"Support for the Conservatives stands at 41 percent, up three points on a previous poll in mid-July, while Labour is up 1 point at 27 percent. The Liberal Democrats are down two points at 18 percent, pollster Populus said."
i can’t make head nor tail or this. any help?
The points are percentage points. So, support for the Conservatives was 38 per cent in July and is now 41 per cent, etc.
Does it really matter if the person you are voting for is ahead or behind?
Would you not vote for them anyway?
For some reason people crave ratings, numbers and statistics.
Politicians run their entire campaigns based on polls instead of what the party stands for. Sad isn’t it.
As I channel surfed for Star Trek I stumbled upon Fox News. They were running a segment on why all of the polling data is wrong. Why?
Because there’s a good chance they are. I mean how can you poll a couple thousand people in a selected area and think it actually represents the views of 300 million?
Does anyone know or, is it just hit and miss, whoever they call?
GRW, you are so right.
If you are a conservative living in a conservative area don’t hold your breath….I"ve NEVER been polled yet I keep hearing what the American people want from the latest polls…its called selective polling and that is why governing from polls is so dangerous…..
They are putting out very different numbers right now. So which one do people think is the most accurate?
none as conservatives are less likely to talk about what they think (duh, the meaning of the word conservative) and libs have no issues w/ lying ansd saying they’re a conservative.
It shows what messages are doing well with the people, gives a general idea on how the campaign is going, allows candidate to see how certain policies are fairing, tell’s a candidate what states to go for and what to leave, tell’s them what they need to improve…
How are political polls conducted? I’m asking because my current understanding is that they are conducted by groups that call land line phones of potential voters. The reason I’m curious is I can’t think of a single person I know under the age of about 30 who even has a land line, and it seems like poorer voters might not be able to afford land-line telephones. Wouldn’t this be inherently flawed since this group of unreachable voters would more than likely favor democrat candidates? Do pollsters somehow take account for this?
i wish i knew. this will be my seventh presidential election to vote in. i have always maintained a land line. and yet, i have never been polled. who are these people that are polled and how are they "randomly selected"?
What is your political party? Do you respond to pollsters, or if you’ve never talked to one would you if they called you? Personally I hang up the phone, I hate those guys.
You know who else hates those guys?
John Kerry
When statistical techniques are used to calculate confidence intervals for political polls?
Say that p is the true proportion, expressed as a fraction, of those who support political party A. This is what you would like to know but can’t know with certainty until there is a real election.
You ask a number of people whether they support A and suppose m say yes out of n definite replies. (Ignore don’t knows and people who don’t want to tell you.)
If you did the sampling process many times you would get different values of m for the same n value. This variation would be expected to relate to the Binomial distribution which can be approximated by the Normal distribution with large numbers such as >1000 in political sampling.
The mean of the Binomial is np and the standard deviation
sqrt[np(1 - p)]. Of course we don’t know p but m/n is a good estimate of it if the sample was large. This gives a mean of m and standard deviation of sqrt[m(1 - m/n)].
Confidence intervals are expressed as so many standard deviations usually 2. If n = 2400 and m = 960 say this gives you a standard deviation of 24. So 2s.d = 48 or about 2% either way.
Note that you need to 4 times the sample size to halve the confidence interval.
for real…i have my opinions, and if the government basis data from these polls, i would like to have a say in the matter.
or what’s up with that? i write my congressmen, is that seriously all the voice we have in our country?
Normally it is done by telephone.
Like the other answerer, I was called once. I answered all the questions, but had to decline to be contacted for other polls as my wife objected.