YouGov polls 27 states

[Hash]

Maybe Sarah Palin could ask for a poll in Alaska just like she did around the same time four years ago (just to make sure that 80%+ still approved of her).

[Niemeyerite]

I've just been to their website and it looks they only polled these 27 states this time.

Not all 50 ...

I believe only AK, DE, ID and WY have not been polled for the presidential election. RI hasn't been polled since Feb 2011. Every other state has had at least one poll in the past year.

What about Arkansas, Lousiana and Mississippi? I don't recall having seen polls in those states.

[Tender Branson]

I've just been to their website and it looks they only polled these 27 states this time.

Not all 50 ...

I believe only AK, DE, ID and WY have not been polled for the presidential election. RI hasn't been polled since Feb 2011. Every other state has had at least one poll in the past year.

What about Arkansas, Lousiana and Mississippi? I don't recall having seen polls in those states.

There have been some, but they are 6 months to 1 year old.

[minionofmidas]

Has anyone considered that perhaps, given that we have 50 polls quoting 95% confidence intervals, and that we consequently expect 2-3 outliers, the TN results might be one of them, or are we having too much fun making prejudiced statements about likely voters in the state?

The "confidence interval" is a random cutoff point low down on a bell curve, originally agreed on for scientific experiments for which a bell distribution of probabilities is a certainty. In such a bell distribution, a spot just within the "margin of error" is not perceptively more likely than a spot just outside it, both are infinitely more likely than a complete, how-the-hell-did-they-come-up-with-that outlier, and both are infinitely less likely than a result very near the true result.

Also, these are political "polls" taking unscientific subsamples of an actual, non-laboratory population, then unscientifically reweighted to at least somewhat match the pollster's notion of what a scientific subsample of the population, were one available, would look like. They are not scientific experiments.
And we're comparing polls taken now with election results in six weeks, anyhow - you can never know how much of the error is due to voters changing their minds or lying and how much is due to your bad polling.
Hence why pollsters' results don't actually match up with a Bell Curve distribution, and hence why, while it's a good shorthand remainder of the fact that even the best pollsters get it wrong sometimes, MoE lingo should not be taken literally.


Meh. I just need to get that off my chest once or twice every election season. Nothing personal. Anyways, as Ernest pointed out, the few GE polls we've had of the state so far, old as they are, mostly agree with this poll.

[Andrew1]

I've just been to their website and it looks they only polled these 27 states this time.

Not all 50 ...

I believe only AK, DE, ID and WY have not been polled for the presidential election. RI hasn't been polled since Feb 2011. Every other state has had at least one poll in the past year.

What about Arkansas, Lousiana and Mississippi? I don't recall having seen polls in those states.

LA polled by Clarus, Oct 2011, MS polled by PPP, Nov 2011, AR polled by Hendrix college, March 2012, all showed not much change from 2008.

[classical liberal]

I would rather see a poll of SC, which I doubt anyone really considers to be a tossup, than a further poll of states that look right based on the averages of polls already in the DB.

[big bad fab]

Game over for Mitt, eh ?

Well, it was a bad electoral year: boring in France, boring in the US
Boring in Mexico too.
The Netherlands was funny but it wasn't so big.

Are you serious about supporting Romney? Not even Sarko or a majority of FN voters would.

I just want elections to be suspenseful and interesting.
Had I been Amercian, I would have voted for Obama, probably both in 2008 and 2012.
But, like in survivors, please make a difference between ideas and historical and political interest
I'm a fan of Beria, you know

[Niemeyerite]

Game over for Mitt, eh ?

Well, it was a bad electoral year: boring in France, boring in the US
Boring in Mexico too.
The Netherlands was funny but it wasn't so big.

Are you serious about supporting Romney? Not even Sarko or a majority of FN voters would.

I just want elections to be suspenseful and interesting.
Had I been Amercian, I would have voted for Obama, probably both in 2008 and 2012.
But, like in survivors, please make a difference between ideas and historical and political interest
I'm a fan of Beria, you know

hahaha, OK, allright. I think I'm able to make that difference.

[PulaskiSkywayDriver]

These seem spot on as to what we are seeing nationally right now.