When Should GE Polls be Taken Seriously?
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  When Should GE Polls be Taken Seriously?
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Author Topic: When Should GE Polls be Taken Seriously?  (Read 912 times)
Free Bird
TheHawk
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« on: November 04, 2015, 05:44:32 AM »

They're all over the place. Trump would lose nationally big but win Florida big! Carson would come weirdly close in Connecticut! I understand taking primary polls at this point, but when should GE polls start being taken seriously?
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Why
Unbiased
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« Reply #1 on: November 04, 2015, 06:16:03 AM »

When they are no longer pitting a hypothetical Democratic nominee against a hypothetical Republican nominee in a hypothetical battle which is many months away from starting let alone finishing.
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Fmr President & Senator Polnut
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« Reply #2 on: November 04, 2015, 06:24:51 AM »

No GE polls should be taken seriously a year out.
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Roemerista
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« Reply #3 on: November 04, 2015, 06:25:46 AM »

November 2016.
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Sir Mohamed
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« Reply #4 on: November 04, 2015, 06:49:48 AM »

No, far too early. And national polls are not that important in any way. The swing state polls should be taken seriously after the candidates are nominated.
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Thomas D
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« Reply #5 on: November 04, 2015, 07:26:28 AM »

I'll say June.
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Mr. Morden
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« Reply #6 on: November 04, 2015, 07:33:02 AM »

Hasn't fivethirtyeight or some similar outfit analyzed this very question with real numbers rather than gut feelings at some point?  I mean, we have the historical data, so it shouldn't be that hard to work it out.
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Zanas
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« Reply #7 on: November 04, 2015, 08:06:31 AM »

I'd say in late Summer 2016, August or September.
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Mehmentum
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« Reply #8 on: November 04, 2015, 09:26:01 AM »

GE polls have very little accuracy this far out.  They're just a snapshot of how the country is now, which will necessarily change over the course of a campaign.

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Statilius the Epicurean
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« Reply #9 on: November 04, 2015, 09:27:51 AM »

After the conclusion of both conventions.
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King
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« Reply #10 on: November 04, 2015, 09:44:46 AM »

After the conventions.
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DS0816
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« Reply #11 on: November 04, 2015, 09:46:00 AM »
« Edited: November 04, 2015, 09:48:54 AM by DS0816 »

I think it's a good idea to take a general-election poll, nationwide or from a given state, and post it here after a presidential election so we can have some hearty laughs over how ludicrous that given poll was.

I'm not thinking right now of 2012. But, from 2008, there was one from Rasmussen Reports claiming that, in that Democratic presidential pickup year, losing Republican John McCain was leading Democratic presidential pickup winner Barack Obama by 10 percentage points in Ohio. (George W. Bush, in 2004, won Ohio by 2.10 percentage points as he won the U.S. Popular Vote by 2.46 percentage points.) Whole-number estimates, Rasmussen ended up being approximately 15 percentage points off. Which, in Ohio, was around 800,000 or so votes.

At this point, here in November 2015, the one that I find funniest is Quinnipiac reporting that Ben Carson would win a Republican pickup of Pennsylvania, in 2016, and carry it by 9 percentage points. That it is Carson who would be taking a state, with a Democratic tilt in every presidential election following the 1940s, and telling us that he would carry it by over 500,000 (which would be a 2012 Democratic to 2016 Republican shift of over 800,000) raw votes. That report, though not saying it specifically, indicated that Carson would win a Republican pickup of the U.S. Popular Vote by, say, 13 or 14 percentage points and past 17,000,000 raw votes (a shift, from 2012, of around 22,000,000).



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Ljube
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« Reply #12 on: November 04, 2015, 03:08:23 PM »

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Ebsy
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« Reply #13 on: November 04, 2015, 03:14:38 PM »

Definitely after the conventions.
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Penelope
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« Reply #14 on: November 04, 2015, 04:40:18 PM »

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eric82oslo
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« Reply #15 on: November 04, 2015, 04:50:35 PM »

I would say somewhere between two and three months prior to the general. Within one month before, they have historically been quite reliable. (Though that could obviously change, cause polls are not what they used to be.)
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