Interesting article on 538 re: fake polls, Michigan, & Kid Rock

[catbyte]

Fake Polls Are A Real Problem

By Harry Enten

August 22, 2017

Is Kid Rock leading the U.S. Senate race in Michigan? A story like that is essentially designed to go viral, and that’s exactly what happened when Delphi Analytica released a poll fielded from July 14 to July 18. Republican Kid Rock earned 30 percent to Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s 26 percent. A sitting U.S. senator was losing to a man who sang the lyric, “If I was president of the good ol’ USA, you know I’d turn our churches into strip clubs and watch the whole world pray.”

The result was so amazing that the poll was quickly spread around the political sections of the internet. Websites like Daily Caller, Political Wire and Twitchy all wrote about it. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted it out. And finally, Kid Rock himself shared an article from Gateway Pundit about the poll.

There was just one problem: Nobody knew if the poll was real. Delphi Analytica’s website came online July 6, mere weeks before the Kid Rock poll was supposedly conducted. The pollster had basically no fingerprint on the web.

Indeed, Delphi Analytica isn’t a polling firm in any traditional sense, and it’s not entirely clear they even conducted the poll as advertised.

The story of Delphi Analytica, its mysterious origins and its Kid Rock poll show that the line between legitimate and illegitimate pollsters is blurring. Much of the polling industry is moving online, where conducting a survey is far less expensive than making thousands of phone calls. But that lower price has also opened up polling to all sorts of new people: Some are seasoned professionals trying an old craft with a new tool or well-informed, well-meaning amateurs trying to break into the industry, but other characters have less noble goals — they’re pranksters seeking attention and scam artists trying to make a quick buck.

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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fake-polls-are-a-real-problem/
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Very interesting.

[shenmue]

1. Oh shit

[catbyte]

3. There are some pretty fucked up people here in MI, but I refuse to believe that

there are that many fucked up people here. Twitler "won" by 10.7K votes & buyer's remorse has really set in here. Best to stay vigilant, though.

[Wounded Bear]

2. There are valid reasons why most people don't take online polls seriously...

Now, I'm sure there are methods to make online polling more scientific and accurate, but most of what we've seen so far have been little more than click bait and spammers.

I'm with those who are skeptical about on-line polling.

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4. What's infuriating is that so many mainstream outlets reported it apparently without

bothering to do the least bit of vetting of the polling company.

[Gothmog]

5. Kid Rock is not going to be a US senator