Comments on: What is it with wingnuts and pollsters?

By: A Fistful of Euros

A Fistful of Euros — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 22:05:45 +0000

Catastrophic success? Sadly, No! takes the Wall Street Journal to task for saying that the German elections failed to produce a clear result because Germany's parliamentary system is 'peculiar'. As S,N!

By: Mrs Tilton

Mrs Tilton — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 16:07:21 +0000

There's PR, and then there's PR. Germany's PR system does have its peculiarities, you know. For instance, there will be a special election in one district of Dresden in October. (An obscure neonazi candidate had the good form to die shortly before the voting, hence needed to be repalced. German law requires a certain minimum time before voting on any given panel of candidates, hence the small delay.) In that election,if the CDU do really, really well... their number of MPs in the Bundestag will decrease by one. But the peculiarities of German electoral law, such as they are, were not what delivered Sunday evening's result. That the German did not elect the government the WSJ wished for is down to this: the party the WSJ backed ran an abortion of a campaign, squandering what had been, not very long ago, a 20% lead. In the event they polled less than 1% better than the incumbent SPD, and have but three more seats in the Bundestag (assuming they don't do excessively well in Dresden). Indeed, another perverse Dresden outcome would see the CDU and SPD evenly matched for seats. That's pretty much a purely mathematical possibility, though -- virtually impossible in real-world terms. (Click through on the URL for more on the German elections than you could possibly want to read.)

By: mdh?tter

mdh?tter — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 13:21:40 +0000

Seriously, How hard would it be to do a poll with a one percent (+/- 0.5) MOE?

statisticians?

this 4 percent is beginning to feel like stroking the wounded ego because he has ‘the football’.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 13:21:08 +0000

Seriously, Ho hard would it be to do a poll with a one percent (+/- 0.5) MOE?

statisticians?

this 4 percent is beginning to feel like stroking the wounded ego because he has ‘the football’.

By: piotr

piotr — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 08:49:05 +0000

Proportional representation is a moronic system. Where is room for creativity, like artistically gerrymandered districts?

Actually, German system does have elements of first-past-the-post and it is probably too complicated for the simple folks at WSJ.

By: tg

tg — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 06:59:11 +0000

All that fancy-schmancy statistical talk is just obfuscation of the plain facts, which are clear to anyone with an ounce of common sense, and don’t need to be asked of your “representative sample.” W polls at 90+% approval? Plain as the nose on your face, some ejucated librull will try to blame it on the fact that the sample was crazy Aunt Adolph and Kaye Grogan. So to hell with Mr. Bartlett AND his sphericity test, as well as Kurt Osis, whoever that is.

Dear lord, I’m drunk already.

By: Pinko Punko

Pinko Punko — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 06:12:24 +0000

spencer, clue the rest of us in.

Yes, down with the evil overlord pollster class, the world is rife with their virulence!

By: spencer

spencer — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 05:56:50 +0000

Satan loves his representative samples displaying no signs of heteroscedacity when running OLS regressions

I hate the fact that I know what this means.

Except the part about Satan, that is.