Dreamtimer
23rd August 2017, 18:08
Fake polls have real impacts.
Is Kid Rock leading the U.S. Senate race in Michigan?
Delphi Analytica released a poll fielded from July 14 to July 18. Republican Kid Rock earned 30 percent to Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s 26 percent.
Websites like Daily Caller, Political Wire and Twitchy all wrote about it. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted it out. And finally, Kid Rock himself shared an article from Gateway Pundit about the poll.
Delphi Analytica’s website came online July 6, mere weeks before the Kid Rock poll was supposedly conducted. The pollster had basically no fingerprint on the web.
Indeed, Delphi Analytica isn’t a polling firm in any traditional sense, and it’s not entirely clear they even conducted the poll as advertised.
Much of the polling industry is moving online, where conducting a survey is far less expensive than making thousands of phone calls. But that lower price has also opened up polling to all sorts of new people
If you’re a political observer interested in polls or a journalist who writes about them, you need to be more careful than ever.
Transparency is one of the central tenets of the polling industry. But no individuals are listed as employees on the Delphi Analytica website. Additionally, the site is registered to Domains By Proxy, LLC, a service that keeps the names of a website’s registrant or registrants hidden.
Michael McDonald...follows political betting markets and had previously contacted me [Harry Enten] about another survey firm, CSP Polling, that he believed was a shell organization started by some people who use PredictIt, a betting market for political propositions.
McDonald said that CSP stood for “Cuck Shed Polling.” Like Delphi Analytica, CSP Polling doesn’t list anyone who works there on its website.
[A] person can put out a poll and get people to place bets in response to it — in this case, some people may have bet on a Kid Rock win — and the poll’s creators can short that position (bet that the value of the position will go down). In a statement, Lee said Delphi Analytica was not created to move the markets. Still, shares of the stock for Michigan’s 2018 Senate race saw their biggest action of the year by far the day after Delphi Analytica published its survey.
There are less well known pollsters who correctly gauge the electorate even when many traditional pollsters don’t — pollsters like Robert Calahy, who runs the Trafalgar Group and who was one of the most accurate pollsters in 2016; he was one of the few who correctly anticipated Trump’s victory. He says he’s had some difficulty getting accepted by some members of the media because he isn’t as well-known as more traditional pollsters. He told me that he completely agreed that the existence of fake firms makes it easier for skeptical members of the media to dismiss all pollsters they are unfamiliar with.
Public polls can also influence donors, Geller says. Donors don’t want to back a likely loser. Voters themselves can be influenced as well.
In this case, Delphi Analytica’s claims may have made Kid Rock more seriously consider entering the Michigan Senate race. He retweeted the results, after all.
Republican Kid Rock earned 30 percent to Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s 26 percent. A sitting U.S. senator was losing to a man who sang the lyric, “If I was president of the good ol’ USA, you know I’d turn our churches into strip clubs and watch the whole world pray.”
Source (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fake-polls-are-a-real-problem/)
We should probably be very careful about which "Fake" stuff we decide to take on faith.
Is Kid Rock leading the U.S. Senate race in Michigan?
Delphi Analytica released a poll fielded from July 14 to July 18. Republican Kid Rock earned 30 percent to Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s 26 percent.
Websites like Daily Caller, Political Wire and Twitchy all wrote about it. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted it out. And finally, Kid Rock himself shared an article from Gateway Pundit about the poll.
Delphi Analytica’s website came online July 6, mere weeks before the Kid Rock poll was supposedly conducted. The pollster had basically no fingerprint on the web.
Indeed, Delphi Analytica isn’t a polling firm in any traditional sense, and it’s not entirely clear they even conducted the poll as advertised.
Much of the polling industry is moving online, where conducting a survey is far less expensive than making thousands of phone calls. But that lower price has also opened up polling to all sorts of new people
If you’re a political observer interested in polls or a journalist who writes about them, you need to be more careful than ever.
Transparency is one of the central tenets of the polling industry. But no individuals are listed as employees on the Delphi Analytica website. Additionally, the site is registered to Domains By Proxy, LLC, a service that keeps the names of a website’s registrant or registrants hidden.
Michael McDonald...follows political betting markets and had previously contacted me [Harry Enten] about another survey firm, CSP Polling, that he believed was a shell organization started by some people who use PredictIt, a betting market for political propositions.
McDonald said that CSP stood for “Cuck Shed Polling.” Like Delphi Analytica, CSP Polling doesn’t list anyone who works there on its website.
[A] person can put out a poll and get people to place bets in response to it — in this case, some people may have bet on a Kid Rock win — and the poll’s creators can short that position (bet that the value of the position will go down). In a statement, Lee said Delphi Analytica was not created to move the markets. Still, shares of the stock for Michigan’s 2018 Senate race saw their biggest action of the year by far the day after Delphi Analytica published its survey.
There are less well known pollsters who correctly gauge the electorate even when many traditional pollsters don’t — pollsters like Robert Calahy, who runs the Trafalgar Group and who was one of the most accurate pollsters in 2016; he was one of the few who correctly anticipated Trump’s victory. He says he’s had some difficulty getting accepted by some members of the media because he isn’t as well-known as more traditional pollsters. He told me that he completely agreed that the existence of fake firms makes it easier for skeptical members of the media to dismiss all pollsters they are unfamiliar with.
Public polls can also influence donors, Geller says. Donors don’t want to back a likely loser. Voters themselves can be influenced as well.
In this case, Delphi Analytica’s claims may have made Kid Rock more seriously consider entering the Michigan Senate race. He retweeted the results, after all.
Republican Kid Rock earned 30 percent to Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s 26 percent. A sitting U.S. senator was losing to a man who sang the lyric, “If I was president of the good ol’ USA, you know I’d turn our churches into strip clubs and watch the whole world pray.”
Source (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fake-polls-are-a-real-problem/)
We should probably be very careful about which "Fake" stuff we decide to take on faith.