text: US Presidential Election 2020 - The Democratic Candidate for President | Page 170 | Politics.ie
  First Prev 170 of 271
  NBC/ WSJ poll released yesterday of 400 Likely Voters.
  Nate Silver provides a tentative hierarchy of the Democratic candidates.
  Tier 1 comprises the front-runners at this point. Unless there is serious upheaval, the nominee will come from the top 2 tiers. As the second link says, there may be quibbles about Castro, Booker or Gabbard.
  Tier 4 C should be seriously thinking of withdrawing immediately.
  We check in on the four tiers of candidates.
  The State of the Race - Lawyers, Guns & Money
  There's a good discussion here, but I think this broad way of ranking the candidates now is pretty much right: And I think it's extremely unlikely that anyone below Tier II is the nominee (I might quibble and throw Castro into 3a, but it's not very important). And I hope that Marianne Williamson...
  Personally I don't see anyone outside Tiers 1 and 2 figuring at this stage, and I'm still not sure whether Buttigieg has much staying power either, though he seems to be doing very well in Iowa. Tier 3 are all well known figures and yet have made no impact at all at this stage, so they need to be considering their positions.
  Fox News had a South Carolina poll yesterday giving radically different figures to the Change Research one (i.e. Biden in 35%). Change have another in NH today showing Warren displacing Sanders at 22% and Biden improving to third in 19%.
  NYCKY, always afraid we are putting Owede in bonus territory on his posting contract.
  It was supposed to have been a "good week" for Trump - he trampled all over the "special relationship" with an ally, gave an incoherent and malevolent speech about the First Amendment at a "social media summit", dumped the 14th Cabinet member to depart from his team, though he praised the man ... and he lied about Jeffrey Epstein.
  In spite of all these wonderful achievements, Trump is still not showing great improvement in his polling, maybe an uptick, but previously his upticks were followed by downticks.
  Pollster: NBC News/ Wall Street Journal, Sample 800 Registered Voters
  Democrat President Result Margin
  Harris 45% 44% Trump Harris +1
  Sanders 50% 43% Trump Sanders +7
  Warren 48% 43% Trump Warren +5
  Biden 51% 42% Trump Biden +9
  On those figures he's a shoo in....
  Biden's advantage over Sanders and Warren, in terms of his putative margin over Trump, seems to be declining.
  Just a question about posted poll, how representative is a poll of 800 in a country the size of the U.S.? Not an argument, just curious?
  Assuming sound methodology, the margin of error would be around 3% with a 95% confidence interval.
  Oh come on - last time out the 'experts' were predicting a 95% chance of Clinton being the next POTUS!
  - & I believed them....
  I don't think the sample size is large enoughHow many voters over such a diverse voting population, how can 800 be representative?
  That is the beauty of polling .... an accurate poll does not depend on its proportion of the population, but only on the sample size. Obviously you need to stratify the sample (50% female, right proportion of minorities, social classes etc)
  If the proportion you want to measure is roughly 50%, , then a sample of 1000 will have an error of +/- 3%
  The math is complicated, but for political polling, a sample of ~1000 is perfectly adequate. A sample of 10,000 would have an error of +/- 1%. So the sample was 10 times more expensive to gather, but you have not improved the error by all that much.
  A 33/1 shot won the Irish Derby (prob 3%) this year, and two years ago a 40/1 odds horse (prob 2.4%) won the Epsom Derby. What were the odds on Liverpool getting to the Champions League when they were 3-0 down to Barcelona?
  A 19/1 shot winning a two horse race was unusual, but not a miracle.
  Some models has Trump at 2/1 (FiveThirtyEight), the New York Times had him at 6/1, so it was one of those occasions when the outsider won - if it was a poker game, Trump filled an inside straight.
  But can he fill an inside straight twice?
  Yep. If the Dems field Biden, or an extremist. Right now it's hard to see them doing anything else.
  The problem is not so much the sample size but ensuring that it's capturing statewide differences and variables. California comprises 12-13% of the population but Vermont is about 0.2%. To accurately reflect that, in an 800 person poll, you would need to poll about two people in Vermont, hardly a representative sample. That said, we don't need opinion polling to tell us who will win in Vermont or California.
  I think 800 or 1,000 is fine as a sample size to tell you the national vote but as we know the national vote doesn't decide the Senate, House or Presidential votes.
  The polls in the 2016 predicted the national popular vote accurately.
  Nate Silver pointed out on election eve that Trump could still win the Presidency by getting majorities in certain states, without an overall national majority. And that is what happened - Trump won Florida & Pennsylvania by small majorities.
  In poker terms, it was like having a 2 and a 3, a 5 and a 6, then getting dealt a 4 to fill the straight.
  Look if you now have beef with maths take it up with mathematicians.
  The 2016 national polls were usually either within or just slightly outside their MOE...national polls measure the national popular vote, Clinton wound up +3% in that. Most polls in the week before the election had her +3 to +7.
  The population of the USA is about 60 times the size of Ireland, but you can see the national polls use the same sampling size, also in the UK, and any country for that matter. You will seldom find a sample size above 2,000 or less than 500.
  For example, a YouGov poll from the UK over the past week has a sample size of 1,671.
  The reason being the sample size is not dependent on the population size, but on the skill of the pollster in sample selection and questionnaire design, as long as the sample size is over a minimum threshold.