How One 19-Year-Old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages

Nate Silver at 538 talks about the whole dissecting polls deal, or &quot;unskewing&quot; them. All polls must make methodological choices, and all of those choices have advantages and disadvantages. Spending a lot of time trying to dissect those choices and passing judgment on them is not as productive as:<p>1. Looking at aggregates of lots of polls.<p>2. Looking at the variance that a poll captures from one iteration of it to another.<p>Or at least, so he claims. Obviously, he runs a poll aggregator, using a model that heavily weights the trendline of individual polls, so he has a dog in this fight.

One thing I noted is that NY Times says that most polls have four categories of age and five categories of education; except these aren&#x27;t categories, they are ordinal variables.<p>Age and level of education are slightly co-variant (you don&#x27;t get many 18 year olds who have a PhD). Because the age classification and education levels are ordinal you should use an ordinal smoothing [0] function to turn them into pseudo continuous variables. Given the continuous and co-variant independent variables (as well as other categorical independent variables) and a categorical dependent variable the best analysis is probably to use a quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de&#x2F;2100&#x2F;1&#x2F;tr015.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de&#x2F;2100&#x2F;1&#x2F;tr015.pdf</a> and <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cran.r-project.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;packages&#x2F;ordPens&#x2F;ordPens.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cran.r-project.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;packages&#x2F;ordPens&#x2F;ordPens.pdf</a>

Side rant: what the heck did they implement on NYtimes.com ?! When I quickly click the text (which I compulsively do to select a paragraph etc.), it <i>changes the font size</i> (sigh)

This is really fascinating. I get why the poll creators made these decisions, but the results of the weighting lead to a ridiculous result compared to other polls. Supposedly this poll was extremely accurate in 2012, so who knows?

I&#x27;m not sure if he doesn&#x27;t know his role, and I&#x27;m curious how tracking polls like this try to account for the large media attention paid to the poll and its methodology. This guy is known to stats nerds, and they&#x27;ve been tracking his moves and (rather mean-spiritedly) calling him &quot;Carlton&quot; for a while now.

Will the era of click-bait titles come to an end?

TLDR; The 19-year black man is very small demographic and would have small sample size. Apparently, the sample for LA Times poll includes and outlier who favors Trump which then gets weighted disproportionately to arrive at conclusion that trump is favored by young black voters.

This makes me feel so much less confused about that poll

I&#x27;m posting under a throwaway account just to say I agree with you; if that says anything.

Let&#x27;s go find the really heavily weighted members of _all_ the polls and dox them too. This way we can screw them all up. Not just one that is influenced by a potential Trump voter.

Regarding the <i>Times</i>&#x27; decision to run this article, I wonder how much of it was based upon &quot;hey, polling is kind of goofy&quot; and how much of was &quot;look! Here&#x27;s another way we can show that Trump isn&#x27;t really resonating with voters!&quot;.