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The Polling Game · Plausibly Live - The Dave Bowman Show Podcast

• 0:21
  Every election cycle we do this to ourselves.
• 0:26
  A poll comes out, Canada Day is on top, he's leading or she is
• 0:29
  leading. Another poll says.
• 0:31
  Canada B is closing the gap. The experts then take those
• 0:36
  polls. They average them, they weigh
• 0:38
  them, they adjust them for turn out, education, age, enthusiasm,
• 0:44
  whatever else their model says the electorate might look like.
• 0:49
  And then the people go to the polls and vote.
• 0:52
  And inevitably, the so-called experts discover that the
• 0:56
  electorate they spent months measuring to the NTH degree
• 1:00
  wasn't the electorate that, you know, actually showed up.
• 1:05
  That's simply because a poll doesn't measure an election.
• 1:09
  It measures what a selected group of people says at one
• 1:13
  particular moment in time to one specific question.
• 1:18
  And then the pollsters use mathematics and assumptions to
• 1:21
  predict what millions of other people are going to do later.
• 1:26
  Maybe they get close more and more often, though.
• 1:31
  They don't. Even Frank Luntz right now is
• 1:34
  calling for a suspension of polling until they figure out
• 1:37
  what the hell they're doing wrong.
• 1:39
  His words, not mine. There's only one poll, though,
• 1:43
  where nobody has to model the turn out, weigh the sample,
• 1:46
  account for undecideds, and figure out who's lying to the
• 1:50
  pollsters. And that, of course, is Election
• 1:52
  Day. Those votes aren't predictions.
• 1:55
  They aren't samples. They aren't models.
• 1:58
  They're actual votes, so enjoy the horse race.
• 2:03
  If you want argue about the polls, average them to the 3rd
• 2:06
  or 4th decimal place. Carry it as far as you want to
• 2:10
  go, but just remember, the only poll that actually means
• 2:14
  anything is the one on Election Day.
• 2:16
  And here's the thing, Every one of those, every single one of
• 2:21
  those pollsters who got everything wrong still got paid.