Friday, May 8, 2015

Biased Pollsters Revealed....Finally

There's a couple of articles out today after the trouncing the Labor party took in Britons general election that should have us all wondering about the integrity of said pollsters. First off Nate Silvers take. Bod added

Nate Silver: Polls are failing us
Nate Silver fared terribly in Thursday's UK election: In his pre-election forecast, he gave 278 seats to Conservatives and 267 to Labour. Shortly after midnight, he was forecasting 272 seats for Conservatives and 271 for Labour. But when the sun rose in London on Friday, Conservatives had an expected 329 seats, against Labour's 233.

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."~snip~
Also at Yahoo:

 Pollsters another casualty of stunning UK election
London (AFP) - The Conservative party's unexpected triumph in Britain's general election delivers a hefty blow not only to the routed Labour party, but also to the pollsters who predicted a dead heat.

Cameron faces nationalist surge and pressure on Europe AFP
Exit poll: Conservatives surprisingly strong in UK election Associated Press
U.K. Election Exit Polls Diverge Dramatically From Forecasts The Wall Street Journal
British election: LIVE REPORT AFP
Cameron's Conservatives win in surprise UK election Associated Press
"The pollsters need to go off and interrogate themselves and poll each other to find who has been telling porkies to whom," concluded Conservative London mayor Boris Johnson.

"It's extraordinary that 11 polls on the eve of the election should get it so wrong."~snip~
You gotta wonder why they got it so wrong,
My take is that polling companies, like a lot of government agencies and the media, have become infested with leftists and social justice warriors who's intent is to influence who gets into office by any means necessary.
Including conducting polls in such a way as to get predetermined results and then present them to the public. Since pollsters work so close with the liberal/commie biased media they have an incentive to keep the media happy cause they pay the bills.
In the mean time we get snookered into believing left-wing fantasies and accused of being on the wrong side of history.
If anything these results should be a wake up call to us about the validity of polls and force us to take the results of any poll with at least a grain of salt.

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