Talk Elections

Jindal: 46%
Boasso: 10%
Georges: 9%
Campbell: 6%

Undecided: 29%

The poll of 641 registered voters was conducted Oct. 1 to Oct. 6 by the Southeastern Social Science Research Center at Southeastern in Hammond. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percent.

In 2003, the university released a poll showing Jindal and then Lt. Gov. Kathleen Blanco were neck and neck less than a week before the runoff election. Blanco, a Democrat, won by four percentage points.

http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/politics/10446687.html

sigh, all these polls on the two blowout races, and not 1 on the closest of the 3 :(

If there's been no polls, how do you know that the election in your state is the closest?

Because clearly, the Eaves-mentum is palapable.

Jindal need not worry he's under 50% here.  He's close enough to need only around one out of every eight or nine undecideds.

You must not have been paying attention.  Eaves is totally going to upset Barbour with 125% of the black vote and 50% of the white vote for a total of 175%.

Polls on Louisiana, wishful thinking on Kentucky, and historical voting trends in Mississippi that make it pretty much technically impossible for the race not to be closer than Lousiana will be and he hopes Kentucky will be. It's actually not that unreasonable.

Honestly, how can they truly call this accurate when thats all they poll in a state of millions?  It makes no sense to me

They call it accurate within whatever the Margin of Error is at the 95% confidence rate.  It's mathematically pretty sound.  After a while, it gets to the point of diminishing returns.

Here's a quick primer (http://www.concernedjournalists.org/node/151).  It's all math—basic statistics and probability.

As long as you have a truly random sample, there is a 95 percent proability that the race is within the stated margin of error.

The trick with getting a good poll is getting a truly random sample, and ensuring that every voter has an exactly equal chance of being polled. Obviously it's impossible to get a 100 percent random sample in reality, but firms such as Mason Dixon are obviously coming quite close given how accurate they tend to be.

Take a statistics class.

Yeah, not exactly all 17-year-olds can just run out and take a statistics class solely so they can understand polling, Zach.

High schoolers?  Most high schools have a statistics class.

Some can, yes, but it's not exactly like he can run off and start a statistics class immediately.  :P

It's much easier to just explain the math behind it than tell him that.

As someone who currently makes a living, in part, editing math textbooks, I can assure you that the concepts of "polling" and "probability" are covered the sixth and seventh grades.

(And as someone who actually writes questions for inclusion in math textbooks, I can assure you that sixth grade kids learning math in California this year will be answering a multi-part question about Chris Shays on one of their book's "chapter tests.")

Political indoctrination in our schools!

I never learned about it (in school), but I went to a private school, but we still had standard Math textbooks.

Haha.  It was actually my favorite question that I got to write.  I used a poll that showed Farrell ahead, and had the students show the result as a circle graph.  Then, they had to identify what kind of sampling it was based on the description of who was polled (random).

From there, the actual results were given, and students had to graph that.  They were then asked to give a possible reason why the poll was inaccurate.

If you ask me, real world examples beat the hell out of "Seven students prefer puppies.  Nine prefer kitties.  Show in graph, plz."


It's required learning under No Child Left Behind, so a lot of this may be new.

I can't figure out how you live somewhere large enough high schools offer Statistics, yet small enough B'nai B'rith is unheard of.  Must be a Michigan thing.

Agreed. I have enough of their so called "Real World Examples" with trains, cookies, and NaCl solutions.

Oh, we're not allowed to use cookies, because they might set a bad nutritional example for the children.

I'm serious.  We're seriously not allowed to use cookies, or ice cream, or cake, or french fries.  Technically, we're not even supposed to use pizza to demonstrate fractions.  But there seems to be some kind of laziness exemption that always passes the censors.

The worst of it, though, is that we are not allowed to use the word "dice," "die," or imagery showing a traditional die with pips to teach probability.  Because that promotes gambling.  Even though the reason kids learn probability is because the state and federal standards demand that children learn how to "avoid unfair games of chance."

We can, however, use the term "number cube," with numbers instead of pips.  Cause kids are retards and will never make the connection between the two.

(And now, back to Bobby J.)

And you're not allowed to use red tape as an example, because then the students may realize that hte people who regulate their schoolbooks are really a waste of taxpayer money.

Math schoolbooks, especially my last two ones are utter failures.

Wow. This idiocy must be fairly recent, because that definitely wasn't the case in my math textbooks. Still idiocy.

If the state wanted children to avoid unfair games of chance, they would not have a lottery.

Well, he wound up with more than 50%.

Given that it was 46% with 26% undecided, that was just about a certainty.

True, but I thought he'd get about 61%.

That's rather wishful thinking, given that he was a non-white candidate in Louisiana. :P