Flaws of RCP poll aggregation

Currently the RCP average of polls shows Harris +0.1 in Pennsylvania, based on a straight average of 6 of the most recent polls. I'm not focusing on Pennsylvania here, merely using the RCP data for the state to point out some observations. This RCP average of polls is deeply flawed on so many levels. Let me explain.

It is indeed true that if you take these 6 polls, and average the response rate for Harris and for Trump, as a straight average,  Harris gets a rating of 47.83% and Trump gets an average of 47.67%. But take a closer look and some interesting things begin to appear.

Notice firstly, that there are polls from as far back as August 18/19 being averaged against polls as recent as September 3rd through 6th. Those are not like periods. I won't quibble this point too much, but recent polls are more likely to be accurate than older polls. But the debate wasn't until September 10th, so these may be more alike in voter temperament than pre debate vs post debate polls. Additionally in RCP's defense, maybe there are not enough polls that are recent enough to do much more. Both fair points, but this is actually the least of my concerns.

There are 3 polls that are tied, 2 in which Trump leads Harris, and only one where Harris leads Trump. 5 polls with Trump tied or ahead, only one with Harris ahead, and yet she leads the RCP aggregate. Not just odd, Very Odd. The poll that has Harris ahead has her way ahead. Its skew, is overpowering 5 other polls. That means the outlier poll is dominating the RCP average. That's not good math.

Let me take that last point one step further, the Bloomberg poll surveyed Registered Voters, not Likely Voters. It is not as indicative of actual turnout as all the other polls.  So not only is the outlier over emphasized due to it's skewness, it also is not as good a poll as the likely voter polls.

In calculating an average of polls I would exclude the Bloomberg poll because of the people polled. That's without even getting into the crosstabs of the polls to see if Democrats were oversampled. Maybe they were and maybe they weren't, but remember Michael Bloomberg ran for president, as a Democrat.  Again, not suggesting there is a bias in the sample selection, because there is enough reason to exclude it from the poll without even considering that. To be fair, Insider Advantage and Trafalgar Group tend to skew Republican and those are the two polls that have Trump ahead. I would not exclude them however, because I would not exclude CNN or The Hill polls just because they tend to skew Democrat.

The CNN poll has an absurd 4.7% margin of error though.  The rest of the polls margin of error are below 3.5%, which is to me a reasonable number. For that reason I would exclude CNN.

All else being equal, and it's really not, that would leave me with 4 polls. And if everything were equally done, I would take a weighted average of the polls rather than a straight average. The Insider Advantage poll of 800 should count slightly less than the CBS poll of 1085. Weighting the percentages according to poll size makes a bit more sense.  

Doing so, I get the following output, showing Trump +0.8% In Pennsylvania:

Bias much?

JUST. AWFUL.

Google's AI anti-white?

Google's AI Gemini is kind of weird, and seemingly trained on data that is slanted  anti-white.

Want more data to consider? Watch this:

The root cause of woke capitalism

Going back to the Bud Light issue I discussed earlier today, I want to make a point about the root cause of woke corporate culture.  Companies didn't decide all at once to abandon reason for becoming woke.  And it isn't simply a matter of responding to a Facebook/Twitter bubble culture (of years gone by in the case of Twitter, but on-going on other social media platforms).  Nor is it the bureaucratic growth of self-important HR (Human Resources) departments that spew this corporate social responsibility garbage, as some suggest.  HR departments are a symptom not a cause of the problem. What then is the root cause?

Let's work backwards through the chain.  Companies, as more conventional, conservative executives and management age out, need to replace their leadership with newer, younger talent.  That is done through a process of hiring in which Anheuser-Busch's recently taken leave VP of Marketing serves as a prime example.  Companies look to the educational system to find what they consider to be the elite of the educated wherever possible (i.e. if they can afford it).  What they consider elite are institutions are Ivy League schools typically.  But even beyond those Ivy League schools, colleges and universities in general were always left-leaning and the tilt has grown ever-sharper over the decades.  They are incubators of socialist NPCs/drones/non-thinkers.  They have, over many decades, rooted out critical thinking and replaced it with dogma.  

