One of the “fun” things about presidential elections is that every four years there’s a new dumb thing about the process for political junkies to yell at each other about despite the disinterest or genuine disgust of normals, and this year it’s polling! Did Nate Silver’s devil-math suck all the fun out of democracy, forever? Were the polls skewed because they didn’t reflect Republican understanding of reality? Were Gallup and Rasmussen “in the tank” for Republicans? Well, Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport has decided to weigh in on this controversy, and would like you to know that (a) Gallup was not wrong, because it abruptly stopped picking Romney to win by 7 points several days before the election, and (b) Nate Silver is a parasitic remora clinging to the great white shark that is Gallup and if everyone gets into the Nate Silver business the whole polling industry will collapse, and then we’ll have no polling at all, and then we’ll be sorry!
We feel vaguely bad for Frank Newport, truly, because he represents a stolid and storied organization and he’s probably institutionally unable to give vent to his full-on snarky rage against his critics, as he’d like. Instead, he had to jam a bunch of passive aggression into a very serious blog post about how successful Gallup’s polling was this year! First, he’d like you to remember that Gallup does not attempt to “predict” the election, like a common soothsayer. (Yes, he put “predict” in quotes.) But he’d also like to point out that, damn it, their final numbers were within the margin of error of being correct, and if they happened to have Romney a couple points ahead of Obama instead of vice-versa, well, those are the breaks, you know?
You might point out that Gallup actually had Romney ahead way outside the margin of error going into the final week of the campaign, then rather abruptly changed to be more in line with every other reputable polling company. This may have looked like herding, where pollsters start adjusting their methods because they’re afraid they’re wildly wrong, but Frank Newport would like to make it clear that this was not the case and Obama’s numbers just suddenly shifted for the better at the last minute. Was it because of Superstorm Sandy? Hard to say, but the change came after the storm, so yes, almost certainly.
But then he really lets you know what he thinks of math and numbers nerds like Nate Silver, who dare to sift through multiple publicly available yet contradictory sources of information to make sense of them:
But some of this will result from a variant of the venerable “law of the commons.” Individual farmers can each make a perfectly rational decision to graze their cows on the town commons. But all of these rational decisions together mean that the commons became overgrazed and, in the end, there is no grass left for any cow to graze. Many individual rational decisions can end up in a collective mess.
We have a reverse law of the commons with polls. It’s not easy nor cheap to conduct traditional random sample polls. It’s much easier, cheaper, and mostly less risky to focus on aggregating and analyzing others’ polls. Organizations that traditionally go to the expense and effort to conduct individual polls could, in theory, decide to put their efforts into aggregation and statistical analyses of other people’s polls in the next election cycle and cut out their own polling. If many organizations make this seemingly rational decision, we could quickly be in a situation in which there are fewer and fewer polls left to aggregate and put into statistical models. Many individual rational decisions could result in a loss for the collective interest of those interested in public opinion.
This will develop into a significant issue for the industry going forward.
Shorter version: If you people insist on thinking Nate Silver is so great, everyone in the polling business will stop doing expensive polling and just start analyzing other people’s polls instead and then where will you be, huh? Where will reporters get their numbers for their “horse race” stories during presidential campaigns? They might have to write about the issues or something! The horror! This is basically the argument real news organizations have been making for years about how blogs like Wonkette don’t do any expensive reporting but instead just make dick jokes about other people’s news stories and steal their pageviews, and journalism has collapsed over the past eight years, so maybe there’s something to it.
Meanwhile, Dick Morris went on Sean Hannity’s show and pretty much came out and said that his crazy Romney landslide predictions were for Republican morale purposes, despite his assertions at the time that they were all about secret poll information that only he could see.
Sean, I hope people aren’t mad at me about it … I spoke about what I believed and I think that there was a period of time when the Romney campaign was falling apart, people were not optimistic, nobody thought there was a chance of victory and I felt that it was my duty at that point to go out and say what I said. And at the time that I said it, I believe I was right.
