Overtime Politics Thread (WARNING: Possible fraud)

[Mr. Morden]

They are scheduled to release GOP results for Iowa tomorrow, then South Carolina numbers on the 15th and Nevada numbers on the 17th.

I'm sufficiently starved for SC and NV polls that I'm looking forward to those releases, even from a polling firm with no track record.

[Mr. Morden]

Overtime Politics poll of South Carolina, conducted Dec. 10-13:

http://overtimepolitics.com/donald-trump-has-a-20-point-lead-in-south-carolina/

Trump 37%
Cruz 17%
Carson 15%
Rubio 14%
Bush 4%
Paul 2%
Kasich 1%
Fiorina 1%
Christie 1%

[Mr. Morden]

Overtime Politics poll of South Carolina, conducted Dec. 10-13:

http://overtimepolitics.com/south-carolina-democratic-primary-poll-clinton-56-sanders-30-sanders-making-up-ground/

Clinton 56%
Sanders 30%
O’Malley 4%

[Mr. Morden]

As I recall, the Nevada caucuses have the same 15% viability threshold in every precinct that Iowa has, don't they?  That's why Edwards got virtually nothing here in 2008.  So whatever low single digit statewide %age O'Malley is getting here is going to end up largely distributed between Clinton and Sanders.

[Mr. Morden]

Yeah, Nevada seems like an especially bad state to not do any demographic weighting.  Are they even doing the poll in both English and Spanish?

[Mr. Morden]

These guys seem like junk, but only time will tell.

Maybe they're just bad at polling diverse states? Their Iowa numbers lined up with DMR, but these and those SC numbers are out of left field.

Maybe their Republican numbers will be better then, since the party's primary/caucus electorate is much less diverse. 

[Mr. Morden]

Overtime Politics poll of Colorado:

http://overtimepolitics.com/hillary-clinton-leads-bernie-sanders-49-36-in-colorado-11-undecided/

Clinton 49%
Sanders 36%
O'Malley 4%

[Mr. Morden]

The website shows no contact  information other than an email address.

We should email them and invite them here to defend their polls.

[Mr. Morden]

I fear we may be entering a polling dead zone, in which all we have is Overtime Politics and Reuters.  We got the CBS/YouGov polls for Sunday, as well as that new Illinois poll, but are we actually going to have more new polls released during the week leading up to Christmas?  What about the week between Christmas and New Year's?  If Iowa was as early as it was in 2008 and 2012, we would, but I don't think we will this time.  We may get hardly any polls from respectable outlets until late in the week of Jan. 4.

OTOH, maybe Reuters will get even more entertaining, if they keep up polling over Christmas.

[Mr. Morden]

Clinton ultimately got the Latino vote & Castro bros have endorsed h'

h'?  Is that like the reduced Planck constant?

[Mr. Morden]

link: http://overtimepolitics.com/hillary-clinton-leads-bernie-sanders-52-39-in-massachusetts/

[Mr. Morden]

http://overtimepolitics.com/trump-takes-substantial-23-point-lead-in-massachusetts-40-17-over-rubio/

Trump 40%
Rubio 17%
Cruz 12%
Carson 7%
Bush 5%
Paul 3%
Christie 2%
Fiorina 1%
Kasich 1%

[Mr. Morden]

At best it is some part-time amateur using non-scientific means. It is also entirely possible it is just some guy making it up.

I don't know if not correcting for demographics technically puts one in the "non-scientific" category.  Seems more like bad science than non-science.

[Mr. Morden]

But it wouldn't take much for them to be better than Gravis and ARG, which seem to be about the only 2 other pollsters doing state polls recently.

Probably because good pollsters aren't going to mess around trying to do polls around Christmas.  The other pollsters will presumably be back next week.

[Mr. Morden]

I don't see why he's so scared, to be honest. It's not like anybody's going to send him anthrax.

Anything's possible.

^He claims to have a small number of people helping him make calls.

Probably the same people that Trump's talking about when he says he has a lot of Muslim and Mexican friends.

Overtime Politics is using Muslim Mexican labor?

[Mr. Morden]

Sorry, I realize this is explained earlier in the thread, but can someone remind me: Have they said that they're going to start actually *weighting* by demographics, or just asking demographic questions, but leaving the topline #s unweighted?

