Thursday, October 2, 2008

Interesting Poll Analysis by FiveThirtyEight

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Real Credibility Problems

Last week, I (Nate Silver) discussed Real Clear Politics' decision to exclude the Research 2000 daily tracking poll from their national averages. After a lengthy discussion with RCP founder John McIntyre, I decided to defend them, pointing out that while RCP may have a debatable framework for deciding which polls they do or do not include, they at least appeared to have applied this framework consistently.

My gut-level takeaway from my conversation with McIntyre was somewhat different from what I represented, however. My gut-level feeling was that RCP was in fact cherry-picking those results that were to its liking, and then coming up with post-facto rationalizations to justify its decisions.

For the rest of the article: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

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