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Cheez Whiz's avatar

Yours is a much more nuanced and thoughful version of my dumb take of "I believe polls are accurate, but I do not believe they understand what they are measuring". And the Deciders poll is a really good example of that. Using the hammer of a poll to force the square peg of the uneducated and disconnected voter into the round hole of "pick one" has to end up with a lot of noise in the sample. Some of these people's opinions are nothing but noise, since they have no understanding of what they are being offered. Anyone who sees RFK III as a reasonable choice to accomplish anything has no idea of what they are doing. Attempting to quantify this group using the existing polling tools is going to be pointless at best, and more likely misleading, since they will have numbers and stuff to point to as "scientific".

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gromet's avatar

I'm glad to read this analysis, because this morning these polls filled me with dread. You have interpreted their results better than the Post did -- my takeaway then was the hands-thrown-up cry of Who ARE these people? Which I have been doing a lot of, the past seven years, but it was particularly emphatic today.

I am still undecided as to whether to watch tonight's debate. Or at least pretending to be undecided. I know I will watch so that I am grounded against every shocking interpretation of it for the next five months. (Let me guess, Biden looked too old to win? Trump did better than expected? Clearly then we have a real horse race.)

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