Congressional staff say the mood inside the Capitol is tense, stifling and bewildering as members brush off their constituents’ outrage.

    • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      The New York Times/Siena College polls of 3,662 registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were conducted in English and Spanish on cellular and landline telephones from Oct. 22 to Nov. 3, 2023. When all states are joined together, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.8 percentage points for all registered voters and plus or minus 2 percentage points for the likely electorate.

      It wasn’t just landlines because they know that’s bad polling.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        How many younger people answer unknown calls on their phone? I’m 46 and I don’t do that. And if I got a voicemail saying they wanted me to take a poll and to call them back, I would assume it was a scam.

        • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Well, you don’t have to guess because that’s part of the statistics as well. 40% of the people polled were 44 and under. Also, they weighted the poll to help account for age. It’s not like professional pollsters and statisticians don’t know how to account for these sorts of things.

          https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/07/us/elections/times-siena-battlegrounds-registered-voters.html

          I know it’s scary that if the election were held today, Trump would have a very real chance at winning, but that’s the reality we live in. And right now, it is because Biden is such a weak candidate. A lot can change in 1 year. I hope that when it comes down to it, people will do the right thing and not vote for the insurrectionist. However, we have no reason to believe they will.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            40% of the people polled were 44 and under.

            That doesn’t mean it represents what those people think, it means that they chose a group out of the 40% of people under that age who would answer their phones when an unknown caller calls them to poll them.

            Maybe the poll is accurate, but I am very dubious of any telephone poll’s accuracy at this point because so many people simply will not respond to an unknown caller.

            Focus group polling might be more accurate because you can pick the demographics ahead of time, but I don’t know.

            • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              Be skeptical, that’s okay. Polling is never exact. It is good at giving you trends, and right now, the trends are not good. As someone from Wisconsin, I’ve seen firsthand that running a weak candidate and assuming they will do well can cost you the election. Ron Johnson has literally spent a July 4th in Moscow, he had fake electorates in hands ready to over turn the election. Mandela Barnes initially polled well against him, but his numbers degraded because he ran such a weak campaign. Barnes lost that election, yet we voted for the democratic governor. Barnes was such a weak candidate that enough people voted a split ticket to re-elect Johnson.

              The point of the story is don’t just stick your head in the sand and make up excuses about polls.

              Edit: Also 40% is 1465, which is a good sample size.

              • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                Oh no, I wouldn’t do that regardless of the polls. I have no intention of listening to polls when it comes to stopping Trump from getting in whether they’re good news, bad news, believable or unbelievable.

                I just find this particular poll and similar polls to be dubious for the reason I said. But I am also not a statistician.