[Mr. Morden]

"Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Overtime Politics polls entering the US Election Atlas until our forum's representatives can figure out what is going on."

[Mr. Morden]

For a Republican primary, though, it's way off. Hell, even for the general election, it's way off, as the notion that both Latinos and Asians alike do not comprise anywhere nearly the same share of the electorate as they do of the population (for Latinos, it's about 40%; for Asians, about 50%). In reality, the R primary poll should be anywhere from 96-98% white in Michigan.

Here's the racial breakdown from the 2012 Republican primary exit poll in Michigan:

http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/primaries/states/michigan/exit-polls

white 92%
Hispanic 3%
black 2%
Asian 2%
other 1%

[Mr. Morden]

Did they put out anything as inaccurate this poll?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-illinois-2016-democrat-president-primary-clinton-sanders-met-0308-20160308-story.html

Why does it matter?

Bullsh!t made up polls are bullsh!t made up polls. Even if the numbers end up being closer than others. If you look at our predictions threads some posters come close to predicting the actual results. But if they set up what they claimed was a polling company and that those predicted numbers were from polls, that doesn't mean they'd be correct or that the polls would be any less nonsense.

This was still a pure fraud and I have to laugh at anyone whoever took it seriously after all the evidence came in. What's embarrassing is Atlas was the only place where that was the case, even r/sandersforpresident quit citing it.

I don't think anyone took them seriously after Super Tuesday. It's just funny that a number of polls were much worse than some fake pollster.

I mean, a fake pollster *should* do better than quite a few real pollsters assuming they simply put out polls that are close the current polling average. Assuming that you did that, you'll always do better than whoever was on the "wrong" side of the average. I think one of the things that got people initially sniffing around Research 2000 was that their polls were <i>never</i> "out there." In fact, they virtually all tracked extremely close to the average, or in lieu of that to whatever you'd expect according to the conventional wisdom. In real polling even slight mistakes in weighting or sampling in real polls have the potential to produce wildly incorrect results, so it's expected for there to be occasional junkers (especially given the generally low standard of work of all American pollsters, but I digress.)

PPP has a history of having their the scale, so that isn't an issue limited to fake pollster.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/heres-proof-some-pollsters-are-putting-a-thumb-on-the-scale/

Are you kidding me? I wrote a long reply and then it told me I was logged out when I tried to post it and I lost it. >_> Anyways, I'll just summarize what I wrote and say that while that's true there's obviously a huge difference between putting out real data, that's still completely usable to statisticians or really anyone, and putting your thumb on the scale during weighting to hedge your bets and putting out fake, made up data that's totally useless and pollutes real statistical analysis. After all, anyone can re-weight those PPP polls themselves and the result is the same as if PPP had done it. The data is still totally usable.

Also, I pointed out that the reason PPP does this is understandable and sympathetic. There's no way to reliably get a representative sample, and outliers are inevitable, especially when you poll as often as PPP does. Yet all it takes is one crazy outlier, like that Chicago Tribune poll you posted, and you get branded a bad pollster by morons who don't understand statistics (I'm not saying Chicago Tribune is a good pollster mind you -- just that one crazy result doesn't prove they're a bad one.) I mean, PPP gets their money from the candidates who hire them, and those candidates use PPP's polls at fundraisers and such to argue that their candidacies are viable. PPP can't afford to get a bad reputation from one outlier. And what they do is still good. They do a lot of polling pro bono and that's perfectly good data, even if PPP's in house weighting is bad. It's actually quite an unfortunate situation all around, and I don't think it's totally or even mostly the fault of pollsters who do this like PPP. It's mainly the fact that there's a lot of misinformation about polling out there, and it's one of those topics that everyone thinks they understand and few people actually do.

But it lowers the statistical value of a poll if it already takes into account all the recent polls.

Yeah, even though PPP isn't making up #s out of thin air, they are definitely engaging in some methodological shadiness, as discussed in that 538 link, as well as other criticisms from Nate Cohn, among others.  And a similar argument applies to them: The fact that they still turn out to be accurate much of the time isn't a defense.

Contrast that with, say, Ann Selzer.  Sometimes she's wrong, but the numbers are the numbers.  If she has a poll that "looks wrong", she's not going to hide it with methodological shenanigans.