OT Contributor Video: Heard Tell On Virginia Elections
The latest episode of Heard Tell from Andrew Donaldson discusses the Virginia elections with Joe Szymanski of Elections Daily.
You probably Heard Tell that Virginia not only had an election recently, but that election means that [insert prior political position here] is vindicated…or, at least that seems to be how a bunch of folks are approaching it. Instead of doing that, we are going to turn down the noise on the Virginia elections and turn to our friends at Elections Daily, and their Deputy Director for their Elections Team Joe Szymanski, who is very familiar with Virginia and covered the race from primaries to after parties. Why did Glenn Youngkin surprise so many and beat the electoral odds, why did Terry McAuliffe falter and fail, what was the keys to the race, who were the important people groups, and what should we take from this election going into 2022 midterms. The Virginia elections, information over affirmation, and data over feelz, on this episode of Heard Tell.
A year or two ago, one of the best articles on elections I read (is, sadly, one that I can’t find now) had to do with pollsters and how they weight different polls.
They took a poll and asked 5 or 6 different math people to weigh the poll, show their work, and give their best guess on what the poll represented.
These folks all started with the same numbers and they showed their math but the outcomes swung wildly. Like, I want to say that the most optimistic for Democrats reading was +6 and the most optimistic for Republicans was +3 but all of the pollsters had different numbers at the end of the day because of how they were weighting their sample.
The math was, like, insane. But you could see how, if you didn’t understand the math, the assumptions about the weighing would completely throw the polling off. What made a good poll wasn’t whether the pollster could run his numbers through the formula. Heck, even I might be able to pull that off. The poll was made accurate by whether the pollster made the right assumptions.
And there was so much that went into that it was easy to see it get all cloudy and turn it into “the pollster is wishcasting”. The pollster who did the best wishcasting, though… he was the one worth following next time.Report