Even in exit polls with the NY Times seal of approval.
According to a Capitol Weekly early-voter exit poll, Hillary Clinton was leading Bernie Sanders by less than 10% in the Los Angeles area vote-by-mail balloting ahead of last Tuesday. According to results posted to the Los Angeles County website, Clinton was winning vote-by-mail ballots by 66.6-33.4%, for a discrepancy of more than 23%.
The discrepancy cannot be easily explained by demographic factors: the results of the Capitol Weekly exit poll were weighted by age and race. Moreover, the exit poll had 21,000 respondents, and was praised–prior to election night–by mainstream elections journalists, including Nate Cohn of the New York Times.
Twenty-one thousand respondents. That’s a very respectable size for the absentee ballots, even for California, if the Washington Post is to be believed. It truly is an astounding coincidence how an exit poll with a sample size that large could be off by 23 percentage points. And one that was specifically weighted to take into consideration age and race, factors that were known to benefit Hillary more than Bernie.
A poll that surveyed absentee voters by sending emails to people known to have returned their June 7th ballot as of June 4, 2016. Not guessed at, not presumed, but people they knew had voted,”weighted by geography, party registration, age, ethnicity and gender to match the voters who have already cast ballots…” Using such weighting eliminated the effect that younger, male Sanders voters were over-represented in the poll. In other words, they had already adjusted their raw data to account for that.
Indeed, this was the most Clinton-favorable poll of the many that were conducted. All the rest had Clinton leading by only two percent (2%) with margins of error ranging from 4-5 percent. So how could this most-favorable Clinton poll still screw it up that badly? Such a respected polling company, too. I mean I could understand it being off by say 10%, even though that figure would still likely far exceed the poll’s margin of error, but 23 percent? That’s simply astounding to me.
Exit polls this year really do suck. At least in the Democratic primaries, anyway.
I really appreciate your posts on climate change, including the passion evident in them. But also their adherence to factual reality and reason.
On this subject, though, you just keep discrediting yourself. Specifically, many objections raised in these threads are quite valid.
In this instance, a “discrepancy” between results from early voters and “later voters” (and hence in the final result) just isn’t that surprising, or even remarkable.
For example, it seems way beyond plausible that early voters are more motivated, invested, etc., and so disproportionately (relative to the overall Dem primary electorate) favored Sanders in this case.
(My instance of Ockham’s razor in fact rates that as THE most likely explanation of the observed phenomenon you present.)
Seriously. Today’s posts and the ongoing conspiracy mongering are making this blog a few short steps from 9/11 truthers. Please stop this madness.
When I first found this place, it seemed a refreshing oasis of mostly reasonable and Reality-Based folks engaged in mutually respectful discussion/debate.
A primary election season seems to change all that, and not for the better.
Voters from 6 AM – 8 AM work. Voters from 8 AM to 11 AM are retired. Voters from 11:30-12:45 work. Afternoon, retired. 4:30 – close – work.
There are all kinds of things going on.
Exit polls don’t work. In fact, the entire polling industry is on the ropes.
voting to mean prior to Election Day, but I don’t know that for sure. Nor am I motivated enough to research it.
Here’s how you know Steven is a hack:
This is just pathetic, Steven.
Re your point number 3: Anybody else get flashbacks to those hoax emails we used to get forwarded forwarded forwarded: “Warning! McAfee has just discovered a very dangerous virus called Heebee-Jeebee! It will bollix your framjog unless you immediately disable the flornbeskit!”
Let us be very very clear: There is no fucking way in the world to make an exit poll that is accurate.
20 years ago, they worked. However, suspicion, refusals, etc, have made them incredibly unreliable.
From 2004:
There are many reasons why exit polls do not work and cannot be made to work.
You cannot randomly sample. You must ensure that you take exit polls in a proportionate way in all regions. You cannot control willingness to respond.
None of this has ANYTHING to do with probability or any of that. This is process. If you cannot control process, you get shit.
You neglected to include that: Only in the USA do exit polls not work.
You know this for a fact?
Works well in the UK
It’s obvious, once you remember that Hitlery Clinton only has absolute control over the exit polling in the US.
For now…
And Marie doesn’t know the differences between exit polls in the US and abroad. Exit polls in Ukraine, for example, are designed to detect fraud. Exit polls in the US are paid for by a consortium of media outlets and are designed to see who’s voting. The former has fewer questions and a much larger number of respondents.
We could make exit polls accurate in the US, but someone would have to pay for it.
Cognitive dissonance. It’s been mentioned multiple times over the previous two threads.
I don’t think it even rises to the level of cognitive dissonance. It’s laziness, fear, and a desire for simple answers, even if they’re wrong.
You’d think it would be obvious that alleging massive, systemic, nation-wide vote fraud would need something approximating evidence. Not for Steven!
If US exit pollsters can’t perform the simplest task of all — sample, collect the “who did you vote for,” and perform the calculations to project the winners — then the rest of their exit polling data collection would be even more faulty.
This isn’t even a freakin’ exit poll! It’s a survey!
That makes absolutely no sense at all. Do you have any idea how exit polls work in the US? Do you know that they’re continually updated and modified to match the actual vote totals? Do you know that their primary purpose is demographic, not predictive?
Give it a rest Steve. You’re trying to talk to people that believe the FL 2000 exit polls were wrong and that Jeb! ran a clean election in his state that year.
