yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Why polls can be wrong


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

  • [Instructor] In previous lessons, we've talked about how polls and surveys are used to measure public opinion, but the important thing to recognize is that they are estimates of public opinion. Ideally, they're done as scientifically as possible, as statistically robust as possible, but even then, they might not give an accurate picture.

And perhaps one of the most famous recent examples of that is the 2016 election. In this chart, which I got from Real Clear Politics, you have the results of many of the polls of Monday, November 7, 2016. You might recognize that as the day before the 2016 presidential election.

And if you were to just look at this chart from the day before the presidential election, who would you think would win the presidency? As you can see, most of these polls have Hillary Clinton having more support among likely voters than Donald Trump, but we know what happened on election day. Donald Trump won the election.

Why did that happen? Well, there's a lot of potential theories, and political pundits continue to debate why this happened. One idea is that polls, when they randomly sample people, they're trying to randomly sample likely voters.

And some people theorize that there might have been a group that voted in this election that the pollsters did not view as likely voters but they voted nonetheless, and amongst that group, they voted disproportionately Trump. Another idea is that maybe someone else about the sampling techniques wasn't completely random, that for some reason, it might have skewed in favor of people who leaned towards Clinton instead of people who leaned towards Trump.

Another idea is that these are national poll results, while we elect our president through the electoral college. So it might be more interesting to look at especially some of the swing states what were happening, but even there, it was a surprise for most political pundits in terms of who won many of those states.

So the big picture here is that polls and surveys can be valuable. They can start to paint a picture of where the public's views on things are, but you should not view them as indisputable truth. They are samples from the population, and it is hard to do a truly random, unbiased sample.

And even when you do that, you're not even sure if people are going to tell you who they're really going to vote for. And even if they do tell the truth of who they're thinking for voting for at the moment, we don't know. Maybe their minds change by the time they actually go to vote.

More Articles

View All
What It Takes to Keep America Beautiful | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic
When we got in and we were on the beach, the first thing you notice is the dramatic, you know, uh, sea stacks that from a distance just, you know, they look like mountain ranges almost. But they’re so close. In May 2022, National Geographic photographer S…
3d curl intuition, part 2
So where we left off, we had this two-dimensional vector field V, and I have it pictured here as kind of a yellow vector field. I just stuck it in three dimensions in kind of an awkward way where I put it on the XY plane and said, “Pretend this is in thre…
Car insurance basics | Insurance | Financial Literacy | Khan Academy
So cars are something that usually involves some type of insurance. One, cars are a pretty expensive asset that many of us own. The other issue is cars are driving around pretty fast, and they can actually cause a lot of damage to property or to people. …
The Bermuda Triangle: Shrouded in Mystery
What began as a regular training session on the afternoon of the 5th of December 1945 would soon become one of the greatest mysteries of the human world: Flight 19. A group of five U.S. Navy torpedo bombers set out from their base off the coast of Florida…
Drew Houston - CEO and Founder of Dropbox | Entrepreneurship | Khan Academy
So, uh, excited to have Drew Hon here. Uh, you know, a very well-known figure amongst kind of our team out here. Um, and for those who are maybe watching this video later, uh, founder of Dropbox. How many, how many billions of people do you have using? I …
AI in your life
So in this video we’re going to talk about where we all have artificial intelligence or AI in our lives. And so before I go into where we’re already seeing it and where we’re likely to start seeing it more and more, I want you to pause this video and thi…