>Doug -- I'm sending this to you personally, because the panix server is
>refusing to relay this to the e-mail list.
It did.
>Doug Henwood wrote:
>>>Gar Lipow wrote:
>
>>>When I took the quiz it told me two things:
>>>1) My candidate is David M.
>>>) I'm a moderate liberal.
>>>
>>>Uh yeah, right.
>
>>So which is inaccurate?
>
>>Doug
>
>Doug I know I have not posted that often, but do I sound like a moderate
>liberal?
No. I was curious about the David McR part, really.
> >PS: The AAPOR crowd seems mystified by the fact that while net polls
>shouldn't be accurate, they're more accurate than they should be.
>
>If net polls are really coming closer to reality than they should be
>(I'd want more evidence) could it be a matter of sheer size of the
>sample? That is, once you get into gigantic smaple sizes, does the
>ratio of rerpesenative to non-representative possible sample change. It
>has been a long time since my elementary statistic class. I know that
>you don't gain that much when it comes to truly random samples, but I
>don't think we ever dealt with how it would affect biased samples.
>Anyone with the statistical savvy to answer this one?
I'm no stat-head, but a large sample size isn't going to improve things if it's an unrepresentative sample. You'd think that a net audience is richer, whiter, more male, and more libertarian than a random sample of the U.S. pop, wouldn't you?
Doug