Originally Posted by
Daved
I know this is a week old, but I'm surprised nobody responded to these messages. Regardless of how you feel about the candidates, at least educate yourselves on how polling works before making these types of comments.
First, to Yarin. The "not undertaken by the establishment" polls that appear to be in that picture are completely different than the polls that showed that Clinton "won" the debates. The polls in those pictures are merely surveys open to anybody who decides to click and answer them. This makes the population who respond not representative of the country as a whole. If the website doing the survey has an audience that prefers one candidate over another, then you will likely get an outcome in the survey favoring that candidate. If one candidate's supporters are more enthusiastic, especially about the outcome of these surveys, then you also might get an outcome in the survey favoring that candidate.
This is different than the scientific polls that showed Clinton "won" the debates. Scientific polls attempt to survey a sample of the country (or the subset of residents that might vote in the election). While there is certainly some margin of error in doing this kind of poll, it can generally be relied upon to give a rough estimate of how the entire population feels. If you look at several different independent scientific polls, you can get a pretty good sense of who people (or voters) feel "won" the debates.
In the last U.S. Presidential election, many Romney supporters didn't think the polls (which had a fairly strong consensus that Obama was up by about 2 points) were accurate. They thought that Romney's supporters were more enthusiastic, and that the polls oversampled Democrats. It turns out, the polls were pretty accurate and could be used to accurately predict the outcome in all 50 states. In fact, the polls underestimated Obama's support, and he won by about 4 points nationally.
The lesson is, don't ignore the "mainstream media" and "establishment" polls because you're biased against them, and definitely don't look at unscientific online surveys as evidence of anything. If you average the results of a few national polls, chances are you'll be within a couple points of the actual state of the race.
And Epy, I'm not sure why you think a sample size of 2000 out of the 225 million eligible voters is crap, especially when it is weighted scientifically. As I mentioned before, poll aggregators predicted the national vote to within a few points and predicted each state outcome last election and the election before. I mean, sure, one individual poll might be off by 10 points but there's no reason to wait for the big tamale to understand that (a) Clinton currently has a big lead and (b) her lead increased after the first and second debates.