e; I wrote a better headline than the ABC editors decided to and excerpted a bit more
According to the poll, conducted using Ipsos’ Knowledge Panel, 86% of Americans think Biden, 81, is too old to serve another term as president. That figure includes 59% of Americans who think both he and former President Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner, are too old and 27% who think only Biden is too old.
Sixty-two percent of Americans think Trump, who is 77, is too old to serve as president. There is a large difference in how partisans view their respective nominees – 73% of Democrats think Biden is too old to serve but only 35% of Republicans think Trump is too old to serve. Ninety-one percent of independents think Biden is too old to serve, and 71% say the same about Trump.
Concerns about both candidates’ ages have increased since September when an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 74% of Americans thought Biden – the oldest commander in chief in U.S. history – was too old to serve another term as president, and 49% said the same about Trump.
Part that drew my eye,
The poll also comes days after the Senate failed to advance a bipartisan foreign aid bill with major new border provisions.
Americans find there is blame to go around on Congress’ failure to pass legislation intended to decrease the number of illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border – with about the same number blaming the Republicans in Congress (53%), the Democrats (51%) and Biden (49%). Fewer, 39%, blame Trump.
More Americans trust that Trump would do a better job of handling immigration and the situation at the border than Biden – 44%-26% – according to the poll.
So that bipartisan border bill stunt was terrible policy, and it doesn’t seem to have done anything for the Democratic party politically
Can we please stop trying to compromise with fascists now?
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/
there’s a website that catalogues and compiles polls from various different sources. each poll asks something like 1500~ people. they do both telephone and online polling, depending on the polling organization. if you click on the poll, you can find out more about the organization and they often publish exact methods and data so you can look for yourself how they gathered the data
now, you’re right that the sample size is going to be different than the population. however, there is a science and math to this stuff where you can use formulas in order to account for that. let me give a simple example
let’s say you live in Townsville with a population of 60 people. 20 of those people are male and 40 are female. you want to find out whether everyone likes vanilla or chocolate ice cream, so you go to the bowling alley. at the bowling alley, there are 10 men and 10 women. so you survey everyone but you realize
the sample size demographics are different than the actual population demographics. in the population, females outnumber males 2 to 1 whereas in the sample population it’s 1:1. so you need to weigh your votes accordingly
you can either do one of two things - you can count every vote from a woman twice. or you can count every vote for a men at a ratio of 50%. that way you are representing the population demographics more accurately
polling agencies do this but with a myriad of different demographic properties. age, sex, gender, income, ethnicity, etc, in order to try to get a more accurate number. you will never be able to exactly represent a population with a small sample size, but you can get pretty damn close within a margin of error.
tldr: polls are not perfect but they absolutely can help predict public sentiment because of some statistical axioms (Law of Large Numbers, Central Limit Theorem, Random Sampling)
I agree that there are statistical methods to everything, and they are quite powerful. My concern is that population sample is limited and, in many ways self-selecting, due to the ability of pollsters to access a representative cross section of the (population/voting population). I noted the impossibility of getting a representative sample using telephone polling. Online would be just as fraught - huge demographics literally don’t participate in those communication methods, by choice. Granted, actual voting is similarly inaccurate, and can be wildly so, do to voluntary non-participation; but the cross product of phone/internet poll users and voters, I would suspect, is pretty far from 1.0.