Even though most voters say that the case against the former president is “strong,” they don’t want to see him serving jail time

  • Flaky_Fish69@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    here’s the actual poll

    they sampled an incredibly small sample size. It’s extremely easy to get fucked up results from assuming that you can make a poll representative of Americans as a whole. Like. where I live… most people in the state want him locked up (or you know. burned at the stake.) But, you go an hour out the cities and even the democrats there would be likely to express some hesitancy. Because it’s trump country out there.

    and that assumes the poll wasn’t meant to get this result (for example polling in ways that get maybe more conservative democrats. or people simply lying and saying they’re democrats.)

    • RyanHakurei@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Actually the sample size checks out. I love it when people see “Smol number not as big as big number, therefore sample size bad” and I am going to pull a very elitist argument here and say that people at Harvard University likely know more about polling than you do, just saying.

    • FlowVoid@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      A sample size of 2090, as in this study, is large enough to bring the margin of error down to 2%.

      Furthermore, there is no need to speculate about who they polled, because this information is available. Questioning the results of the poll is as unreasonable as 2020 Trump supporters questioning every poll that showed Biden with an advantage.

    • SweetAIBelle@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      The section that says “Results were weighted for age within gender, region, race/ethnicity, marital status, household size, income,
      employment, education, political party, and political ideology where necessary to align them with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online.” kinda sticks out to me, too.

      • Madison_rogue@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, that admission kind of makes me pause when considering the results. There should have been a page of the published poll that better described how this was taken. For instance, doing just a LAN line poll skews poll results considerably.

        But it’s only the beginning of the fed case against Trump, so I’m sure opinion will change.

      • FlowVoid@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        That’s how all reputable election polling was done in 2020. For example, if you take a random sample that happens to be 52% men and 48% women, it is completely appropriate to overweight the women’s responses to match their actual percentage in the US, 50.5%.

        In fact, in the 2020 election there was a bunch of Trump supporters who had the same doubts as you, and they would “unskew” polls with 52% men responding to give them 52% of the final weighting. Lo and behold, their “unskewed” polls showed Trump in the lead. But the proof of the method is in the election results…

      • Flaky_Fish69@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Most polls are conducted with a political agenda, so they don’t really care…. Especially because it’s incredibly uncommon for people to actually look.