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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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A Note to Nate
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PollingFirm
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| Contributor | Penguin |
| Last Edited | Penguin Jul 06, 2010 08:57pm |
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| Category | Commentary |
| Author | John Zogby |
| News Date | Wednesday, July 7, 2010 02:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | To Nate Silver:
Congratulations to you. You have gained a lot of attention and are on the threshold of attaining even more. With these well wishes, from someone who has also achieved a good deal, be alerted to your new responsibilities. To date you have many fans. But the real scrutiny is just beginning and some fans are ephemeral. Here is some advice from someone who has been where you are today.
Don't Create Standards You Will Find Hard to Maintain Yourself. You are hot right now - using an aggregate of other people's work, you got 49 of 50 states right in 2008. I know how it is to feel exhilarated. I get the states right a lot too. But remember that you are one election away from being a mere mortal like the rest of us. We very good pollsters have missed some. They tell me you blew the Academy Awards and your projections in the 2010 U.K. elections were a tad squidgy. So be humble and continue to hone your craft. Be aware that some of your legions who adore you today and hang on your every word will turn their guns on you in a minute. Hey, I have been right within a few tenths of a percent - but you are a probabilities guy and even a 95% confidence level and a margin of sampling error are not enough for some.
Be Honest. You take other people's polls, compare records for predictions, add in some purely arbitrary (and not transparent) weights, then make your own projections and rankings. But your efforts include more than just statistics. There is some edginess: you don't like numbers when they don't agree with your preconceptions. One night you took a one sentence comment I made to a Boston Herald reporter that my partial poll results showed President Obama with about a "50-50 rating," and you headlined your piece, "The Worst Pollster in the World Strikes Again." Was that due diligence? Did you realize that less than a week later, as is often the case, most other polls were similar to mine? |
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