Do The Majority Of People Really Want A Stricter Lock Down?

[dave50]

I keep hearing on the news and reading articles in the papers (sorry no link) that when questioned a majority of people are in favour of even stricter lock down measures. Who are they asking? I don't know anyone in my quite wide circle of family and friends who are in favour, on the contrary, most of them think we have gone too far already. I can only conclude that they have been asking those whose financial security is guaranteed, by whatever means, no matter what.

[Spicerack]

I suppose the point I'm making is your polls are ***.
Let's face it, they're made by people like you for people like you......and they're always wrong.
They even reckon, ha ha ho ho ho(oops, fell out of bed) that American people are going to make, tee hee, Joe Biden President.

[Spicerack]

People on here believe that crap. Never learn, do they?

[jim360]

You're perfectly welcome to try to convince yourself, and others, that your friends are the only people who ever should be asked about anything in terms of what the people at large think. You will, however, be wrong.

As to the coming election... well, time alone will see. Polls are rarely perfectly right -- the nature of a sample is that it's never going to be perfect -- but they don't miss by nearly as much as you make out. So, no, they are not asterisks. The future is never perfectly knowable, so it would be a mistake to trust them absolutely. It's far more stupid to call them "always wrong".

[jim360]

In terms of what's coming in 2020: from the purely polling point of view, polls are suggesting that Biden currently enjoys a 10-point lead nationally, and something like a 5-point lead in several key states. At this point it is almost certain, at the very least, that he'll win the popular vote by a margin greater than Clinton enjoyed in 2016. Whether he'll win all the states he needs is less certain.

One other point is that, taking the polling and its interpretation as accurate, Trump currently has around a 12% chance of winning. 12% is not insignificant: it's about the same as the chances of tossing three tails in a row. It would therefore be a surprise, but hardly a shock, if he won from this point of view.

In essence, you're confusing two types of mistake. It could be, of course, that the analysis I've mentioned above is completely wrong, and Trump's chances of winning are much higher. Or it could be that they are right, but that he wins anyway, because unlikely events are not impossible ones.

[Canary42]

Remember USA in the Sixties "Rather Dead Than Red"

We seem to have adopted "Rather Dead Than Debt"

[pixie374]

Hardly....

[jim360]

The catch is that we don't get the opportunity to conduct several thousand identical elections to test whether the probability of a given outcome was accurately evaluated. Still, despite all this, polls are much better than you'd expect from sheer, dumb luck. It suits some to pick specific failures, but that's known as confirmation bias, so can be safely ignored as an argument. Put another way, no-one pays much attention when the polls are accurate: which they were, reasonably, in the 1997, 2001, 2005, 2010, 2017, and 2019 UK general elections, and were not in 1992 and 2015. Two misses out of eight in 30 years isn't a bad hit rate.

[Peter Pedant]

// that he'll win the popular vote by a margin greater than Clinton enjoyed in 2016.//

clinton got 2% more votes 2016 and this was predicted - but she didnt win because ... god knows wrong kind of votes or something

and didnt Bush win by 46 000 votes?

[Peter Pedant]

Jim, the inaccuracies in the Thatcher election were greater than er predicted !
and they concluded that voters had lied about their intentions. I thought this had been seen in one of the american elections