Rasmussen Polls Were Biased and Inaccurate; Quinnipiac, SurveyUSA Performed Strongly

[Joanne98]

By NATE SILVER

Every election cycle has its winners and losers: not just the among the candidates, but also the pollsters.

On Tuesday, polls conducted by the firm Rasmussen Reports — which released more than 100 surveys in the final three weeks of the campaign, including some commissioned under a subsidiary on behalf of Fox News — badly missed the margin in many states, and also exhibited a considerable bias toward Republican candidates.

Other polling firms, like SurveyUSA and Quinnipiac University, produced more reliable results in Senate and gubernatorial races. A firm that conducts surveys by Internet, YouGov, also performed relatively well.

What follows is a preliminary analysis of polls released to the public in the final 21 days of the campaign. Our process here is quite simple: we’ve taken all such polls in our database, and assessed how accurate they were, on average, in predicting the margin separating the two leading candidates in each race. For instance, a poll that had the Democrat winning by 2 percentage points in a race where the Republican actually won by 4 would have an error of 6 points.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/rasmussen-polls-were-biased-and-inaccurate-quinnipiac-surveyusa-performed-strongly/

[FrenchieCat]

1. The day that there is honest conversation from pollsters, and the media of how

inaccurate polls touted every damn day starting one year prior to an election,
actually have a hand in determining the final poll numbers. If SurveyUSA and the more
accurate ones don't poll as often as Rasmussen, then their numbers become affected
by the release of the Rasmussen polls, which seem were done weekly and then daily.

Example: The more I say that there are no fish in the sea, day in day out,
the large the porportion of folks will grow who will believe it, and therefore the next
poll comissioned will find a large number of those who believe that there are no
fish in the sea. The longer this cycle is repeated, the higher in percentage
those who won't believe fish live in the Sea (especially in those places where the sea is very far away) will become. Comes the day of the final poll, it doesn't matter if I was wrong,
the point is that more folks believe it, because they were affected by the announcements
of the inaccurate polls.

[progressoid]

2. No Shit?

:eyes: