When Karl Rove cites Rasmussen polling, then it MUST be true!
Rove on the 2010 elections: "Doctors, nurses and hospital workers impacted by health-care reform's adverse effects will speak more often to more people and with greater passion and credibility than will the president and his allies."
The American Medical Association: "[There are] major Medicare savings under health reform legislation... H.R. 3590 includes a number of payment improvements for physicians that, combined, will result in immediate and significant Medicare payment increases for many physicians... This is not the last step, but the next step toward real health system reform."
The same reform that is now occurring in Canada, to "improve" their bottom line. Yeah their bankrupt bottom line, necessitating charging for formerly included operations.
TORONTO (Reuters) – Pressured by an aging population and the need to rein in budget deficits, Canada’s provinces are taking tough measures to curb healthcare costs, a trend that could erode the principles of the popular state-funded system. [snip]
British Columbia is replacing block grants to hospitals with fee-for-procedure payments and Quebec has a new flat health tax and a proposal for payments on each medical visit — an idea that critics say is an illegal user fee.
Spend your own money for insurance; you have health care.
Wow, the AMA (which represents less than 1/3 of the doctors in the US) says something, then it MUST be true.
The AMA represents all doctors like the ABA reprsents all lawyers, which is to say it doesn't. Organizations like the ABA or AMA are the gold standard for liberals/democrats only when they agree with them (though, admittedly, both of them have liberal leadership so they often do).
Excellent point. Whatever one's personal politics are, surely we can all agree that Karl Rove is far more qualified to characterize the attitudes of American doctors than the AMA.
Yes, let's focus on Karl Rove and not the CBO chief who is obviously is filled with regret for letting this mess pass through with Obama's fantasy numbers.
Also, the AMA sold itself out because it told doctors they'd have loads of new customers/patients. They don't care who overpays for it.
How terrible to focus on Karl Rove's explicit words and conclusions, when we have the tea leaves of CBO Chief Eldendorf to interpret as shared "regret."
After the Dick Blumenthal military story broke (Conn. Senate), Rasmussen rush-released a poll claiming his lead over Linda McMahon (R) had plunged to 3%. Three subsequent polls (Quinnipiac, R2K, and Greenburg) re-polled the race at 25 points, 19 points and 15 points. Rasmussen has since updated its results; surprise, surprise, it turns out Blumenthal's up by 23%.
After Rand Paul's comments about the Civil Rights Act comments drew a big negative reaction, Rasmussen put out a Kentucky Senate insta-poll showing Paul holding strong at +25% over Jack Conway (D). Two subsequent polls (R2K and SurveyUSA) showed Paul's lead at 3% and 6%. Rasmussen has since updated its results; surprise, surprise, it turns out Paul's up by 8%.
And now Karl Rove is using Rasmussen numbers to tell another story that, surprise, surprise, favors Republicans. They should change the name of the company to "Rasmussen Reports, You Decide."
This messenger doesn't need to be shot... he's already got holes.
Rasmussen has gotten a reputation for producing outlier number after outlier number. Commenters such as Nate Silver have offered analyses why this is not necessarily nefarious, but they agree that it's a pattern and a professional black eye.
Other people are less circumspect; not just Democrats have suggested the company puts out unlikely numbers fast and early to push a narrative or a position, and/or to increase Rasmussen's own visibility (since unusual numbers get reported more widely). They regularly "pull back to the pack" when it gets closer to election time.
That is, if they join the pack at all. Rasmussen has polled many non-Presidential races early but not late, such as the high-stakes Critz-Burns special election. The company's vanishing acts have been interpreted as a deliberate strategy to avoid being pinned down as inaccurate in high-risk, low-reward races. Even when Rasmussen's numbers wander off the reservation, the company can always say the race "shifted" after its initial polling.
Not many organizations weigh the various pollsters' comparative accuracy over the length of an entire series of campaigns. That enables Rasmussen to "escape" being called on its persistent tablesetting deviations by getting a good score on the final exam. That could be simple good fortune for them, or it might be gaming the system - probably depending on which political party you support. Rasmussen's real record of accuracy, or lack thereof, is a lot more complex than getting the Obama-McCain margin.
