- Joined
- Mar 27, 2014
- Messages
- 63,340
- Reaction score
- 33,264
- Location
- Tennessee
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Undisclosed
Your actual argument is based on a faulty premise of summary statistics. The RCP uses the arithmetic average. By using the arithmetric mean, they're not saying, "We believe all of these polls have equal importance." They're saying, "We need is a single value that attempts to describe these polls by identifying the central position within these polls." It's called, "central tendency." They just need one value that describes all the polls recorded within the last week.
That's exactly what they're saying because the method they use to aggregate them results in them being treated AS IF they have equal importance.
And they don't use "all the polls."
Now I'm willing to grant you that prehaps not every poll is included in the average, whether it's due to timing inconsistencies, or incomplete data on the part of individual pollsters, or maybe they just didn't want to look at random online poll due to it's flawed sampling methodology. However, you'll only assuming this; you're not demonstrating this.
Good that you are willing to grant me REALITY. If you want to prove it to yourself, here's a listing of all the polls ranked by 538, then try to trace them to the final 2016 RCP poll. You'll see RCP only includes a small sample of all polls made public.