The Ring of Fire
@theringoffire·1.4M subscribers·27K videos
Presidential Polling Means Absolutely Nothing Right Now
Posted
May 5, 2019
Views
10,901
Likes
742
Comments
128
Engagement
7.98%
May 5, 2019
10,901
742
128
7.98%
Every word spoken in this episode is indexed. Type any phrase to jump straight to the moment it was said.
Type any word or phrase that may have been spoken. Click a result to seek the player to that exact moment.
Try a name, a topic, or a quoted line
See what was published immediately before and after this episode.
5:51Now PlayingWith around 20 Democrats currently vying for the nomination to be their party’s pick for president, polls can be confusing, annoying, and 100% misleading. Since we’re still months away from the debates and even further away from the primaries, anything could happen, and that’s why the polls that we’re seeing coming out every week don’t mean very much at all. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Become a member today!
Support us by becoming a monthly patron on Patreon, and help keep progressive media alive!
Spread the word! LIKE and SHARE this video or leave a comment to help direct attention to the stories that matter. And SUBSCRIBE to stay connected with Ring of Fire's video content!
Support Ring of Fire by subscribing to our YouTube channel
Be sociable! Follow us on:
Follow more of our stories at
Subscribe to our podcast
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
What we've seen a lot of very interesting polling come out, at least on the democratic side of the aisle for the 2020 presidential election. We saw one poll this week that had Joe Biden absolutely slaughtering all of the competition. You know, he definitely got a post announcement bounce and he was up with somewhere between 20 and 30 points, head and shoulders above everybody else. Uh, except it turns out that that pole didn't even have a sampling size of voters under the age of 49 large enough to even bother reporting. So it was a, an exceptionally skewed poll. We've seen other polls that, oh wow, this one looks like, oh wait, no, you only sampled like 30 people. This isn't a good poll. Let's all agree on something right now. While I have no doubt that the polling does help give us an idea of where everybody stands in the positioning, either first, second, third, fourth, fifth, or it's so on place, anything beyond that polls right now don't matter at all.
They don't, let's stop pretending that they do. Let's stop pretending that the, uh, so-called numbers people, and I think everybody knows what I'm talking about. Let's stop pretending like they didn't get it wrong in 2016 let's stop pretending like they know some kind of special magic formula that only they know they're human beings and human beings can be wrong, polls can be wrong and inaccurate, and that's what these, uh, numbers gurus are having to use. But as a student of political science and as anyone who's taken political science as their major understands, most polls aren't reliable. If a pole has a margin of error greater than 3% that poll is automatically discounted and unreliable and not used by real political scientists. So when you see these polls now, when the, the numbers grew, say, oh, we've averaged all these polls in this one had a margin of error of 8% this one at 6% all those numbers are already invalid.
#rof #trofire #theringoffire #progressivenews
Sentinel Indexing in Progress
Metadata and chapters are available. Claim extraction for this episode is pending.
All video content is delivered via YouTube embedded players in accordance with the YouTube Terms of Service. Sentinel provides research tools that promote discovery and accountability across political media.