Don’t worry, Dick, people won’t be mad at you for lying to them to their face! You will still get paid gigs on conservative media forever and ever, and will have a venue to spout your bullshit numbers when Nate Silver has put well-meaning but incompetent shops like Gallup out of business. [Gallup/HuffPo]
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Mitt won, so go Gallup off the fiscal cliff. Oh. Wait.
Would they be griping this much if Dick "Landslide" Morris had been correct instead?
When you say "if" do you mean it like "if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle"? Just asking…
Ann Coulter is your aunt?
"She" was my uncle Andrew before the Addadictomi operation.
Nate was able to dissect Gallup and Rasmussen and explain, in detail, why the polls were statistically biased and historically inaccurate. They should be thanking him, not the other way around.
Poor kid still can't catch a break…for accurately predicting the outcome of the election no less!
They should be thanking him, not the other way around.
That would require admitting they were… oh noooes…. wrong.
But if the general populace (not wonkie types) ever realizes that Gallup and Rasmussen are generally full of shit, the GOP and media establishment will stop bankrolling their polls (especially the issue polling that pays the bills in the off years). Silver pointed out Gallup's historical problems months ago, and Ras got exposed as a joke in 2008, but as long as they have some level of trust in the public eye, the way it is right now is much better for them – they get to be GOP hacks, paid handsomely to do so, without actually having to worry about pesky little things like accuracy.
I thought Republicans are suppose to be good at math.What's next are you going to tell me Asians are good drivers?
Say, you know who else disputed electoral polling results… ?
Not-Al Gore?
No kidding.
Leon "It's not me babe" Trotsky on his Mexico tour?
He lost to the Ice Axe party.
Ya end up in the one house in all of Mexico that has an ice axe in the garage…
LIPA?
Oh, wait, you didn't say "electrical pole"….
Fuck those fucks.
Kanye?
Mitt "Unskew the Polls!" Romney? (I am still coming to grips with the fact that he actually believed that nonsense)
Programmers have an old saying "GIGO."
Of course, in Mitt's case, it was "GIG,GOG"¹
¹ Garbage Into Garbage, Garbage Out of Garbage
That is starting to look a lot like "Giggity, giggity!" Quaqmire approves.
Allen West?
Deibold Elections Systems?
Joe Walsh?
Has anyone thanked Dean Chambers at unskewedpolls.com yet?
"we’ll have no polling at all, and then we’ll be sorry!"
Objection! Assumes facts not in evidence.
So does this mean that deer isn't dead after all?
Calling land lines during the day is probably not as efficient as, you know, math.
Or, say, divining chicken bones in a bowl of goat's blood.
Or reading palms.
Jesus, Gallup, take a Midol.
and find a cuddle buddy
Overgrazing Ann Coulter's wicked snatch is more like it.
Mind disinfectant, stat.
Ewww — my eyes! Words seen can't be unseen. *bleaches retinas*
Hah, you said "Republican understanding of reality" in the opener. I'll wipe up the spittle now.
Shorter version of Gallup's lame-osity:
Garbage In, Garbage Out.
(GIGO, as every CompSci 101 student knows)
Really, could Dick Morris be named anything else?
Dick Joke?
Dick Mit-ohren.
Rich? All those Fox News appearances add up, you know.
Trying to come up with a reply to freakishlywrong about Mister Morris is …
Suppurating Pustule?
'Sup, Sup?
Douche Bag?
Dick SuckMor(ris)Toes?
Dick Head?
"for Republican morale purposes"
So. How'd that work out?
Very well, from my perspective.
I'm getting pretty good mileage with it, akshuly.
They've gone from blatant to whiney in a week, so that's good.
What does some company in New Mexico know about the rest of the nation, anyway?
SANDIA NASHNUL LABZ LIBUL !!!1!!!
I feel like I should say something profound about those who fail to understand the past will never get the future, but fuck it, buttsechs jokes are way funnier.
