CN Ó Raghallaigh
Sheril Kirshenbaum
Saroj Gautam@Sheril Did opinion poll predictions work in the previous election?
@saroj Depends which polls we consider.
Annie (Brightstar) Kenyon 🏳️🌈@Sheril To be a little more fair to pollsters, I think people just expect too much from them. If the chance of drawing a ♣️,♠️, or ♥️ from a randomized deck is 75%, I shouldn't call that probability unreliable if I draw a ♦️.
A better way to put it might be, polls are just probabilities. You can still win the game if you play hard enough!
SporkfighterStats may tell you who *should* win the football game, but we still play the game to see who wins. Polls and elections are no different.
k cavaliere@Sheril Unless you know the method and sample a poll can be made to prove anything.
Vote!
Paolo Vicini 🗳
Dave Wakeman@Sheril when I’ve stepped into this at all. That’s the point I’ve been trying to make. At this point attempting to get a representative sample in a reasonable time frame to make a poll is almost a fool’s errand. Not impossible but I’d say unlikely.
Katylou@Sheril excactly!
Carl Johnson@Sheril Didn't understand people who paid attention to polls when I was in politics, don't understand them now. Especially now! There are no random samples anymore. America's need to treat everything like sports and guess the outcome ahead of time....
Mishie
Gert V 🇵🇸Probability indeed, perhaps polls can be useful as an instrument of measuring if-- or how rigged the elections were. But of course we'll only know this after the event.
Simply Kat@Sheril exactly!
Infrequent voters and non-voters, if you don't vote, you don't matter to those who end up in office.
BGCajun@Sheril I totally agree. They haven’t yet figured out how to poll effectively via smartphones which is where most under 40 spend much of their time. Plus, if I see a number I’m unfamiliar with, I won’t respond.
Dave Brockman 🇬🇧🇺🇦💕
Barry Schwartz 
@Sheril Aside from internal polling, polling has very little actual utility.
It is for people to go to a fortune teller but pretend they aren’t doing that.
Nate Silver BTW thinks he has a System™ that can pick winners even if the horses are doped and the jockeys are cheaters. He recently said so (on Twitter), just in different words.