dinsdag 4 november 2008

Obama kan niet verliezen. Of toch wel?

Terwijl over de hele wereld mensen met ingehouden adem wachten op de uitslag van de Amerikaanse verkiezingen, hier een interessante kijk op de "polls" die bijna allemaal voorspellen dat Obama onvermijdelijk zal gaan winnen.

I’ve checked my email, and I have over a hundred new messages. And I can’t get to anything resorting to ‘Sean Malstrom’ due to real life situations. Luckily I changed my career gears long ago. But my old profession of political analysis is going to be absolutely destroyed. I still think McCain will win the election and do so by a larger margin than Bush did in 2004. When this happens, a hurricane of outrage will be unleashed at the political analysis business, mostly the pollsters. People will demand to know how they could be so off. In other words, the future of the political analysis business will be destroyed as their reputation will become destroyed in the upcoming days.

People in this business, like any other business, do not attack one another due to the need to uphold the reputation of the whole. For example, you won’t find Dick Morris or Karl Rove attacking the polls since that would be the same as attacking their own industry. Jay Cost, a person I respect and worked with for the 2004 election results (I was assigned on his team to PA) had this to say about the polls:

None of this is consistent with what we would expect from random statistical variation. These considerations reinforce the point I made on Friday. In all likelihood, something else is going on here. The pollsters have different “visions” of what the electorate is, and these visions are inducing such divergent results.

Lees dit lange, maar heel interessante artikel hier: Toast