BUTTSECHS!!
* Just trying to lift morale
YA-
Oh.
We're going to need a bigger crane.
Doobie Bros (What a Fool Beiieves)
He came from somewhere back in her long ago
The foot licking hooker loving fool don't see
Tryin' hard to recreate
What had yet to be created once in the maths
Sean musters a smile
For his idiotic tale
Never coming near what reality was
Too stupid to realize
It never really was
Faux was a place in his life
He never made them think twice (or once)
As he spits to make an apology
Anybody else would surely know
He's a lying piece of shit
But what a fool believes he sees
No wise man has the power to reason away
What seems to him
Is always better than nothing
And nothing at all keeps sending him.
Awesome Manchu, (and fucking thanks for the ear worm).
Shorter Gallup: See, we make Silver look good!
We are relevant!
Did I miss the dick joke?
Only if you didn't watch him on Hannity.
"campaign was falling apart, people were not optimistic, nobody thought there was a chance of victory"
"I believe I was right. "
Given all those indicators you listed, I don't see anything wrong with the conclusions you drew. Dick.
So….they're saying that they're the Commons and Nate Silver is one of many cows who graze freely off them without contributing to the cost of polling?
But doesn't quoting and linking to them serve as advertising? Do they pay him?
Right. You wouldn't want to take the more responsible and reality based position that, hey, this guy was analyzing our data and came up with a different and more correct picture so should we be learning something?
That would involve shorter lunch hours for the executives.
"…so should we be learning something"
That, too, would involve math, so, no.
Is our analysts learning?
We have a reverse law of the commons with polls.
So you let your cows starve. Gotcha.
Bad analogy is bad.
Bad analogy is bad… But it still manages, while utterly failing to illuminate the matter at hand, to side with the evil, self-interested rich folks who closed the commons to the smaller gentry and poorz in order to preserve timber prices, grain prices, and fox-hunting. Win!
"We may be increasingly irrelevant, but we will always side with the powerful and the corrupt. Never fear.
So keep paying our invoices! Pleeeeezee!"
So Rush and Toesucker are now on record as lying to their listeners. Any thoughts as to how this will negatively impact their business model?
I thought it was their business model.
That's a feature, not a bug.
Meanwhile, Dick Morris went on Sean Hannity’s show and pretty much came out and said that his crazy Romney landslide predictions were for Republican morale purposes
If I was a conservative¹, I'd be pretty pissed
¹This would involve more drinking than I can even imagine, or severe brain trauma.
Plus the whole splitting of your soul into Horcruxes thing. Ick.
"Don’t worry, Dick, people won’t be mad at you for lying to them to their face! You will still get paid gigs on conservative media forever and ever, "
Being a regular on Fox News is like being a writer for The Enquirer. It pays well, keeps you busy, but means that you won't really get much worse elsewhere in the industry. Morris peaked years ago but hangs on, fighting to keep his face on TV.
Similarly Benito Mussolini personal pollster felt IL-Duce lost popularity by hanging from a lamp post.
Was he, eh, well hung?
Don’t worry, Dick, people won’t be mad at you for lying to them to their face!
They will be mad at your for being Dick Morris.
I blame Obama.
I am gonna say it (maybe someone else already has; I haven't read the comments yet) but pollsters are scum. It is all just bullshit. No one I know has ever taken the time to answer them honestly or bothered at all. I just hang up.
It's so cute when boring people fight.
He simply does not care for Nate Silver's gay math.
BTW WTF is a parasitic remora? Is that something I was supposed to read a sentence or two about back in some 9th grade biology textbook (and still remember to this day, for this very moment)?
Some might say that "parasitic remora" is an example of redundancy, like "asshole in a pickup truck".
Little fish that has a sucker on its head, attaches itself to sharks, mentioned in the Jimmy Buffet song "Fins"
"But now she feels like a remora
'cause the school's still close at hand
Just behind the reef are the big white teeth
Of the sharks that can swim on the land"
Remoras are not parasites, tho. They are commensalists. A parasite works to the detriment of the host, but remoras do not affect their hosts much.
