(I meant to do this last week, but I was visiting family in Asia, and damn it, Firefox ate my post again. Sorry about that. - DD)

We left off talking about how important it is to know your client:

When you are doing research for someone, they are entrusting you to discover what they need to accomplish their goals. It's an incredible responsibility, and not one that you should take lightly.  In order to understand their needs, you have to understand them.  You have to understand their organizational mission, their history, their resources in addition to the parameters of your specific project.  Unless you know your client, all the time and resources you put into it will be for naught.

The goal was to leave off and use the absence to see what we could find.  We'll see what we found out under the flip.

When we started this site, we never meant to let our partisan identification get have anything to do with what we wrote about. After all, when writing about data, voter files, polling, journalism, microtargeting, Linux and other such things, you'd think that there would be plenty of material to write about.  And, well, there is, but to my eyes, the perpetrators of stupidity in polling are mostly on the otherside.

Today's lesson comes from that bastion of truth-seeking and truth-speaking integrity, the Editorial Pages of the Wall. St. Journal.  Known parrhesiast Stephen Moore decides to show us how not to read a poll.

There's more.

Via the always-excellent Future Majority, Pew Research has released a new report about the impact of missing cell-phone-only voters in telephone polling.

An analysis of six Pew surveys conducted from September through the weekend before the election shows that estimates based only on landline interviews were likely to have a pro-McCain tilt compared with estimates that included cell phone interviews. But the difference, while statistically significant, was small in absolute terms

There's more below the fold...

In the last installment of this series, I talked a bit about how I wanted to change this up.  Instead of pretending that we were going to be working on some imaginary Congressional race in Missouri, which was just impossible to simulate, we were going to simulate doing a project for The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.   Since their donor base and primary sources of revenue come from senior citizens and baby boomers, they want to know what these people think of recent inductions into the Hall of Fame, what they think of recent exhibits and what directions that they think that Hall should explore.

There's more.

I'd like to follow up on Pluribus' brilliant post on downloading and using census data with an explanation of how these data can be useful to you from a polling perspective. You're starting to see some of this happen with voter file vendors, but, hey, remember, the point of this site is to help smaller groups who can't afford a Catalist subscription do all the crazy fun data things that we do. 

There's more.

Matt Yglesias made a good point recently: for all the additional complexity that 538's prediction model brought to the table, it didn't add a whole ton of accuracy.  Yglesias goes into more detail, but the nut is here:

Read more...

Welcome back to The Plebian's Guide to Polls. So where were we?  Let's review for a moment.

We've discussed how opinion polling came about.  We've put forward some of the reasons for polling.  We've differentiated four different types of polls that get used.  We've looked at how polling methodology can affect the results we see.  And we've talked about the meaning of the margin of error (MoE).

Today's issue, "The Good Stuff", begins our exploration of the sort of information we can get from a poll.  But be forewarned, if you want to get to the good stuff, sometimes you have to dig a little.

There's more...

Working in strategic polling is a lot like being in college: you're constantly scrambling to meet crazy deadlines, dealing with too many obligations at once and barely have enough time, money and energy to put into handling any single one of these obligations at any time. So, similar to writing papers and cramming for exams, you limit how many resources you put towards each poll. Instead of calling 5,000 people over the course of one week, hiring out the entire phonebank, you call 500 people, hire out only part of the phone bank's hours, and do it over the course of two days.  You get the data faster, it's way cheaper and your client is happy with what he has. And, really, it's only the difference of a few points on the MoE, so who's really hurt?

This is, of course, completely wrong.  Think about it for a minute, and then click the full entry to see why.

Right at the top of this post, I'd like to take a step back and thank you, our readers, for continuing to stay with us as we evolve and come up with new ideas.  What began with Blue Leader and me ranting about our experiences working in data and analytics is slowly growing into a strong, six person team of people with diverse points of view, ideas and approaches to solving problems. And as we move forward and develop our ideas, we look back at other things that we tried and realize that we may have to tinker with the ideas a bit.

This is one of those moments.