Nate Silver Quotes

National polls basically always misinterpret the final outcome or mis-predict the final outcome.

Exit polls have gone notoriously wrong in the past.

One should be weary of drawing too many inferences from a single poll. You can find wildly disparate results with two different polls. There is no question that American Muslims remain one of the most marginalized and demonized groups in United States. There has been a sustained propaganda campaign against Muslims for over a decade and it doesn't disappear over night. Those attitudes are hardened. But one of the things that polling often doesn't measure is the intensity of opinions.

Everyone takes surveys. Whoever makes a statement about human behavior has engaged in a survey of some sort.

I'm a believer in the polls, by the way. Rarely do you see a poll that's very far off.

Polls are frequently taken to try to tease out or determine likely directions and trends, but once taken, they belong to the past, requiring that new polls be taken.

Polls are inaccurate in my opinion, based upon anecdotal evidence, based upon people that I know.

The errors in media polling rarely benefit a Republican.

Our polling methodology has gotten outdated, and, in fact, it's not really telling us what it needs to be telling us.

I don't believe in traditional, head-to-head polling.

Every time I think that political analysts and writers will finally recognize that most of them don't understand much about political polls, they prove me wrong. They don't know how to read them; they don't understand the importance of cross tabs within a given poll, and they don't know how to analyze them.

Banning pre-poll surveys is certainly no answer in today's world. Sensitising the public and the media as to the good, bad, and desirable aspects of survey research is more sensible than that.

I know that a lot of people love to say that polls are wrong or don't matter, and from time to time they are - it depends on who they are polling.

Sampling, statisticians have told us, is a much more effective way of getting a good census.

There are so many things the people who take polls never get around to asking.

Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing.

If you believe these polls, you're making a mistake.

Big data has been used by human beings for a long time - just in bricks-and-mortar applications. Insurance and standardized tests are both examples of big data from before the Internet.

You'd think experienced political professionals would know better than to place their trust in exit polls, notoriously inaccurate surveys that had John Kerry winning the 2004 election by five points when he actually lost by three.

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

If you aren't taking a representative sample, you won't get a representative snapshot.

Certainly, last year we did an episode about the census and sampling versus a direct statistic. You just said the word 'census,' and people fall asleep.

Those market researchers... are playing games with you and me and with this entire country. Their so-called samples of opinion are no more accurate or reliable than my grandmother's big toe was when it came to predicting the weather.

Polls are only good for dogs.

I've learned a long time ago not to take polls too seriously.