Just ridin' that gravy train.
That's what I aim for each day at work.
I hear Newport on Marketplace all the time and he says the same thing over and over and over: Americans care about "the economy, jobs, the deficit, fixing government, and healthcare"
You really need to call people to figure that out?
Shorter Gallup: Waaaaahhh! We don't know what we're doing and Silver showed us up! We hates him forever we does!"
I read it as "Nate Silver is threatening our poorly-performed jobs!"
Newport is obviously assuming that no one is going to come along and bankroll a bigger, more ambitious operation for Silver.
Newport hopes.
Gallup gets it right when it doesn't matter to their management. When it does matter to their management, they try to pull the numbers in their desired direction. Here's why:
"Born in Evanston, Illinois, Gallup received a bachelor's degree in religion from Princeton University in 1953. In 1954, Gallup joined his father's polling company, The Gallup Organization, where he worked until his retirement in 2004."
Junior very badly wanted a Christian America and would do anything to make that happen, including lie about how many believers there really are.
The national poll last Tuesday may make him stop and think, then.
Well, it'll make him stop. He died last year.
Alec and Robyn were always nicer anyway (they all lived near me).
Shorter Dick Morris: "It's not a lie, if you believe it's true."
Fairy tales can come true
It can happen to you
If you're a toe-sucking runt
"The truth is whatever people will believe." ~ Roger Ailes (No kidding…)
Repeat it enough times and it becomes true. ie, lead up to Iraq war.
The truth is every Poll aggregator would have been even more accurate if the Gallop and Rasmussen “field” was left un-grazed.
Whats this about polling? Is this another Slutvember story? Has Petraus been polling someone else? Who else has been polling Petraus' Slut? Has anyone of flag rank NOT been polling Jill Kelley? Only Nate Silver can make sense of all this Slutvember polling thats been going on.
Oh for fuck's sake. There's apparently not enough Boudreaux's Butt Paste in this fucking hemisphere to cure these assholes' butthurt, is there?
Believe they'll be needing a little Bag Balm as well.
Those picture are the happiest I've ever seen John McCain.
Shorter Frank Newport:
But you can't hold all pollsters responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole system of polling? And if the whole polling system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Nate Silver – isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America
Incidentally, I've felt vaguely bad for Nate Silver for basically the same reason since he's joined the New York Times, with the added fact that he's not a terrible person representing an organization that's spent the last several years degrading its own reputation. (That was only in the Bush years!)
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and Dick Morris.
The lack of Gallup polls is probably the only reason Silver didn't do so amazingly well "predicting" Britain's parliamentary elections in 2010…
Here's a fun fact: this is identical to the argument that blogs are killing the news industry and that the Internet, at large, is killing culture, overall. If if any media history nerds are interested, you can almost certainly find similar arguments proffered back in the day, for VHS and Audio Casettes, Television, Radio, and the Printing Press.
BUT VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR!
Gallup: The Eminem of presidential polling
Or Milli Vanilli.
The GOP has been Pole-ing the American people for years.
OT, but here is the happiest news EVER! Florida man upset over election results KILLS HIS OWN FUCKING SELF! http://gawker.com/5960453/florida-man-angry-over-…
More, please, more more more!
Dude's gay? (Duh, it's Key West). Must be one of them Log Beach Cabana Republicans.
Best comment: Karl Rove says it's too early to call the guy dead.
Sounds like Frank Newport, like the rest of us, has a huge man-crush on Nate's frontal lobe (which I think we all know is abnormally large and girthy).
When did politics go from "We Like Ike" to "We Hate Nate"?
Within 24 hours of Nate first putting Obama in the lead.
Nothing like a party standing on the confidence of a Dick.
The Tragedy of the Morons
Now don't go making an issue of Mitt's religion. It's not right to… wait, what?
