The Polls Weren't Wrong

""Refreshing and lucid, methodically pedantic account what polls in fact do and do not tell us. Scathing and rigorous discussion how media covering elections in the First-Past-The-Post electoral system of the United States repeatedly attributes its own shortcomings in analysis to political polls."" -Julius Lehtinen, Editor-in-chief of Europe Elects ""Carl Allen has written a truly groundbreaking book that is a must-read for anyone interested in statistics or polling. Whether you’re already an expert in the field or a total neophyte, this book has something for everyone. And as the author poignantly points out, veteran pollsters often have as much to learn as the general public. By walking readers through the fundamental underpinnings of statistical polls, the author establishes a rigorous baseline framework through which we can view modern polling. The author then masterfully pivots to illustrate how many modern practitioners in the field have abandoned these principles altogether. And finally, the reader is shown the tangible cost of the polling industry’s errors—that the intrinsic objective of polling, providing an unbiased assessment of public opinion, has been lost in a sea of pseudoscience. For anyone who wants to understand the basis for modern polling, this book is for you.For anyone who wants to understand how the polling industry got to this point and how we can fix it, this book is for you. For anyone seeking to understand why the outcomes of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election and the 2017 Brexit Referendum were not the shock outcomes that the media represented, this book is for you.The polls weren’t wrong."" -Nick Migliacci, Senior Vice President, Caesars Entertainment ""As society not only tolerates, but in many cases rewards, misinformation, statistical literacy is a skill that has grown in importance, arguably on par with literacy itself. Statistics education, although improving, has historical left a poor taste in the mouth of general education students, through an overemphasis on theory and computation rather than an appreciation of the value of the insights quantitative analyses can generate. Carl Allen takes the reader through a journey towards statistical literacy through the incredibly consequential subject of election forecasting, debunking conventional wisdom on the meaning of polls, and how they should be factored into a probabilistic predictions. Allen's prose are inviting; demystifying both the subject matter and the quantitative material through a thorough tour of our collective history of misunderstanding what polls are telling us, and how these misunderstandings can be cured through creative analogies found in the statistical literature. Whether you're interested in predicting the upcoming presidential election, or (hopefully) future ones, this book is an essential read."" -Eric Eager, VP of Football Analytics, Carolina Panthers ""Carl's treatment of the topic of polls is remarkably valuable. I'm not an expert in poll data specifically but I am an expert in inferential statistics, the major tool employed by Carl in this book. And I'm well aware of the tendency for even the experts to misapply and misunderstand complex formulas that they perhaps know how to plug numbers into and churn out answers for, but lack a deep understanding of. A critical gap in the understanding of statistics and probability as it applies to any subject, is a lack of the proper intuition and understanding of potential pitfalls resulting in a mindless application of the tools at hand that leads to incorrect or unjustifiable conclusions. Carl's methods of building up this intuition and statistical competence using examples from fields beyond just political polling, from the simple ideas to the complex, is a critical approach that is often overlooked when someone dives into any field heavily reliant on statistics, particularly when the statistics isn't the reason the practitioner was initially interested in the field. Carl's approach is often blunt and direct, but I find it charming, refreshing, and reminiscent of my university mathematics education when I was exposed to unintuitive but correct concepts in mathematical reasoning. For those who are apprehensive, I highly suggest you heed Carl's warning in the preface about not skipping the background material in the first part of the book, and accept having your intuitions challenged."" -Matt Reynolds, Ph. D Applied Mathematics