Because these institutions have always had a liberal bias they are predisposed towards furthering that bias. How they got that way to begin with is for another time, but the phrase "those who can do, those who can't teach" is not out of place in the discussion.  The disaffected and unsuccessful end up in education. While that is not to say they are the entire population of educators but rather those who can be successful in teaching but have proven unsuccessful elsewhere end up teaching their blame-others dislike for capitalism to students who have not yet (fully) developed the ability to do some critical thinking. Woke universities are incubators for a woke populous, including its leaders.  And of course it has trickled all the way down to grade school educators and school boards.

But even woke education is not the root cause.  Woke education is fuelled by money that allows it to continue to exist. The money comes from two sources; enrolment and donations from those who can afford it.  Donors are coming from an increasingly insular leftist-thought-bubble elite who have the money to influence thinking, and from government funding.

The root cause for woke capitalism to continue is of course, money.   It may have not been the initial seed, which was socialist and communist idealism among a few, but they were a few who understood how to make their ideas take root.  Once it has done so the growth of woke into corporate culture was, eventually, inevitable once the critical mass was attained.  There's a reason that the likes of Soros have moved on from funding ANTIFA and professional protesters to District Attorneys because they have consolidated their gains and are moving onto the next battlefield.  As conservatives we have been playing defense since the 1960s and have not moved beyond that mindset.

But while we will always have to play defense, we also now need to mount an aggressive offense.  We cannot change Harvard overnight but education is where we need to start and marshall our resources. And Harvard is not the place to do it, it's too far gone.  We need to work with the same organic growth strategy as the left has done.  The difference is we need to do it with parallel institutions.  Public education is bad. It's really bad.  We don't need to try to fix it, where that is not possible.  Instead we need to replace them with our own alternatives from pre-school right through higher education.  That is playing offence.  Boycotting Bud Light is playing defense, but any successful team HAS to do both effectively.

Wiki-bias

 Just for reference purposes when discussing the veracity of Wikipedia:

Wait, apparently Twitter is...right-leaning???

According to a report, Twitter is unfairly amplifying voices from the right. Most people on the right see Twitter as a progressive cesspool. But nope, not true (*sarcasm*):

Last week, Twitter released a 27-page, in-depth analysis that relied significantly on AllSides Media Bias Ratings™ to explore whether Twitter’s recommendation algorithms amplify political content.

The report found media outlets AllSides rates as being on the right are amplified slightly more — 4% more — than outlets AllSides rates as on the left.

Among other things, the analysis sought to examine whether Twitter’s algorithm amplifies certain types of political groups more than others, and whether some news outlets are amplified more than others. Twitter also looked at whether news media algorithmic amplification favors one side of the political spectrum more than the other.

 All Sides concludes that it is pleased to see "Twitter exploring potential bias in its algorithm using AllSides Media Bias Ratings™, and hope to see more research of this type in the future."  But frankly, this smacks of Twitter using a system to justify it's treatment of conservatives.

It doesn't take into account shadow-banning of conservatives, outright banning of well known conservatives  and the potential methodology involved.  That all aside, Twitter is openly an echo chamber of the left and a lot of us on the right have had to abandon it for Parler or Gettr.  We see it for ourselves.  I work with statistics as part of my job.  I understand that anecdotal evidence is not the way to interpret the world.  But I also understand that statistics can be manipulated.  Computer models that rely on statistics are only as good as the inputs and rules they have been instructed to use.  Statistics in short, can be manipulated, and in fact it is not easy to remove bias from statistics.  They are valuable, but only when used properly, not designed to serve a narrative.

A simplified election view and an explainer of why Trump is actually winning

 Based on the latest RealClearPolitics summary of polls, without looking at the partisan split and simply removing the partisan bias per FiveThirtyEight as well as the time-specific bias in polls by state that was evident in 2016 versus the actual results, I get some interesting results.

When I say time-specific bias, I think I owe an example. In Florida in 2016, in October, the RCP polls had Clinton at 48.2% and Trump at 42.4% support. The actual election had Trump garner 49% and Clinton at 47.8%.  So Clinton support was overstated in October in the polls by only 0.4%, but at the same time, president Trump got 6.6% more of the total vote than polls projected.  Combined, the pro-Clinton effect of Florida polls in October was the Clinton 'victory' margin was overstated by 7%.