This Dick can make it all up to the Republican faithful by selflessly contributing his time to a bogus charity.
He could become an unpaid social liason
I'm pretty sure that's his what is Romney campaign "duty" is.
You know, appearing as an "analyst" without disclosing a conflict of interest, and making up numbers out of whole cloth in order to "do your duty" and support a political candidate's bid, is the sort of thing that would almost certainly be a MAJOR JOURNALISM SCANDAL at any actual news outlet. Remember when that guy for the New York Times made stuff up, and it was ONLY because he was just really lazy?
Hispanic buddy of mine got a tattoo on his back of the Zia sun symbol from the state flag. Says he's a new Mexican.
I see. So the options are: polling or aggregating, but not both.
Well, he is from Gallup, so the conclusion must be true.
I want to see other pollsters polled on this question. And Silver should parse the results.
Somebody needs to explain the first rule of politics now is, "Don't insult Nate Silver."
What's so great about this "argument" is that Nate Silver would be the first one to say, "Yes! Totally true!" If there are no polls, he can't do his aggregation model. No polls, no Nate. Of course, it's true only in that it is a tautology and doesn't get into the actual issue, but, eh, whatever.
So Nate Silver is the Ariana Huffington of the polling industry? I can hardly wait for him to start bussing us to rallies in DC!
"[T]he Romney campaign was falling apart, people were not optimistic, nobody thought there was a chance of victory and I felt that it was my duty at that point to go out and say what I said."
Not hard to see where he thought his "duty"
laylied.Then again, without Nate Silver, Gallup would't've known how wildly skewed their newly-unskewed polling was and gone back to their previously correct model before the election, would they? And now Mr. Newport would be defending his completely wrong model and its errant predictions instead of defending his swing to rationality at the last minute.
Totally cannot fathom how Nate Silver become the focus of so much venom. If you don't like what he does, then ignore him. All this pointing out how evil he is just reinforces the fact that everyone else vilifying him got it wrong. Maybe just let it die now.
"… I felt that it was my duty at that point to go out and say what I said…"
Spelled "doody" wrong.
so Dick admits to lying ( he can prettify that however he wants but he lied ), thus if FOX has him on ever again they prove once and for all that they are ok with liars as long as they tell the correct lies. Did'nt a sitting US senator write a whole book about this?
Honestly, it was probably going to be a while before Dick Morris was on again, anyway; with the election season over, Morris has to get back to his regular job, guarding a labyrinth along with a guy who only says things which are true.
Should be a h/t to Defeatably_Joe for posting the Morris non-apology on Wonkville.
What Gallup recognizes, to their dismay, is that Nate Silver not only picked the winners and losers in the political horserace, but also those of the polling horserace. Having the ability to compare the success and failure of polling firms over the entire pre-election period and over multiple elections will only strengthen polling. Gallups this ruins everything argument flies in the face of the fact that quality meta-metrics force the underlying providers to improve their methods and models.
This is, by the way, different from the news agency versus blogger metaphor in that news agencies are not just supplying raw facts and numbers that can be analyzed. Their business model is to sell to consumers, and if bloggers draw from them, then their business may collapse. Polling firms sell to news agencies, political parties, businesses, etc… and will continue to have that market no matter how the meta-analysis goes. They will always have a few days lead over Nate Silver who must wait and aggregate. And in politics, a few days is forever.
It's better known as the "tragedy of the commons", but I still don't get the analogy when your cows are basically shitting on everybody else's food, Mr. Gallup-poll-person.
Excuse 1: Obama tortured citizens into voting: "These methods may in the end affect voters who were not certain about voting at the time of a poll interview, but who were brought into the voting pool at the last minute by aggressive get-out-the-vote and late registration methods. "
Excuse No. 2: (Debunked by Reuters/IPSOS numbers, Nate) – It's Sandy's fault. "He (Romney) held onto at least a marginal lead position in our polling until the week before the election, when Superstorm Sandy hit. Obama gained five points on the gap between our last pre-storm polling and the final poll. It may be that he continued to gain on into Election Day. "
Do these polls have any importance beyond giving TV talking heads something to talk about? Are voters so clueless that they vote based on the polls, so they can say they voted for the winner? Not even the tea partiers are that dumb.
