Re:Electoral College Decision Tree
by nl on Sunday October 25, 2020 @01:58AM
(#24884145)
Here's the analysis.[1]
It points out that (to quote):
As this report documents, the national polls in 2016 were quite accurate, while polls in key battleground states showed some large, problematic errors. (which is my claim: national polling is ok, state polls aren't great).
The education weighing issue is commonly accepted as the reason for the inaccuracy. The evidence for that isn't as strong as people assume.
Section 3.4 talks about the weighing issue, and shows some where reweighing worked:
Following the election, two different state-level pollsters acknowledged that they had not adjusted for education and conducted their own post-hoc analysis to examine what difference that would have made in their estimates. Both pollsters found that adjusting for education would have meaningfully improved their poll’s accuracy by reducing over-statement of Clinton support.
but also:
Despite this, it is not clear that adjusting to a more detailed education variable would have universally improved polls in 2016. Analysis of the effect from weighting by five education categories rather than three categories in four national polls (Appendix A.H) yielded an average change of less than 0.4 percentage points in the vote estimates and no systematic improvement.
It's worth noting that in previous elections this had never been the case before (which was why it wasn't done).
It points out that (to quote):
As this report documents, the national polls in 2016 were quite accurate, while polls in key battleground states showed some large, problematic errors. (which is my claim: national polling is ok, state polls aren't great).
The education weighing issue is commonly accepted as the reason for the inaccuracy. The evidence for that isn't as strong as people assume.
Section 3.4 talks about the weighing issue, and shows some where reweighing worked:
Following the election, two different state-level pollsters acknowledged that they had not adjusted for education and conducted their own post-hoc analysis to examine what difference that would have made in their estimates. Both pollsters found that adjusting for education would have meaningfully improved their poll’s accuracy by reducing over-statement of Clinton support.
but also:
Despite this, it is not clear that adjusting to a more detailed education variable would have universally improved polls in 2016. Analysis of the effect from weighting by five education categories rather than three categories in four national polls (Appendix A.H) yielded an average change of less than 0.4 percentage points in the vote estimates and no systematic improvement.
It's worth noting that in previous elections this had never been the case before (which was why it wasn't done).
[1] https://www.aapor.org/Education-Resources/Reports/An-Evaluat...