"Things You Wouldn't Know If We Didn't Blog Intermittently."
21 October 2009
Political party preference
VERY interesting trend in the past year. Note the shift of both Republicans AND Democrats toward "Independent" affiliation. On the x-axis the break at about midpoint in the curves is June of 2009.
I've been saying for a long time now that the time is ripe for GenXers to move to a new, more moderate party. I'm not a Democrat, but between Sarah Palin and this religious bent the Republicans have embarked on, I'm not interested in anything they have to say anymore, either.
I'm just a nonreligious, slightly conservative person who doesn't feel represented by any of the options anymore, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
I'm a religious conservative, and even I don't feel represented by the Republican party. They've gone way wacko right, eerily at the same time the Dems went way wacko left. If only people would stop voting for crazies just because of their "R" or "D" label....
I'll second Piper, Democrat's gradual turn to a corporate center-right party made me abandon them for the Green Party some years ago now. It's worth noting that in my state (Illinois) that both Democrats and Republicans worked together to try to keep independents (Libertarians/Greens etc) off the ballot. Quite a chokehold our country's politics that they both have there. It's not surprising that the biggest corporate interests donate to both parties pretty much equally.
Wrong, wrong wrong. You can't say anything about changing party affiliations from this chart except maybe, "wow, there is a lot of scatter in these poll results." Pollster.com did you wrong by putting those solid average lines on the chart and you jumped in with an unsupported conclusion based on them and not the scattered data behind the lines. Other commenters took this jumbled Rorschach blob of a chart and projected their wishful interpretations onto it to agitate for their own political fantasies.
I don't feel ashamed. Pollster does apply a smoothed trend line, but the intereactive graph (which I did not embed) allows one to assign different parameters or even delete individual data points if you disagree with the methodology of the sampling method.
I chose to just embed their graph. When I look at the scattered points I perceive a trend.
Others will disagree. That's the nature of politics.
I am not disagreeing based on politics. I am disagreeing based on statistical science. Just because you see or imagine a trend doesn't make it so. I think statistical analysis of the data will reveal that there is no trend (or that any trend, up, down, or no change can be fit to any of the curves, which is the same thing).
I went to pollster.com and extracted the data to make my own graph. If we start excluding some of it because we don't like the methodology, then that further diminishes any conclusions that can be drawn from it.
You are entitled to your opinions, as are the commenters. There is just no conclusion from this chart that you can use to support them. Let's all of us look for good data somewhere else. We might even demand better statistics from pollsters.
I've been saying for a long time now that the time is ripe for GenXers to move to a new, more moderate party. I'm not a Democrat, but between Sarah Palin and this religious bent the Republicans have embarked on, I'm not interested in anything they have to say anymore, either.
ReplyDeleteI'm just a nonreligious, slightly conservative person who doesn't feel represented by any of the options anymore, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
I'm a religious conservative, and even I don't feel represented by the Republican party. They've gone way wacko right, eerily at the same time the Dems went way wacko left. If only people would stop voting for crazies just because of their "R" or "D" label....
ReplyDeleteI’m a “wacko lefty” and I don't feel represented by the Democratic party.
ReplyDeleteIndependents are not a homogeneous moderate voting block.
I'll second Piper,
ReplyDeleteDemocrat's gradual turn to a corporate center-right party made me abandon them for the Green Party some years ago now. It's worth noting that in my state (Illinois) that both Democrats and Republicans worked together to try to keep independents (Libertarians/Greens etc) off the ballot. Quite a chokehold our country's politics that they both have there. It's not surprising that the biggest corporate interests donate to both parties pretty much equally.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteWrong, wrong wrong. You can't say anything about changing party affiliations from this chart except maybe, "wow, there is a lot of scatter in these poll results." Pollster.com did you wrong by putting those solid average lines on the chart and you jumped in with an unsupported conclusion based on them and not the scattered data behind the lines. Other commenters took this jumbled Rorschach blob of a chart and projected their wishful interpretations onto it to agitate for their own political fantasies.
ReplyDeleteI replotted the data and added 90th and 10th percentile lines which show that you could probably put lines which trend up or down or stay flat and not fall outside the statistical confidence of the data. The chart says nothing.
I don't feel ashamed. Pollster does apply a smoothed trend line, but the intereactive graph (which I did not embed) allows one to assign different parameters or even delete individual data points if you disagree with the methodology of the sampling method.
ReplyDeleteI chose to just embed their graph. When I look at the scattered points I perceive a trend.
Others will disagree. That's the nature of politics.
I am not disagreeing based on politics. I am disagreeing based on statistical science. Just because you see or imagine a trend doesn't make it so. I think statistical analysis of the data will reveal that there is no trend (or that any trend, up, down, or no change can be fit to any of the curves, which is the same thing).
ReplyDeleteI went to pollster.com and extracted the data to make my own graph. If we start excluding some of it because we don't like the methodology, then that further diminishes any conclusions that can be drawn from it.
You are entitled to your opinions, as are the commenters. There is just no conclusion from this chart that you can use to support them. Let's all of us look for good data somewhere else. We might even demand better statistics from pollsters.