• inspectorst@feddit.ukOPM
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    3 months ago

    It’s YouGov. The partisan split of the polling industry in the US is an unusual feature for me as a Briton. It comes up as a note of caution in political betting communities as it’s not something we really have here - all the major UK pollsters (including YouGov, who I assume subject their US operations to the same standards as they do at home) have been signed up to the British Polling Council for decades and have to adhere to various standards of transparency around their questions and methodologies. (Unusually, YouGov are the one UK polling outfit that sometimes get claims of partisanship thrown at them, but that’s because their founder later became a senior Conservative politician rather than because of any genuine evidence of partisan bias in their numbers!)

    I was amazed by this for example:

    But this thread is a reminder that without the equivalent of the British Polling Council some American pollster have a partisan skew which means when analysing the polls and betting on them that should be taken into consideration.

    It is possible for an American pollster to ask this question

    ‘Are you planning on voting for the man God wishes was his son Donald Trump or the whore of Babylon Kamala Harris?’

    and all we’d ever see from the pollster is ‘Trump 50%, Harris 50%’ as they don’t have to publish the question or data tables