Quote:
Originally Posted by Solecismic
It sounds like Rasmussen deserves some criticism, and I can understand why his results would be adjusted. In my case, I'm adjusting the result itself, in Silver's, he's giving it far less weight.
You can look at Silver's analysis before 2010, and he praises Rasmussen. Since then, I was picking up skew without knowing why, but it might be more.
My complaint is that Silver isn't challenging his own employer. The CBS/NYT polls seem so skewed I'm not even using them. I looked into them, and found a D adjustment that can't be defended (+9 last month when I looked). Silver called the CBS/NYT one of the worst in 2010, yet, now that he's paid by them, he's giving it his strongest weight.
This doesn't invalidate Silver's results or methodology. But it does call into question a bias.
My question to you and others is, given you have a point about Rasmussen, why are similar criticisms of polls that favor the Democrats defended so vigorously? Why can't this work both ways? Is your side always right, no matter what?
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The criticisms of the the polls favoring the Democrats are
not similar. The fundamental criticisms of Rasmussen are, most simply put: (1) he does not call cell phones; and (2) he weights his results based on how he thinks the party identification of the electorate will look on election day.
I assume the criticisms of the Democrat-leaning polls are that they improperly weight the basic demographic makeup of the electorate. While this may be a valid attack, it is far, far different from what Rasmussen does. Weighting by demographics is well-accepted as a necessary and sound technique, though there is certainly potential for doing it wrong (which is where I assume the criticisms of the Dem-leaning polls are directed). Weighting for party identification is thought of as a completely unsound polling methodology. Perhaps Rasmussen will be vindicated in this election, and weighting by party ID will become the norm. But it is unsound science based on the state of the art at this time. So it is much different to criticize him for doing something so widely panned than it is to criticize other pollsters for using accepted techniques but disagreeing with the
way they do them.