Eegore
Serious Thumper
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SuzukiSavage.com Rocks!
Posts: 8694
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How do polls matter,then?
They don't for the most part. The difference between polls and rallies is that rallies are specifically targeted for areas that will get high attendance, typically. There is not a lot of benefit to holding a rally in an area where there will be no support or low attendance. It's unlikely Trump will hold a rally in downtown Portland for instance.
Polls on the other hand tend to have many more participants, and can be independent. Not all are, but they have a higher probability of being independent than a rally put on by a campaign. Of course they have a much higher margin of error by comparison.
Both have practically zero assurance for predicting a winner as there are far, far more voters, like millions more, that won't participate in polls or rallies. I'd like to see things like rallies predict accurately a POTUS, but I can't mathematically see a way to get accurate information from such a tremendously low percentage sample of the voting pool.
240 million registered voters, with a 66.1% turnout would be 158,427,986 voters. If the 24 Trump rallies this year represented 50% of a 66.1% turnout he would need 6,601,166 attendees per-rally. That's just to represent 33.05% of the voting turnout - 6 Million attendees at each rally.
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