biden is that unpopular. Seeing that no Dem ticket has won in 30 years without him on it.

Edit: Damn I said it was a personal opinion, but thank you for all the supportive comments! 😘

59

u/chillinwithmoes Nov 17 '24

Are we really pretending that Barack fucking Obama needed Biden

5

u/AnnoyedCrustacean NATO Nov 17 '24

White guy poll bump

Shame it didn't work for Harris / Walz

14

u/Leonflames Nov 17 '24

That's the current situation of this sub haha.

8

u/SharkSymphony Voltaire Nov 17 '24 edited Nov 17 '24

Look Jack, Joe held the world on his shoulders.

There's a reason they call em the Obama Biden Mysteries and not just the Obama Mysteries.

-3

u/justthekoufax Nov 17 '24

I didn’t say that, I just said I don’t think he’s as unpopular as he’s being made out to be.

5

u/40StoryMech ٭ Nov 17 '24

But we have POLLING that says ...

27

u/creaturefeature16 Nov 17 '24

His approval ratings were (and are) absolutely abysmal from 2022 onwards.

23

u/West-Code4642 Gita Gopinath Nov 17 '24

Bro barely campaigned in 2020 and absolutely failed to advocate/campaign for any of the policies his admin passed. He had a brief honeymoon for like 6 months and then had wbush2 like unpopularity rest of his term 

8

u/Nerdybeast Slower Boringer Nov 17 '24

Biden would have lost New Jersey

0

u/grig109 Liberté, égalité, fraternité Nov 17 '24

This deserves a gold medal in cherry-picking statistics.

1

u/justthekoufax Nov 17 '24

Give me one then.

7

u/MasterRazz Nov 17 '24

She didn't weigh her polls, so you can just attribute it to a sampling error. It happens.

2

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.

1

u/iplawguy David Hume Nov 17 '24

No one has hurt me more this year than Selzer.

1

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.

0

u/barktreep Immanuel Kant Nov 17 '24

Turns out she was not the best pollster in America. She explicitly refused to adapt to the forces that all the other pollsters were struggling to adapt to and this is the result.

-1

u/[deleted] Nov 17 '24

It really makes me want to believe the Elon hacking conspiracies

-26

u/DepressedTreeman Robert Caro Nov 17 '24

how does having sex with a 17 y.o. make him a pedo?

21

u/ExistentialCalm Gay Pride Nov 17 '24

Would you prefer the term rapist? Or are you fishing for ephebofile?

-20

u/DepressedTreeman Robert Caro Nov 17 '24

was it consentful or not?

10

u/n00bi3pjs Raghuram Rajan Nov 17 '24

It is a federal crime to traffic minors across state lines for sex.

15

u/ExistentialCalm Gay Pride Nov 17 '24

I would argue that non-adults can't consent. And depending on where this happened, that would be legally the case as well.

-12

u/DepressedTreeman Robert Caro Nov 17 '24

age of consent laws exist for the purpose of that and yes possibly he did.

its silly that that isnt federally mandated

-14

u/DepressedTreeman Robert Caro Nov 17 '24

yes i expect downvotes