You are right Marie. And this was my last shot across the bow. I couldn’t resist after seeing that even the most favorable poll for Clinton still was somhow so far off the mark it was absurd. Kafkaesque.
It’s a lost cause, Steven.
Here’s the deal, Steven: you have no idea what you’re talking about that. I don’t mean that as an insult — it’s an objective fact. You posted an absurd “study” a couple of graduate students cobbled together from data that was at best unreliable and at worst (since it came from a conspiracy theorist’s blog) fraudulent. You didn’t know that, because you either didn’t read or didn’t understand the study.
You didn’t know that no one thinks early exit polls are unreliable because you couldn’t be bothered to do a 5 minute Google search. You didn’t see the articles in The Nation, (http://www.thenation.com/article/reminder-exit-poll-conspiracy-theories-are-totally-baseless/) the Washington Post (https:/www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/25/you-need-to-chill-out-tim-robbins) and others that chronicled the very basic methodological problems in that bullshit study.
And when commenters pointed out these very obvious problems, you never had a substantive response. Instead, we got “OMG — paid trolls!” and “Did you read the study/update/appendix” and “My dad has a big CV!”
And you STILL have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re cutting and pasting and linking to bad articles that you don’t understand.
What you describe, what you are opposing, has become a pervasive difficulty in the left blogosphere. Everybody thinks himself an instant expert, and the din of credential waving and dick measuring is enough to drown out any actual expert who cares to offer his informed opinion. We used to think ourselves better than the RWNJs, only to have become mirror twins in our turn.
The best counter to this, as we have known for these four hundred years and more, is to look at the actual data and see what it tells us. Failing that, people are free to believe what they want to believe. They form cozy tea parties from which unconfortable information can easily be excluded by catty remarks, sneering insinuations of bad faith, and other cheap rhetorical tricks.
You forgot to mention how everyone who you disagrees with has no morals, ethics, or principles.
How we’re all neo-liberal neo-conservatives.
And how we all secretly cheered on Bush Jr., all hoping he’d get elected so that our tax dollars could go directly towards the murder of babies.
If we don’t agree with you, it’s because we’re sub-humans who just don’t get it.
Also: Benghazi.
I suppose I take heart in the fact that so many share these posts on social media thief it is clear they feel too intimidated by the bullies for Clinton that have turned a once great community into a shell of its former self.
It’s still a great community. Im not intimidated by the Clintons , and I doubt any of the other people rejecting your narrative are either.
You are being extremely disrespectful to people who have been here as long as you for daring to come to conclusions that differ from yours. I utterly reject your premise here. Epistemic closure.
Your candidate lost. Get over it.
at least pressing up against the border of dishonesty: I voted for Bernie (turned in my absentee ballot on Election Day, June 7, to be precise). My critique of Bernie’s “political revolution” is only that it falls short of what’s needed to save us from ourselves (if that’s even still possible) as I’ve written here repeatedly.
My comment here has nothing whatsoever to do with being a “bull[y] for Clinton”.
It is based entirely on the merits of the arguments.
Sad (I mean that literally and sincerely) to see you resorting to such disingenuous misdirection. Six months ago, if anyone had told me it would come to this, I would not have believed them.
Actually, we all silently agree with everything you post, but all of the sweet, sweet cash we’re receiving from Victoria Nuland, David Brock, and Huma Abedin’s ISIS contacts is just too much to pass up.
Personally, I’m working for Ryan Hughes, who was a Hillary mole running Bernie’s campaigns in MI and PA. I was amazed when a gut made a selfie YouTube video that spilled the beans, and even more amazed when Steven found it. But luckily, Hillary’s campaign stole 700K votes, so the bitcoins kept rolling in.
Damn autocorrect lol. Thief = though.
A survey of mail-in voters isn’t an exit poll, at all, in any way. It doesn’t have access to the voters as they leave the voting booth. It’s just a survey, nothing more.
Look, I’m all for integrity of the ballot but this is sounding more and more like Republicans complaining about voter fraud. They think it happens but for some reason they can’t prove it exists or that the Democrats are engaged in it. This doesn’t stop them from making the accusation.
Here’s another article about how the election was massaged/stolen:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36408-was-the-democratic-primary-just-manipulated-or-was-it-stole
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Here’s the thing. From all appearances the elections in 2000 and 2004 were stolen. Now election thievery is normalized. In fact, you get attacked for even noticing.
I just read that article. Where does it say the election was stolen?
Thanks Bob.
STEVEN:
If these claims had real resonance, Sanders’ campaign would be raising holy hell. We’ve all observed Bernie, Jeff Weaver and their surrogates during the primary season; there’s no doubt they’d be throwing down the gauntlet right now if this were real.
Please respond to this very, very strong evidence that you’re off base here.
I’m in California. We’re a Democratic state through and through. EVERY state leader we elected in the last election was a Democrat. We are also a huge state. There are 39 million of us in 164,000 square miles. To steal an election, especially one so closely watched, in CA would require a massive undertaking involving thousands of people. It just isn’t possible. And quite frankly, I’m really resenting the accusations.
Hillary won. Because we voted for her.
Another absolute bullshit post peddling a garbage conspiracy theory.
Booman, you need to kick this guy off your blog.
Steven, I know you hate Hillary and believe all of the worst stories about her, but you need to come back to reality. California wasn’t stolen, the primary wasn’t stolen, Bernie simply got fewer votes.