It's true that the polls were not as far off in 2016 by the time November rolled around, but prior to that, they were either very wrong, deliberately very misleading or else something big changed in the last week to sway a massive shift in voter preference. I don't think the latter scenario was the case, even though Comey re-opened the Hillary Clinton email investigation in late October.  Why do I think that?  Because in a good number of the swing states the Hillary bias did not disappear in November polls.

What's more likely is that the polls were being used to push a narrative and that as election day closed in, they had to become more accurate or be viewed as untrustworthy in the future.  The bias often persisted right up to the election in 2016, but it was more muted than it was in November. 

Polls today have Biden outperforming Hillary's 2016 polls versus Donald Trump. Is that a concern?  Definitely - remember that Hillary Clinton had almost as high unfavorables in polls as  did Donald Trump.  Biden is, inexplicably, more likeable than Hillary Clinton to many.  That's why he's in hiding and not wanting to debate Trump again (ignore the lies that it is about Trump having COVID-19).

But it's possible the polls are biased towards Biden as much or more (or less) than they were  towards Hillary Clinton.  The bias is not easy to gauge.  Maybe by 2024 I'll be able to do that.  For now, I'm going to assume that the bias is the same for Biden as it was for Clinton.

With all that said - here's what my electoral college map looks like, removing the polling bias (or mistake):

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

Another look - why the polls don't scare me

Intuitively everyone on the right understands that Clinton was crushing president Trump in the polls in 2016 and still lost.  I've been looking at the polls in 2016 by month. After filtering for likely voter polls in the RealClearPolitics polls for September 2016, and comparing those results to the final outcome of the presidential election there is a consistent bias in the results towards Clinton.  Looking state by state you can see the bias in the polling leaning heavily towards Hillary Clinton:

As you can see there were 13 states in September that exhibited a polling bias towards Clinton, two that exhibited no bias and two that exhibited a bias, or error, towards president Trump. Some of the bias was pretty dramatic at this point in the race.

Some of these states had the bias tighten later in the race.  Some did not.  The point is the polls now are either biased or inaccurate compared to what they will like like the day before the election.  One counter-argument could be that the voters' choices changed during that time as well.  Fair enough - there was all of that James Comey garbage of the email investigation back and forth going on.

But if you look back at this point in the race there was a media exuberance that Clinton was going to win 350+ electoral college votes.  Remember this?

Isn't that fun to watch in retrospect?

Even if the pollsters have made adjustments and accounted for 75% of those biases (which is a stretch since there is little evidence that is the case), there's still a swing of a couple of points towards president Trump and that impacts his chances of re-election pretty significantly.

FiveThirtyEight has rated various pollsters as having a bias towards Democrats or Republicans or neither, but that is a more generic bias and understates the bias I have found.  It's possible both biases apply.  Most of the FiveThirtyEight polls seem to have benefited Democrats.  While there is potentially some overlap between their identified biases and my 2016 pollster biases, the overall impact is to Trump's benefit and potentially more than my cautious view of granting pollsters a 75% correction this time around.  The polls don't scare me.

Hannity holds extended talk with president Trump

President Trump sounds rationale when not having to combat a biased media. This is the president Trump the mainstream media do not want you to see:

You also get to see how the president was on top of this while Democrats were busy ignoring it.

The Big Tech bias continues, ramps up

Tim Pool, a self-described centrist (and former progressive Bernie Sanders supporter) outs more big tech bias against president Trump - in this case at Google and it's subsidiary YouTube.  And it's not just happening in the U.S.A.

Project Veritas exposes CNN

More from James O'Keefe's Project Veritas, exposing CNN bias this time.  I share these because YouTube makes it hard for people to know about conservative news and the mainstream media of course smears it as fake news, but this is information that is credible.  It needs to be shared to get knowledge out there.

Republican leader gets banned for calling out threats

Republican senate majority leader Mitch McConnell pointed out the threats to him.  But it gets worse. Twitter leaves Leftist calls for "Eradication".

Wow.

