Bitch, Please...

 

Both Wilder and Silicon Graybeard have looked at the below-referenced poll, and when two people on my daily read list go somewhere, I figure it ought to be work a look.

Which poll purports to show that Trump voters and Biden voters are (fill in the blank):

a) Hopelessly divided

b) both composed of a remarkable number of Big Government lovers

c) totally ginned up creations from out of the alleged pollsters' underpants.

So let's have a closer look ourselves, SiG having led the way in posts at Wilder's blog, and then in more depth at his own site.

Having been trained and experienced in polling methodology ourself, firstly in regards to political science, and then again in terms of medical research, we begin by looking at the polling methodology followed, to see if this poll is valid and trustworthy, both, either, or neither.

Properly and scrupulously followed, with valid methodology and questions, polling can indeed be rather accurate. Sadly, such precision and circumspect honesty is rarely followed nor practiced, and largely not at all for some decades by anyone of importance where politics are concerned.

From the linked site courtesy of SiG, the exact method of conducting this, um, "poll":

"From July 22 to Aug. 4, 2021, Project Home Fire worked with Innovatemr, an industry-leading top 20 marketing research data collection firm, to capture online responses to more than 300 questions spanning social, political, and psychological topics from 1,001 Donald Trump presidential election voters and 1,011 Joe Biden voters (N=2,012)..."

 

"online responses"

Srsly? Online??? Where 99.997% of "women" on dating sites are gay dudes in their mother's basements trolling for dick pics? Where 117.4% of adolescents looking for hook-ups with adults or trading kiddie porn are named either "Detective", "Special Agent", or "Officer"? That Internet of "online responses"?!?!?!? That's mail-in voting levels of reliability, without even the after-rape kiss of requiring a postage stamp.

But those were actual "Trump voters"? Because, online, without any means of verification of their existence, let alone their political affiliation, they said so?!?

In the words of Emperor Poopy Pants the Ist, "C'mon, man!"

I'd stop there, but since I'm already suited up, cleats sharpened, and mid-air in the act of piling on, we continue.

"responses to more than 300 questions"

At the risk of quoting myself here,

I wouldn't spend the time to answer three political questions online, let alone three hundred. The idea that they found anyone who would, let alone 2000+ such people in a two-week span, even with a talent pool of the entire US online, is flatly recockulous.

You're only going to get the sort of people I see in the ER, usually there for either substance overdose, or for a psychiatric evaluation, which Venn diagrams constitute a remarkable degree of overlap.

Or else a bunch of underage 4chan droids either deliberately gaming the system for their own amusement, interns from UVA jerking the results around to pass a class, or both. Chances that even 10% of them are old enough to vote in any election, let alone did so: 0%.

Believing that they got 2000+ actual persons, including nearly half actual Trump voters, and all willing to sit still for a 300-question Bataan Death March questionnaire, requires Solomon Oddonkoh levels of gullibility.

So what does that make any such alleged "poll"?

We're talking an-army-of-veterinarians-feeding-truckloads-of-Ex-Lax-and-Metamucil-to-industrial-beef-feed-lot-quantites-of-cows-sized piles of bovine effluvia.

Metric fucktons of pure bullshit.

Beyond any further rational argument.

Figuring that out took me maybe 10 seconds, after reading that one excerpt.

You want to grab 1000 random people each, at a NASCAR race, a Packers game, standing in line at Disneyland/World, at a Teamsters meeting, and at a Black Lives Matter protest, poll them maybe 5-10 questions max, and than analyze that research data, and we can talk. Yes, it'll be biased for each group, but out in the open, in a way that cancels out, which is the entire point of looking at Trump voters v. Biden voters, and with real people, not the invention of someone's fevered polling dweeb imagination (overlooking the obvious: that any 10% of purported Biden voters exist only as a concoction of someone with a stack of mail-in ballots and a Sharpie, and not anywhere in real life; rather exactly like this "poll"). But that would take actual legwork, investment, and physical risk, and we can't be risking that for snowflakes too afraid to even go to local malls. In which case, tell that Soros-funded center, and their hired polling flunkees, to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut anytime they peddle such bilge-spew as "data".

John, SiG, and anyone else similarly taken in by the referenced "poll", I know you guys have probably heard of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, 

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward -- reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't." - Michael Crichton

but may I gently and respectfully suggest that before you invest any further time with polls from academia, the media, or both {Bonus Question: What is 0 times 0?, which is the reliability of both groups multiplied.}, you refresh yourselves on the concept, rather than spend any further time dealing with the machinations of admitted liars and horse thieves, unless it's to figuratively string them up, in print.

The mendacious bitchez who ginned that amount of pure diaper-spackle "polling" from their own underpants know it's exactly that, and nothing else. Stop giving them the time of day, let alone the time available to yourselves, and your readers. Their effluvia demonstrates vividly that the plural of "excrement" is not "data".

Other than for the negligible worth of practice at forensic examination, I absolutely despise waste.