Exit polls aren't what you think they are(nuttersandnuttier.com) |
Exit polls aren't what you think they are(nuttersandnuttier.com) |
It would sound like Simpson's paradox if one candidate won a higher percentage of the vote in both East and West springfield, yet lost the election. But this is of course impossible.
Simpson's paradox arises when you compare two different percentages, say belonging to Candidate A and B, across two different treatments, say East and West Springfield, but you don't compare the sample sizes. It doesn't apply here because everyone who votes is assumed to vote for either A or B.
An example of Simpson's paradox would be like this. We look at the percentage of their own party that a candidate wins. Then it could be that Candidate A wins 90% of the Democrats in East Springfield while B wins only 80% of the Republicans; and in West Springfield, A wins 60% of the Democrats while B wins 50% of the Republicans. Yet, due to differences in population between East and West, A overall only wins 65% of the Democrats while B wins 75% of the Republicans.
The article talks about "weighting" the results, which is exactly figuring out the conversion from "democrats in West" to a common unit, "single person", to allow proper arithmetic operations on them.
And don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
I know I wasn't good with my statistics classes (I managed low to mid "A"s, but I never really understood the steps I was reproducing, or the why behind the process), but how do you correct for that type of uncertainty?
Is there a good, basic statistics reference that HN would recommend? We used Devore's "Probability and Statistics for Engineering and the Sciences", and it didn't "click" with me. I'd love to find a good textbook on the subject.
Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to use the 2012 dem primary as a basis instead?
> And if you hear anyone say the exit polls are a sign of a rigged election, please do tell them that I told you to tell them that I said to say that they’re not very knowledgeable about the subject.
Yeah, it's too bad. Now that I know this info about exit poll results it would be nice if they could qualify the numbers a little when reporting them.
In New York State in 2008, Clinton beat Obama with support coming from both urban and rural areas (with Clinton perhaps doing better in rural areas than Obama):
http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=2008&fips=...
It's also not necessarily the case that the turnout for past elections will be a sound guide to the turnout for the next election. A lot of people vote as a result of affinity for a particular candidate or because of a motivating issue.
Not if you're interested in cases where unaffiliated voters went DEM in the general election, or if GOP-registered voters crossed over. Certainly those are interesting cases.
But after the election, we know exactly who voted, so it seems we could use exit polls at that point to sanity-check the results. Given a paper trail, a significant discrepancy could trigger a recount.
We do, don't be so condescending and expletive. The popular press just wants some cheap sound bites to get more views / clicks. They do the same with academic research, in which they mistake economic significance for statistical significance, ignore any shortcomings, ignore non-rejected hypotheses, and project the findings outside of the (often very limited) scope.