LA Times poll thread

[Beet]

Guess which one is Vorlon, Mr. A, or Mr. B:

Mr. A:

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Mr. B:

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[Beet]

The two are NOT mutually exclusive.  You do not throw out peopel if you are close to a reasonable split in party ID, say a 5% Dem advantage.  Might be a bit off, but not so far teh poll needs tweaking.

Now, when assembling a representative sample a 10% or more Dem advantage is so far out of line as to rule out a true representative sample.  A 14% advantage is downright indefensible.  At that point you have clearly oversampled one side and should adjust your numbers for it, or throw out the poll as garbage.

If every other piece of methodology is good, a slight bias one way or the other will not make a huge difference.  If your difference is too big, the rest cannot compensate for it.

If you are saying its a subjective call, on how bad a poll is, I agree. The LA Times poll was bad, sure, but the biggest complaint against it was exactly of the same kind that millwx pointed out for the SurveyUSA poll in Florida. The latter poll was off by 8%, this one by 14%. Vorlon's attitude towards the two polls was not to treat the two polls similarly but say the LA Times poll is worse, or even significantly worse, but to treat the two polls in the exact opposite manner. He completely defended the latter poll in regard to the specific complaint made and completely panned the former in regard to that complaint.

[Beet]

All I said was that you defended the SurveyUSA poll against the complaint that it was not weight well for party ID and that you panned the LA Times poll using the fact that it was poorly weighted for party ID.

And you did.

Vorlon, I'm not complaining about all your analysis just the different ways you treat the same issue.

I wasn't trying to say you aren't critical of Survey USA (though you did conclude you were confident there was no bias one way or the other), but that you present two entirely opposing viewpoints on the importance of weighting party ID. This has NOTHING to do with the Reagan effect or California or Michigan polls, or the quality of SurveyUSA/LA Times polls in general. It also isn't about your different conclusions of these two polls. Your knowledge and analysis obviously superior to anyone else here. I was just surprised that the two diametrically opposite views of party ID weighting that you took between the two polls. Reading your post on this thread one would assume that party ID weighting is something you look at closely, seeing as you spent half your post on it. Believing the Harris numbers, the LA Times poll would only be 9% off (though I have no desire to defend the poll in general). The SurveyUSA poll was 8% off, according to what millwx said about the voter registrtion numbers. So not that big a difference, but a big reaction. That's ALL this is about. I think you're overreacting a bit.

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Some otherwise independents identifying as Republicans due to Reagan is a valid point, that's not what this is about. I really wish you wouldn't have to assume I'm being dishonest and deliberately "forgetting" or trying to misrepresent what you say. I've read dozens of your posts and had plenty of opportunity to do that before if I wanted. The descrepancy between your reactions on party ID in these two threads just struck me as especially surprising.

Well

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I apologize if I implied that I was seeing contradictions in any other part of your posts other than what you implied about party ID in the different threads. When you type a lot and do a lot of analysis I realise its easy sometimes to come up with these seemingly different views. Especially since the LA Times has such a bad history, I would understand. So just admit your differing bias between the LA Times and SurveyUSA affected your analysis enough to make it seem contradictory, there's no shame in that.

So in response to all your other defenses of other parts of your post, I wasn't complaining about those.

[Beet]

Ok, thanks for changing back the name of the topic (no sarcasm this time).

[Beet]

Please don't "grovel and apologize"... how embarassing! :x

Of course you are probably right about the likely quality of these two polls. So, you use party ID weight as a validity check, and it was a matter of degree between these two polls. The SurveyUSA poll diverged less from the norm, had a larger margin of error, and they were more honest about what factors influenced their result. So the differing party weight offset was relatively less significant, hence the contrasting treatments. Thank you for explaining that.

The LA Times is probably slanted consistently, no disagreement there.