Redban
Sr. Member
Posts: 2,981
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« on: September 30, 2020, 03:06:09 PM » |
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Minus Rasmussen & Gallup, the polls in 2012 were accurate. I remember a headline that said, "The biggest winner in the 2012 election were the polls." Obama won by about 3.5%. Most polls had him ahead by 1-5%. We often forget that these polls have a margin-of-error; they are not meant to be razor precise. If a poll with a MOE of 3.5% had Obama up by 1%, then the poll wasn't really wrong.
Now -- Rasmussen and Gallup were the big ones that got it wrong. Both of them had Romney ahead in their national polls, and Obama's 3.5% win was outside the margin of error for them.
I don't know what happened with Gallup, but I know what happened with Rasmussen. Scott Rasmussen himself often went on Bill O'Reilly's show to explain. He assumed that Obama wasn't going to duplicate the 2008 turnout, so his polls underweighted the Democrats in the methodology. A lot of conservatives latched on to Scott Rasmussen's thinking, leading to the claim that the mainstream polls were wrong and that Romney was going to win. This is what caused the "surprise loss" on election night.
After the election, some people mockingly asked, "Why did all those pollsters oversample the Democrats?"
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