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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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That will happen when you average a group of polls with varying goals -- it might even be an OK way to get valid results! It is not evidence that individual polls are reliable.

Might as well can the snide abuse if you want to keep talking -- my comments have clear meaning, you just disagree.

There really wasn't a great deal of variance in the final polling. Only politico was wildly out. Which isn't to say that averages won't yield better results, they will, but that the evidence of an agenda is scant indeed. Aside from the pollsters with a blatant partisan lean (Trafalgar, PPP), it's a little obscure how polling companies are attempting to propagandise with low single digit percentage differences in polling.

I was uneccesarily rude, my frustration though was that you just asserted that pollsters aren't trying to be accurate without evidence as if it was a self-evident truth.

I mean I guess they can be accurate -- sometimes the client is paying for an accurate result, as with political polling commissioned by the major parties.

People commissioning polls on gender identity are probably not like this though, and are mostly paying to have their biases flattered. If they don't get this result, they will take their money to a pollster that does.

I'm categorically not saying that some dude's impression of tiktok comments is a better way to get at the truth -- the point is that neither is reliable.

People commissioning polls on gender identity are probably not like this though, and are mostly paying to have their biases flattered. If they don't get this result, they will take their money to a pollster that does.

If it's pro-trans people paying to have their biases flattered, then the polling companies are doing a shit job because the Pew poll especially doesn't make great reading for someone so inclined, and if anti-trans then my point is surely even further buttressed as that means that Gen Z are even more pro-trans than those polls suggest!