In Reply to: Re: Long way to go but these polls don't bode well for posted by russsmith on September 25, 2024 at 08:42:18
I do not deny that Trump bought that one poll but we are using 800 to 1600 samples to make a prediction of 150,000,000.
At 800 to 1600 samples, in general a poll will be completely wrong 1 out of 20 times (5%). That's the nature of randomly selecting a small number of samples.
We are supposed to see outliers in both directions.
According to 538, there were 10 national presidential polls in the last 5 days. That means every week and a half, there will be around one outlier.
The 538's averaging of the polls nulls out the outliers or you can do what Silver does and ignore outliers until you see they fall within range of the majority of other polls.