Fivethirtyeight.com's Nate Silver has just released a comprehensive analysis of 4,700 polls since 1998. When the standard is expanded from "how close was the pollster's estimate to Barack Obama's margin of victory over John McCain?" to "typically, how accurate is a pollster?" Rasmussen falls from first, to a working 8-way tie for 14th. And Silver's methodology specifically minimizes polls released early in an election cycle, which gives Rasmussen a boost.
A few quotes are particularly apropos to this thread, even though Silver did not direct them at specific targets:
"Polls, especially those from weaker pollsters, sometimes bounce around a lot before "magically" falling in line with the broad consensus of other pollsters."
"Elections are not entirely independent of one another, e.g., a pollster's skill in forecasting the outcome of the 2008 Presidential election in Pennsylvania is probably correlated with its skill in forecasting the same election in Ohio. Be very suspicious of pollsters who claim to be superior on the basis of only having called one election correctly."
"It turned out, when I ran my analyses, that the scores of polling firms which have made a public commitment to disclosure and transparency hold up better over time. If they were strong before, they were more likely to remain strong; if they were weak before, they were more likely to improve."
Unlike numerous pollsters, Rasmussen does not reveal its methodology.
Zogby, which preceded Rasmussen as the favored pollster of Republican advocates, ranked 64th and last.
From Mark Evanier's blog: "When pollsters brag about their accuracy level, what they're talking about is how close their final polling came to the final outcome. They can be wildly off until a day or so before the election and still claim they called it within the margin of error. Silver cites this example...
'In the 2008 Democratic primary in Wisconsin, for instance, which Barack Obama won by 17 points, American Research Group had released a poll on the Saturday prior to the election showing Obama losing to Hillary Clinton by 6 points; it then released a new poll 48 hours later showing Obama beating Clinton by 10 points. (It is very unlikely that there was in fact such dramatic late movement toward Obama, as most other pollsters had shown him well ahead the whole time).'
In other words, I can now confidently predict for the next two years and five months that in the next presidential election, there will be a massive write-in vote for the robot from the old Lost in Space show and he'll win with 99% of the vote. Then a day or two before the election, I'll switch to whatever Gallup says and I'll probably be able to claim a pretty good batting average for that contest and boast of my accuracy."
11 comments:
When Karl Rove cites Rasmussen polling, then it MUST be true!
Rove on the 2010 elections: "Doctors, nurses and hospital workers impacted by health-care reform's adverse effects will speak more often to more people and with greater passion and credibility than will the president and his allies."
The American Medical Association: "[There are] major Medicare savings under health reform legislation... H.R. 3590 includes a number of payment improvements for physicians that, combined, will result in immediate and significant Medicare payment increases for many physicians... This is not the last step, but the next step toward real health system reform."
The same reform that is now occurring in Canada, to "improve" their bottom line. Yeah their bankrupt bottom line, necessitating charging for formerly included operations.
TORONTO (Reuters) – Pressured by an aging population and the need to rein in budget deficits, Canada’s provinces are taking tough measures to curb healthcare costs, a trend that could erode the principles of the popular state-funded system. [snip]
British Columbia is replacing block grants to hospitals with fee-for-procedure payments and Quebec has a new flat health tax and a proposal for payments on each medical visit — an idea that critics say is an illegal user fee.
Spend your own money for insurance; you have health care.
Wow, the AMA (which represents less than 1/3 of the doctors in the US) says something, then it MUST be true.
The AMA represents all doctors like the ABA reprsents all lawyers, which is to say it doesn't. Organizations like the ABA or AMA are the gold standard for liberals/democrats only when they agree with them (though, admittedly, both of them have liberal leadership so they often do).
Excellent point. Whatever one's personal politics are, surely we can all agree that Karl Rove is far more qualified to characterize the attitudes of American doctors than the AMA.
Yes, let's focus on Karl Rove and not the CBO chief who is obviously is filled with regret for letting this mess pass through with Obama's fantasy numbers.
Also, the AMA sold itself out because it told doctors they'd have loads of new customers/patients. They don't care who overpays for it.
How terrible to focus on Karl Rove's explicit words and conclusions, when we have the tea leaves of CBO Chief Eldendorf to interpret as shared "regret."
After the Dick Blumenthal military story broke (Conn. Senate), Rasmussen rush-released a poll claiming his lead over Linda McMahon (R) had plunged to 3%. Three subsequent polls (Quinnipiac, R2K, and Greenburg) re-polled the race at 25 points, 19 points and 15 points. Rasmussen has since updated its results; surprise, surprise, it turns out Blumenthal's up by 23%.