Several polling companies had very accurate polling data that predicted the outcome of the election. Gallup did not. Yet Gallup is threatening to deprive us of polling because of Nate Silver? They must be socialists. We must buy their product even if it sucks.
If all polls ceased to exist today, I suspect my life would be happier for it. So please, be my guest. Stop polling.
Hardly the first time Gallup's been way off the mark: when Puggies talk about "the polls" showing Carter leading Reagan (and losing from one bad debate), "the polls" was actually "Gallup". Every other poll showed Carter losing as early as May.
But you know, it made for a nice nighty night bedtime story for them to warm themselves by…
I've seen Nate on several appearances. He is a really likable kid, unlike most polling "experts" on the tee vee machine. I hope he has a great future.
What I took away from his blog post: please do NOT graze your cows during the election.
So Gallup is threatening to go Galt?
OK, so I got out of the boat, went ashore to unskewed polls website looking for some tasty schadenfreude. And what did I find as a headline?
"We're riding that 'Long Black Train' to economic oblivion"
Not kidding, not even a little. These people are messed up.
This "hate Nate" shit is amazing. The day after the election, some yoyo on Slate or Salon or something (I'm not gonna bother to re-find it) wrote a quite long piece, the gist of which was "Nate Silver is not a genius. It's the polling companies that do all the work, and they're pretty much right anyhow". (It was much longer than that.) Now this Gallup guy.
They completely ignore what it is that Nate actually does. The body of work that underlies his his forecasts is this: He has detected evidence of statistical bias in the the published results of various polling organizations, and he has invested a lot of work in quantifying these biases, based on historical data. This is the secret sauce in his models. His model makes adjustments and/or assigns weights to the published polling results, in an attempt to create a less-biased composite result for each election.
It's worth remarking that "statistical bias" is a mathematical concept. Nate does not presume that any polling organization intentionally skews its results right or left. The numbers speak for themselves — if bias exists, it exists, and it can be measured (historically) and corrected for.
If Gallup, or any other pollster, wanted to put Nate Silver out of the elections business, all they would have to do is analyze their own results for statistical bias, and then take steps to either eliminate the source of bias or correct for it. In the short run, this would screw Nate up, because he'd be applying history-based corrections that were no longer appropriate. In the long run, it would remove his added value, because anybody can meta-average unbiased polls to get an unbiased composite.
Based on Gallup-guy's remarks, it doesn't look like they're going to be trying introspection any time soon, so Nate's business model seems secure.
Felt that it was my duty to make up stuff, like sure.
good point frank. no one in the history of ever has ever used 'information' to do 'analyses' and 'draw conclusions' and 'make predictions'.
man can you IMAGINE how bad THAT would be? why, such laxity might even produce, i don't know, a class of political pundits.
that would suck.
also frank, no one understands 'commons' and 'cows' anymore.
you should talk about, say, military men sharing women from florida.
ff:
I"m beginning to get the idea they are more common than the Kardashians.
First of all, Gallup was off by quite a bit. They suspended polling for about a week and took that opportunity to get back on track. By Nov. 6th they were quite close.
Second, Nate Silver is no Sludge. He doesn't just aggregate. He has a very complicated model that runs endless (well, not quite – just some 25,000 per day!) iterations of what the data really mean. All the polls are just the first step in his analysis.
What about Real Clear Politics? They just post the polls and average them. TMC? I thought they were smoking some pretty good shit, but they came pretty close. Yahoo News averaged the various groups like Intrade.
As others have pointed out, why do they dog Nate Silver? Because he is so good?
math is hard. bullshitting not so hard
I pretend to work. They pretend to pay me.
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