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Majority of American Voters Shrug at Trump Indictment. 53 Percent Want Him Pardoned If Convicted
(www.rollingstone.com)
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here's the actual poll
they sampled an incredibly small sample size. It's extremely easy to get fucked up results from assuming that you can make a poll representative of Americans as a whole. Like. where I live... most people in the state want him locked up (or you know. burned at the stake.) But, you go an hour out the cities and even the democrats there would be likely to express some hesitancy. Because it's trump country out there.
and that assumes the poll wasn't meant to get this result (for example polling in ways that get maybe more conservative democrats. or people simply lying and saying they're democrats.)
The section that says "Results were weighted for age within gender, region, race/ethnicity, marital status, household size, income,
employment, education, political party, and political ideology where necessary to align them with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online." kinda sticks out to me, too.
Yeah, that admission kind of makes me pause when considering the results. There should have been a page of the published poll that better described how this was taken. For instance, doing just a LAN line poll skews poll results considerably.
But it's only the beginning of the fed case against Trump, so I'm sure opinion will change.
Actually the sample size checks out. I love it when people see "Smol number not as big as big number, therefore sample size bad" and I am going to pull a very elitist argument here and say that people at Harvard University likely know more about polling than you do, just saying.
Small sample size is fine when it's representative of the population. Trying to extract nationwide sentiment, a very diverse thing, off a small size is unlikely to be very representative.
Except the numbers work out, and studies have made very very sweeping generalizations based on much smaller sample sizes of much larger demographics (for example the 1 in 5 myth comes from a study that had less than 100 respondents). This study is a dream compared to those.