polls

I applaud Beagles for tracking down the details of that poll.  It has long been one of my many peeves that columnists, using polls to bolster their point, often fail to include details about those polls, saying only something like recent polls show without saying exactly what polls or giving any details about how the polls were conducted.  I have sent a few emails to columnists on this point and when they responded they said something like they only have so many words to put in a column and they don't want to bore their readers, which I find inadequate.  If they don't want to give details on the polls then they should leave them out of their argument.

I imagine they conducted the poll by email because offhand I can't think of any other way.  What they mean about weighing the target sample is if, say, only 10 percent of the respondents were black, but the population of the country is 20 percent black they would multiply the black respondents by two, if male respondents in the polls were 40 percent they would multiply them by some factor to bring them up to 50 percent, and so on until the percents of race, gender, education levels, etc matched the percents in the general population.  There is a problem with those who don't respond.  Do their opinions differ from those who do respond?  Probably, but I don't know if that is a significant variance.  I don't know what's to be done about that.

There should have been a comma in that 1960 number, it does not mean that the respondents come from that year somehow.  It should have been 1.960 which is the number of the respondents.

If by saying 'we still have our guns', Beagles means that he still has Old Betsy, well of course, nobody is coming after after Old Betsy, but I know Beagles is never going to believe that.


I don't see anything coming in the wake of the current shootings.  Moscow Mitch is not going to let anything come to the floor, and after a little Trump puffery about background checks, he has been whispering with Lucky Pierre so nothing will come of that.  Very well the dems will use it as a campaign issue and I think it will help their cause, which to my mind, is a good thing.