beverly_gardnerOct 26, 2024
George Conway
🧵: The fact that “All polling is based on modeling from past elections,” which Stuart accurately notes, is something most people don’t understand.

It’s a necessity of public-opinion research. Because if you call up 100,000 people randomly, you’re going to get a good sample of people who answer their phones—not a good sample of the adult population generally, or the pool of registered voters.

RE: https://www.threads.net/@gtconway3/post/DBl002ux4fo
George Conway (@gtconway3) on Threads

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Oct 26, 2024 at 2:46pmWeb
Show threadGeorge ConwayOct 26, 2024
And you certainly don’t necessarily end up with a sample that adequately represents the people who will actually cast votes—because the identity of those people can’t be known until after they vote. (Also worth noting is that if you randomly dial 100,000 numbers these days, you might only get a few hundred responses—and that doesn’t help, either.)
Show threadGeorge ConwayOct 26, 2024
You can ask people “are you gonna vote”—and you’ll get a lot of people who say they will vote but may not. It’s like asking, are you going to go to the gym today. “Sure I will.” Oops—it’s about to close; maybe next time. You can ask if they voted in the past, but humans are not always consistent.
Show threadGeorge ConwayOct 26, 2024
So pollsters have to take whatever sample they have and weight the responses (by age, gender, party affiliation, race, whatever) to approximate their educated *guess* about the demographics of the people who ultimately cast votes. But those demographics are not knowable until after everyone votes.

Derek Jeter used to say about baseball, “this is why we play the games.” Elections are much the same.
Show threadGeorge ConwayOct 26, 2024
By the way, all of the foregoing explains why polls are really good for two things—message testing and identifying trends—and less so for predicting outcomes in relatively tight races.
Show threadKevin LeecasterOct 26, 2024
@gtconway3
Many of the pollsters are paid to not accurately report their findings too.
Show threadMealfitforakingOct 26, 2024
Also, specifically in Georgia the early vote is comprised of 17% new voters. People that did not vote in '20 either because of age or new resident and a sprinkling of residents who have never voted that have all now already voted. That's nearly half a million people thus far out of 5 million expected votes if it stopped now(there's no evidence it's stopping it's actually growing)it would be 10% of the electorate. Nobody has a model for that, nobody.
Show threadPthjudyOct 27, 2024
@gtconway3 Last week I saw the Broadway musical Suffs about women’s rights. The audience was mainly women. I have never seen such an engaged audience. During intermission a woman turned to us to ask how we liked it. I was with 2 friends but I felt like I was with hundreds. The audience cheers for every accomplishment these women made was loud and heartfelt. Women are as ready to defend their rights as Kamala is ready to lead all of us.