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On Tuesday, polls conducted by the firm Rasmussen Reports — which released more than 100 surveys in the final three weeks of the campaign, including some commissioned under a subsidiary on behalf of Fox News — badly missed the margin in many states, and also exhibited a considerable bias toward Republican candidates.
The 105 polls released in Senate and gubernatorial races by Rasmussen Reports and its subsidiary, Pulse Opinion Research, missed the final margin between the candidates by 5.8 points, a considerably higher figure than that achieved by most other pollsters. Some 13 of its polls missed by 10 or more points, including one in the Hawaii Senate race that missed the final margin between the candidates by 40 points, the largest error ever recorded in a general election in FiveThirtyEight’s database, which includes all polls conducted since 1998.
Moreover, Rasmussen’s polls were quite biased, overestimating the standing of the Republican candidate by almost 4 points on average. In just 12 cases, Rasmussen’s polls overestimated the margin for the Democrat by 3 or more points. But it did so for the Republican candidate in 55 cases — that is, in more than half of the polls that it issued.
Did all these incorrect polls have the Democrat candidate win in the final election? It would appear to me that the polls reflected more accurately what way the country leaned instead of the "correct" polls that were "fair". Was the bias just in the results? Were these fluctuations within the margin of error most polls have? This just appears to me to be a sore loser article accusing FoxNews of some wrong doing even if the results of the polls reflected the actual outcomes.
They were wrong because they did not accurately predict the results of the election. This is the primary purpose of polls. Its a simple concept.
What elections in particular did the polls get the final results incorrect outside its margin of error?
Now that was a detailed and well thought out step-by-step response.:roll:
They were wrong because they did not accurately predict the results of the election. This is the primary purpose of polls. Its a simple concept.
Actually, that's incorrect.
The primary purpose of a poll aimed at predicting an election is primarily about that.
A poll trying to tell you how a certain segment of the voting population THINKS however is about that.
As has been said a number of times, polling "Likely Voters" gives you a decent bit of insight into that particular blocks preferences but is a poor indicator for results because it doesn't account for those that may show up but are not considered likely.
What I find funny is that there are so many people just dieing to get their own jab into Rasmussen that we need 3 different threads for basically the exact same topic
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