June 28 (Reuters) - A group of U.S. voters who were unable to choose between Joe Biden and Donald Trump before Thursday’s presidential debate delivered their verdicts after the contest and it was almost universally bad news for Biden.
Of the 13 “undecideds” who spoke to Reuters, 10 described the 81-year-old Democratic president’s performance against Republican candidate Trump collectively as feeble, befuddled, embarrassing and difficult to watch.
This is a focus-group of undecided voters – a small population set to begin with and a sample set designed to be small, but who will clearly decide this election on the margins. You do understand how focus groups work and quite literally all campaigns use these, correct?
And finally, little data is better than no data. Nobody came away from the debate thinking Biden won; so it’s not particularly a stretch to see this would hurt him with critical battleground state undecided voters.
Edit: Whew, talk about vote manipulation. I’m astounded by the complete and utter lack of substantive rebuttal.
13 “undecideds” is a poor sampling. Given one of the “undecideds” was basically between Biden or third party, they didn’t control for any “never-Bideners” or “never-Trumpers”.
Add on this level of ignorance:
You’re basically scraping the bottom of the barrel to force a clickbait headline and choosing the most bombastic quote from them to include.
You’re getting downvotes because it’s pretty much never the case of someone honestly and in good faith posting seemingly pro-Trump rhetoric. It always starts out nice, but devolves into the quote above like “I like the convicted felon”.
You don’t publish initial results without a significant population sample. 13 people is an abysmal sample size. You need around 10% of a population polled up until about 1,000 people because of the way the curve levels out. 100 people minimum to get something remotely confident. The confidence level of this poll is so low that the publishing of it is irresponsible and unethical.
To your argument about the other poll having only 8, that’s also irresponsible. Both articles are clearly jumping to conclusions in an effort to grab views. However, that it received a more positive response is clearly indicative of the way the lemmy population leans. That’s really about all you can grab from that… Well, that and people have no idea how statistical averaging works.
Again, you don’t seem to understand the intent of focus groups or why they’re used by political campaigns. In a way focus groups are more akin to Case Studies, which are still extremely insightful.
Besides, we already have a broader set of polling data of battleground states, and what we see here is a reflection of those wider, scientific polls that didn’t bode well for Joe Biden even pre-Debate.
The mere fact that ANY random sample of undecided voters came away with these views, is downright dangerous.
Oh no, I very much do. I have a degree in psychology that requires being able to do statistical analysis for research.
You use a focus group to elicit qualitative, not quantitative, info from a targeted group in a study, not as the study itself. The issue is, it’s not meant for broad populations or for quantitative studies. Even then, the data is easily skewed by biases from the group themselves, the moderator, and the interpreter and shouldn’t be the only thing used.
Focus groups are meant for things like quality indicators, where you use a range of them in general analysis, which can help to triangulate where an issue is.
To properly employ a focus group, you would first need to poll an appropriate sample size of undecided voters then you target demographics within the sample to gain insight into why they answered their poll as they did.
And how, qualitatively, did these focus groups triangulate where undecided voters are on the issue of who to vote for?
Isn’t it quite probable they did exactly this? They certainly didn’t just pull these people off the streets. They had to aggregate undecided voters to begin with, after all.
I think it’s reaching for straws to suggest this isn’t saying what we already recognize from polling conducted in battleground states.
Edit:
Then they need to state it, because the only data they’ve given is that they asked a group of 13 people, one group, which is still not an adequate sample. Period.
That, right there, is why focus groups shouldn’t be used for this to generalize a larger population, because the data is being misinterpreted to sell a biased story! Probability would be estimated if they actually conducted a full study. Which they clearly didn’t.
And you can’t use previously gathered data from battleground states to estimate results after an event. They’re snapshots of an opinion at that given time. You can’t use them for an event that occurred after the fact. Again, that’s unethical and inappropriate.
The data wasn’t good before, and it doesn’t take a statistician to know they’re going to be as-bad or worse than before post-debate. I’ll happily take that bet with you and circle back in the coming weeks as state-wide polling proves this.
Focus groups aren’t meant to be used for gaining an understanding of a broad swath of the population. Focus groups are used for exploratory research, concept testing, and understanding the “why” behind opinions and behaviors.
If you want to generalize trends towards large populations, you’re going to need a large sample size. It’s statistics that suggests that many respondents will leave you with extremely low confidence in the outcome.
For example, if you are trying to judge the voting preferences of a population of 100,000 people, you’ll need 383 randomly sampled people in a survey to reach a 95% confidence interval. 13 is nowhere near the amount of people required to cover those that considered themselves “independents” before the debate.
That’s not to say this tells us nothing, but it’s by no means a predictive study.
*edit: I actually would say it’s harmful because I think that it portrays the narrative as if it is predictive, when it’s not.
Not to say this falls on deaf ears because I appreciate your actually understanding how scientific surveys work, but as you said yourself: These focus-groups of undecided voters are certainly warning-signs, and if it was flipped around, users would be up-voting this and BIden’s campaign would be touting this as a great thing.
I’m all for larger studies being conducted to show the damage done; the question will then be: How will you change your perception on what needs to be done?
And golly, if only we had large sample sizes of populations comparing Donald Trump and Joe Biden in battleground swing-states. If only we could then compare those numbers to their respective numbers in 2020… That, combined with said focus group insights, sure would be useful! /s
https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2024/05/13/new-york-times-presidential-poll-donald-trump-joe-biden-battleground-states
https://pro.morningconsult.com/analysis/swing-state-polling-may-2024
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-poised-beat-joe-biden-6-key-battleground-states-poll-1904688
And that’s just the start, pre-debate no less. I cannot think of a single data-point where Biden isn’t doing significantly worse than his 2020 performance. National approval ratings, black/hispanic vote, voter enthusiasm, etc.
sure, but it’s not article worthy.
Given how pivotal this moment is, I think it kind of is. Considering only 40,000 votes decided 2020, a handful of undecided voters is extremely vital. What other format would you have it in?
You want the reason we’re down voting you and the post? Because anyone undecided is a fucking moron so we don’t give a shit what they think. Same with those voting for Trump.
That’s a terrible take. You know why that is?
Because undecided swing-voters in battle-ground states will decide this election on the margins. It’s Not you. It’s not me. It’s those stupid undecided voters that we unfortunately need to cater to, and Joe Biden lost some of those voters in the debate. If the electorate were informed and intelligent, we wouldn’t have either of these candidates in the first place.
Reminder that 2020 was decided by something like 40,000 votes thanks to the electoral college.
Damn, I’m just imagining your face if Trump wins the election if those people you’re trying to remain ignorant of tip the election.
Ignorance is never a virtue.