Mueller testimony was horrible

Robert Mueller was unable to answer a lot of Republican questions.  He came across as an out of touch figurehead in the investigation which ergo, was run by Clinton supporting lawyers.

Here's just one example of him not being able to justify what went on as Rep. Jim Jordan decimates the obvious bias present in the investigation:

Mueller didn't even seem to understand the make-up of his own investigative team.  Here's one just one example:

Google, still evil as of 10 minutes ago

To recap, Ted Cruz grilled a Google spokesperson on the Project Veritas expose as well as other evidence that Google has gone well beyond bias:

Tucker Carlson last night gave the Project Veritas story the coverage it deserved, since Google has removed Project Veritas' ability to speak for themselves.

Not surprisingly, the Leftist media is ignoring the story.

This double standard and duplicity must not be allowed to stand.  If you are an American and you love your country you need to vote straight ticket Republican in 2020.  Yes, there are a lot of lackluster Republicans every election cycle, but the alternative to a crushing defeat of progressivism at the ballot box is not something that will allow America to be sustained.

Even if you are a liberal like Tim Pool is, you cannot abide by the destruction of free speech.  You must not abide by the existence of a shadow government trying to thwart a duly elected president and the first amendment rights of all Americans simply by hiding behind the notion of being a private entity.  They are no more a private entity that was the phone company which was broken up for far less nefarious reasons than those being attributed to Facebook.

President Trump reacts to Google bias

Via Fox Business, president Trump reacts to the Project Veritas Google expose:

YouTube bias is not all political

Maybe the YouTube-specific problem is less anti-conservative than we might think.  That's not to say there is NOT a bias - clearly there is, a lot of people and reports have shown - but rather that political bias is only a part of the bias problem.

There is an existential bias towards regular media that is as problematic as any other factor.  When you consider that traditional media is very liberal, the problem of political bias is exacerbated.

This is a really interesting dive into the data of YouTube's trending videos:

This also says nothing about all of the other issues at Google (or Facebook, or Patreon, or Twitter). Political bias is real, but so are systemic problems at these tech behemoths. 

The Patreon Exodus is going into high gear.

Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson today announced they are leaving Patreon for politically motivated censorship, effective January 15th, 2019.  This is a major decision for both men.  Wherever they end up, and others who have been barred from the Patreon platform whom you might follow, follow them there.

If you have your own Patreon account, I urge you to cancel it as I have, as well.

Control the assumptions, control the outcome

Whether it relates to weather prediction models, polling questions or  even (perhaps especially) "non-partisan" assessments of government budgets, if you control the assumptions, you control the outcome.  Liberals get it, we don't.

I work extensively with statistical models in my day job.  Models can have very strong predictive power if they are created with proper diligence. That means that you must control the assumptions that go into them to avoid creating your own confirmation bias.  If you skew the input variables you skew the outcome accordingly.  For example if you treat a missing value in a row of data as a zero as opposed to ignoring the missing value, you are lowering your overall average and therefore skewing your outcome towards a lower value for that particular income.

Democrats have understood this for decades - controlling "non-partisan" groups in order to control the message that comes out of them to condemn every Republican bill (e.g. the recent tax cuts) and heap praise on every Democrat bill (e.g. Obamacare's fictitious budgetary cost reductions).  They have granted money extensively to scientists to predict weather calamity as a result of global warming, thus incenting them to find problems in order to secure more funding.  Intentionally done or not (it really is intentional), the results are skewed towards the desired outcome.

Democrats have stacked everything in their favor over decades of working their way into positions to do so - not just entertainment, journalism, government bureaucracy but also polling firms, lobbyists and even statistical modelling and supposedly non-partisan  organizations.  The trick in the latter is to find a gullible but well-intentioned Republican to co-found an organization or co-sponsor a bill in congress so the claim of non-partisan can be applied. Afterwards they ensure that they stack the top positions and teams involved with those who will find, or skew their findings to their own liberal liking.

