Donald Trump has not received a poll boost in the first presidential election survey conducted since the failed assassination attempt on Saturday.
The poll, conducted by Morning Consult of 2,045 registered voters on Monday, reveals that Trump is leading Joe Biden by just one percentage point on 46 percent, compared to the president’s 45 percent. The poll has a margin of error of +/- two percentage points.
Isn’t 2k voters a comically small sample to draw any results from? I hope it is true, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Not really, 2k is enough to have a result with a pretty low error %. Some example numbers: https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/how-many-people-do-i-need-to-take-my-survey/
That is for “1 population” though, I don’t know if the divided USA public opinion still counts as 1 population. I’m not a polling scientist, I just know that you don’t need a massive amount of data points to draw statistically sound conclusions. Try tossing a coin and see how fast it stabilizes towards 50/50, that one really surprised me the first time I did it.
You’re totally right, my statistics is very rusty, good lord. For the ~240M eligible voters in the US, you can get roughly 2% margin of error, for the usual 95% confidence level.
My comment was a bit daft, in retrospective. Surely the polling people know what they’re doing, better than I do for sure x)
I guess it goes to show how non intuitive some statistical methods can be at first?
I think 2k is a bit larger than the average polls I’ve seen which are 400 to 1500 usually.
1000 is a solid sample size to start with, doubling that is better. But ultimately polls are flawed in the designers bias. How they frame questions matters and creates biases.
Still, if the poll is asking the same question over time, then you can track trends over time.