Ask A Genius 813: Addendum to 812
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/11/14
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: I mentioned that I thought there was bullshit going on with the polls. You’re not supposed to think that there’s bullshit going on with political polls, you’re supposed to believe that pollsters are trying their best using the best methodologies to get the most accurate picture of what’s going on. Then somebody can ask “Who gives a fuck? Just wait for the election to tell you what’s going on” And then people will say “No, you really want to pay attention to the polls to see which the close races are so you know where to direct your campaign money, your volunteering.” You don’t want to waste a lot of effort on an election that you’re going to lose by five percentage points when you could have put that effort into an election that only had a half percentage point difference that you could have overcome.
But several weeks ago, I and it turns out a shitload of other people decided that this time around the polls were bullshit, that conservative pollsters were flooding the field with more frequent and just a proliferation of conservative leaning polls that said that people were very quickly turning away from the Democrats and towards the Republicans. Other people and I were saying maybe this is a technique to demoralize the Democrats out of voting and so I and a bunch of other people started tweeting the polls are bullshit this time around and just keep voting Democratic and it turns out I and everybody else who decided this were right based on the election returns. There was not this Red Wave building up and the conservative pollsters were just being fuckers.
[Recording End]
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