After Rand Paul's comments about the Civil Rights Act comments drew a big negative reaction, Rasmussen put out a Kentucky Senate insta-poll showing Paul holding strong at +25% over Jack Conway (D). Two subsequent polls (R2K and SurveyUSA) showed Paul's lead at 3% and 6%. Rasmussen has since updated its results; surprise, surprise, it turns out Paul's up by 8%.
And now Karl Rove is using Rasmussen numbers to tell another story that, surprise, surprise, favors Republicans. They should change the name of the company to "Rasmussen Reports, You Decide."
That's right, shoot the messenger, uh, pollster.
Accuracy of polls in 2008 election:
http://www.fordham.edu/images/academics/graduate_schools/gsas/elections_and_campaign_/poll%20accuracy%20in%20the%202008%20presidential%20election.pdf
This messenger doesn't need to be shot... he's already got holes.
Rasmussen has gotten a reputation for producing outlier number after outlier number. Commenters such as Nate Silver have offered analyses why this is not necessarily nefarious, but they agree that it's a pattern and a professional black eye.
Other people are less circumspect; not just Democrats have suggested the company puts out unlikely numbers fast and early to push a narrative or a position, and/or to increase Rasmussen's own visibility (since unusual numbers get reported more widely). They regularly "pull back to the pack" when it gets closer to election time.
That is, if they join the pack at all. Rasmussen has polled many non-Presidential races early but not late, such as the high-stakes Critz-Burns special election. The company's vanishing acts have been interpreted as a deliberate strategy to avoid being pinned down as inaccurate in high-risk, low-reward races. Even when Rasmussen's numbers wander off the reservation, the company can always say the race "shifted" after its initial polling.
Not many organizations weigh the various pollsters' comparative accuracy over the length of an entire series of campaigns. That enables Rasmussen to "escape" being called on its persistent tablesetting deviations by getting a good score on the final exam. That could be simple good fortune for them, or it might be gaming the system - probably depending on which political party you support. Rasmussen's real record of accuracy, or lack thereof, is a lot more complex than getting the Obama-McCain margin.
Fivethirtyeight.com's Nate Silver has just released a comprehensive analysis of 4,700 polls since 1998. When the standard is expanded from "how close was the pollster's estimate to Barack Obama's margin of victory over John McCain?" to "typically, how accurate is a pollster?" Rasmussen falls from first, to a working 8-way tie for 14th. And Silver's methodology specifically minimizes polls released early in an election cycle, which gives Rasmussen a boost.
A few quotes are particularly apropos to this thread, even though Silver did not direct them at specific targets:
"Polls, especially those from weaker pollsters, sometimes bounce around a lot before "magically" falling in line with the broad consensus of other pollsters."
"Elections are not entirely independent of one another, e.g., a pollster's skill in forecasting the outcome of the 2008 Presidential election in Pennsylvania is probably correlated with its skill in forecasting the same election in Ohio. Be very suspicious of pollsters who claim to be superior on the basis of only having called one election correctly."
"It turned out, when I ran my analyses, that the scores of polling firms which have made a public commitment to disclosure and transparency hold up better over time. If they were strong before, they were more likely to remain strong; if they were weak before, they were more likely to improve."
Unlike numerous pollsters, Rasmussen does not reveal its methodology.
Zogby, which preceded Rasmussen as the favored pollster of Republican advocates, ranked 64th and last.
From Mark Evanier's blog:
"When pollsters brag about their accuracy level, what they're talking about is how close their final polling came to the final outcome. They can be wildly off until a day or so before the election and still claim they called it within the margin of error. Silver cites this example...
'In the 2008 Democratic primary in Wisconsin, for instance, which Barack Obama won by 17 points, American Research Group had released a poll on the Saturday prior to the election showing Obama losing to Hillary Clinton by 6 points; it then released a new poll 48 hours later showing Obama beating Clinton by 10 points. (It is very unlikely that there was in fact such dramatic late movement toward Obama, as most other pollsters had shown him well ahead the whole time).'
In other words, I can now confidently predict for the next two years and five months that in the next presidential election, there will be a massive write-in vote for the robot from the old Lost in Space show and he'll win with 99% of the vote. Then a day or two before the election, I'll switch to whatever Gallup says and I'll probably be able to claim a pretty good batting average for that contest and boast of my accuracy."
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