Meinungsforscherin Ann Selzer beendet Wahlumfragen und wendet sich „anderen Unternehmungen und Möglichkeiten zu“

https://eu.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/2024/11/17/ann-selzer-conducts-iowa-poll-ending-election-polling-moving-to-other-opportunities/76334909007/

29 Comments

  1. Imagine being so wrong about America it destroys your faith in your profession.

  2. ----JZ---- on

    I’d be fine with ending all polling. It’s almost never right and doesn’t serve any real purpose.

  3. BeverlyHills70117 on

    She had the single most discussed poll of the election cycle, and one of the worst.

    I think going into other non public opportunities may be wise. She ‘ll be wearing this albatross for awhile.

  4. ChocolateHoneycomb on

    When that Iowa poll came out with Harris leading and everyone was believing in it, I was gobsmacked that people thought it was accurate when it was probably the first poll of the entire election cycle where she was leading in that state, which ceased being a swing state years ago.

    Worse, someone on Twitter said it wasn’t accurate and people needed to stop jumping to conclusions that she was going to win in a landslide… and he was met with a mean-spirited body shaming joke that got 100k upvotes on r/MurderedByWords. Unsurprisingly, he was right, the poll was bullcrap.

    Literally one poll made everyone celebrate. ONE. After months and months of “don’t listen to the polls” ONE poll made people jump for joy, simply because it was beforehand a very trusted and often accurate poll.

  5. No-Director-1568 on

    There’s an early ‘big name’ person the history of analytics – George Box – who’s quote I’d like to share.

    ‘All models are wrong, some are useful’

    It’s an impossibility to ‘never be wrong’, she was bound to have this happen one day – it’s a matter of odds over time.

  6. IPredictAReddit on

    Her method was to basically not weight a sample at all and simply call every sampled number till they picked up. As long as the sample of people who will eventually pick up look like the sample of actual voters, this works. And it did, quite well. For a long time. The alternative is to up- and down-weight the people who respond to polls from groups that are under- and over-represented in answering the phone.

    Her polling method was excellent (but also hard to pull off) until it wasn’t, so she was right to call it. She’s a smart person. She knows when to call it.

  7. I will point out that she says in the article that this was always going to be her last poll…she isn’t quitting because of her results, this was her planned exit since 2023.

  8. CornFedIABoy on

    In all likelihood, it’s the Census data she used to weight responses that’s fucked up, not her methods. Does no one remember how chaotic the 2020 Census was between the political interference and Covid disruptions?

  9. libginger73 on

    Maybe asking people who thrive on a right-wing media sphere of blatant lies to truthfully respond to a random stranger on a land line isn’t reliable anymore!! Maybe just stop all this nonsense and noise and let people vote and call the winner when ALL votes have been counted.

  10. ARazorbacks on

    Has she commented on her thoughts on why her poll was so far off? And possibly why all polls were so far off? 

  11. guyincognito121 on

    I got downvotedd into oblivion for saying that the streak of accurate predictions was most likely driven largely by luck. If you have dozens of pollsters out there all using equally accurate methods, some are going to have streaks like that purely by chance.

  12. TheBlueBlaze on

    When you look into how much behind the scenes work the pollsters do to make the data they collect more reflective of the demographics that they *think* will be the final layout, it’s easy to see how someone could get disillusioned from listening to them altogether.

  13. Madmandocv1 on

    Me before the election: If Selzer is right and this is a Harris landslide, she will be the most famous pollster of all time.
    Me at 9:00pm eastern on Election Day: “If I ever see Ann Selzer again, it will have to be at a Kroger in Iowa.”

  14. likeabuddha on

    Hopefully that dork with his so called “keys” does the same. Still out there making excuses as so why he was so unbelievably wrong

  15. She came to the same conclusion we all did: When people support a candidate seen as inappropriate or morally lesser, they lie to pollsters; so why bother with polling?

  16. happy_Ad1357 on

    She set us up so badly, like really gave me hope that I wish I never had so election night wouldn’t have been such a blow

  17. Floppy_Jet1123 on

    Well, people lied so hard in this election.

    “Yeah Kamala for sure”.

    Then proceeds to vote for the damn orange criminal.

    Polls are done. You’ll never get proper data when your responders are full blown liars.

  18. CombustiblSquid on

    Telephone pooling doesn’t work anymore and people are very comfortable with lying about their choices.

  19. I would quit too. People lied on their polling because they were racist and/or misogynist. There is no honesty or integrity or even interest in the public god at this point. We are in trouble

  20. fantasyfootball1234 on

    If an A+ rated pollster can be wrong by 15% swing margin less than a few days before a national election, then polling results are less helpful than knowing nothing at all

    That would be like a weatherman saying it will be 85 and sunny, only for there to be a 1,000 year ice age beginning at noon

  21. Independent-Bug-9352 on

    I wonder if any data shows that the Selzer poll actually backfired, leading people to stay home thinking that, “if Iowa is in play for Harris, then I don’t need to vote. No way Trump is gonna win.”

  22. Levidesium on

    Or she wasn’t wrong, and trump found those 10,000 votes this time across the country, in every state.

  23. Reminds me of the spam on this sub prior to the election of how this election Nostradamus who predicted like 5 elections said Harris would win.

    Like, mother fucker got lucky 5 times, and this sub takes him as gospel. I wonder if in four years we’ll have this dude again who predicted 5 out of 6 elections lol

  24. Badbassfisherman on

    I work with tons of republicans. They talked about how if they were to get polled they would say they are voting democrat in hopes to give the democrats false sense of security and keep democrats at home on Election Day thinking they have it in the bag.

    The republicans not fucking stupid. The echo chamber here on Reddit wants you to believe they are. They are not. They are highly organized, unified and vote without fail for whoever has the nomination. They don’t protest vote. They don’t stay home. They go out on Election Day and vote a straight republican ticket.

    Meanwhile the DNC killed any chance it had by forcing a highly unpopular candidate, that we didn’t choose, upon us. Two out of three elections you put up women and a lot of Americans aren’t ready to vote for a woman president. Even members of the party aren’t ready to do that, especially in the south(Georgia). Fucking idiots. Fuck you Biden and fuck you DNC. You did this. Now we will all pay the price.

  25. twoanddone_9737 on

    Holy shit she had a 16 point error in Iowa lmao

    Everyone was talking about how this was such bad news for Trump a few days before the election.

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