NATE SILVER TELLS US SOMETHING WE KNOW: POLLS MANUFACTURE OPINION AND THEIR REPO

NATE SILVER TELLS US SOMETHING WE KNOW: POLLS MANUFACTURE OPINION AND THEIR REPORTING IS HIGHLY BIASED.

—“[We fail to comprehend what Nate is telling us:] the same tools and models that allowed him to do good forecasting can be used for forensic purposes. And forensically, they’re telling him there was systematic bias by the polling firms.”—

What he is really saying is that polling firms are GETTING BETTER at manufacturing opinion and INSERTING MORE BIAS in their results.

What he is going to tell us next, is who biases their polls.

—“The fault, Silver claimed, was with the polling: “It’s becoming increasingly clear that pre-election polls underestimated how well Conservatives would do and overestimated Labour’s result,” the statistician guru wrote in the wee hours of the morning. (He also overestimated the Liberal Democrats’ result by roughly 20 seats).

But the problem went beyond the UK. “The World May Have A Polling Problem,” Silver asserted. “In fact, it’s become harder to find an election in which the polls did all that well.” Silver went on to cite four examples where the polls had failed to provide an accurate forecast of the election outcome: the Scottish independence referendum, the 2014 U.S. midterms, the Israeli legislative elections, and even the 2012 U.S. presidential election, where “Obama beat the final polling averages by about 3 points nationwide.”

“[T]here are lots of reasons to worry about the state of the polling industry,” Silver concluded, citing a range of factors. “There may be more difficult times ahead for the polling industry.”—