This is an important lesson for conservatives.  It will take decades but we should be working towards undoing those decades of entrenching bias and deliberately skewed findings just as we should be working towards re-balancing journalism and entertainment and all the way down to the assumptions that go into models and forecasts.  It's not just a matter of voting for the right people and hoping for the best, or leaving it to them to do all the work. Progressives understand this and are fighting this way on all fronts, if conservatives do not fight with the same level of intensity, we are destined to lose despite being on the right side of the truth.

Polls still fudge-y on president Trump

Make no mistake, president Trump is still polling underwater, but what's remarkable is how little underwater he is given the deluge over the past year plus of negative stories that the media continues to purvey about him regardless of substance.  The unspoken secret however is that these polls mean zero to the president, zero to his supporters and zero to his re-election chances as well as nearly zero to the Republican controlled congress.

Nevertheless it's all worth a brief debunking.  Here's what the latest RealClearPolitics polling average of job approval for the president looks like.

In the recent average there are a total of 12 polls. Gallup (having the president at -17%), Reuters (-18%), CNN (-19%), CNBC (-14%) and CBS News (-20%) all are polling all adults.  That's been proven to be unreliable with respect to electoral results.  They are often unreliably skewed as well.  For example take CNN's poll. On page 6 it suggest 37% of Democrats approve of the president's job.  In a poll of 1037 respondents and a confidence interval of +/- 3.5%, and the standard 95% confidence level, reverse engineering the statistics, it means the sample contained 429 Democrats. That's a poll that contains 41.4% Democrats.  Similarly the poll contained 235 Independents (22.6% of those polled), leaving 373 Republicans (36% of the polled population).

While Democrats tend to be more numerous a +5.4% skew towards Democrats and a much larger proportion of Independents than a lot of historical polls.  The latter point could be a real variance from the past but the skewness of the poll is still highly questionable. [If you are interested in reverse engineering the polls minus all the stats, there's a good basic calculator here.]

Much of the remaining polling - in fact all but Rasmussen - look at registered voters.  It's historically more reliable but based on that sort of polling, president Obama would not have won re-election in 2012.  The merits of each of those polls require their own individual assessments, something I'm not prepared to do here but it is worth noting that one pollster is a Democrat firm, and as I've pointed previously, Marist polling has issues (something the election results bore out).  While everyone is now saying most all of the polling in 2016 was correct within the margin of error nationally, there were very few polls that actually had Donald Trump ahead state-by-state in the electoral college.  Yet that's exactly what happened. Issues with polling is nothing new.

Putting stock in the polls of the day is a dangerous and misleading game.  All that said, there is a continuity of evidence when even Rasmussen has president Trump at -9%. Rasmussen was so off in 2012 that in 2016 I tended to disregard it.  Nevertheless Rasmussen has Trump much better off than his predecessor was for much of his first term.  If I were president Trump I would not be discouraged by the polls.  It still really is about getting things he's promised, actually done.

CNN bias unabated, despite president Trump's correct prediction.

CNN's Jim Acosta's rant about president Trump's incorrect extrapolation of events is sadly ironic;

...Acosta said, “The president has an issue…when he is challenged on something that he feels deeply personal about. He doesn’t seem to have the ability to reign things in. … And president trump demonstrated here in the lobby of his own building. He couldn’t feel more at home than he could feel here at Trump Tower. He has talked about it time and time again, that this is his home. And yet, he felt very comfortable espousing some views that are — very, I mean, I would say they’re almost white nationalist-lite, in that, he was complaining, bemoaning the removal of Confederate statues across the country and asking whether or not George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are next.”

He continued, “You could go to just about any history professor at any college in America, you could go to any history teacher at any high school in America, and they will tell you the reason why these Confederate statues are coming down across the country, Wolf –, and remember, Nikki Haley took down the — his UN Ambassador took down the Confederate flag at the State House in Columbia, South Carolina. Those symbols of the Confederacy cause so much hurt, cause so much pain for so many Americans across the country, that it is really understandable to most level-headed, rational Americans that these kinds of monuments, these kinds of symbols eventually just need to come down.

Why?  Because Teddy Roosevelt is next apparently.

Leftist Activists Demand New York Museum Take Down Statue of ‘Racist’ Theodore Roosevelt https://t.co/T3Ta0QWGGM

— Kevin Gutzman (@KevinGutzman) August 15, 2017