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Nov 05, 2008 18:24

So... Which Pollsters Live, Which Will Be Killed?



After 2004, two groups were blamed for making John Kerry’s loss extra sad for the liberals: those secret retards from off-the-grid caves that Karl Rove forced to vote at the last minute, and pollsters. All of the pollsters failed spectacularly on Election Day in 2004, especially with exit polls. Everyone knew that John Kerry was too much of a cocksmoker to possibly win anything, and yet these pollsters committed the CARDINAL SIN of getting Democrats’ hopes up about a national victory of any kind. But this year they tried again. Who will be first against the wall?

Shocker: some of them were right about many things! BUT WILL THIS SAVE THEM?

First, we must devote a section to your absolute favorite pretend boyfriend of late, the most famous person in the history of Internetting, the Messiah of Baseball Stastistics, the pale nerd (read: blogger) who manages to keep getting teevee invites, THE NEW PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Mr. Nate Silver of the FiveThirtyEight math site. He is not a pollster. But he likes polls, a lot.

Nate Silver taught numbers how to fuck. His final prediction was 349 electoral votes for Obama and a 6.1 percentage point win in the popular vote. At the moment, both of those numbers are exactly correct. Nate Silver lives. Oh but wait! The final tally will likely throw North Carolina in Obama’s column, giving him 364 electoral votes in the end. Hmm… Nate Silver dies.

Rasmussen and Pew also predicted a 52% - 46% Obama victory in their final polls. Pew dies because they only chime in every now and then with these polls and then, when they get one right, take all the credit like assholes; Rasmussen lives because they conduct 400 polls a day about everything in politics and, most importantly, don’t send us junk e-mails announcing every single one.

…Which segues perfectly into our next pollster, the infamous John Zogby. For the last year and a half, every time your Wonkette editor has checked his e-mail there has been a fresh “John Zogby to tips” release which is always almost wrong. John Zogby was wrong about everything in 2004 and everything since. He predicted an 11-point Obama margin last night: wrong. And maybe he did pick, um, every swing state correctly last night… but whatever, John Zogby dies.

What the hell, let’s get to the big finale:

Gallup dies, Fox News dies, Daily Kos/Research 2000 dies, Marist dies, ABC/WaPo dies, CBS/NYT dies, Michael Crichton dies, and IBD/TIPP… lives.

Source

I'm just posting for that description of Nate Silver. It's the best thing I've ever read.

nate silver taught numbers how to fuck, polls

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