I listened to a political podcast the other day where all they talked about was poll numbers. Then I listened to an entertainment podcast that just discussed box office take, and then a tech podcast that was just about market share. So apparently we don't talk about things anymore, just about numbers that are squeezed out of things.
Political polling, in particular, has become a war of math this election season, with sites like Real Clear Politics, UnSkewed Polls and the FiveThirtyEight blog specializing in combining numbers into other numbers that are supposedly, like Voltron, more powerful than the individual units that make them up.
Each site has developed its own recipe for the mortar it uses to steady the tower of data. Real Clear Politics prefers an unbiased, straight average of whatever polls its operators arbitrarily decide to include. UnSkewed Polls argues that random chance has a liberal bias, and seeks to un-bias this bias by adding bias. Meanwhile, Nate Silver applies his own secret sauce of analysis to each and every poll; the ingredients remain unknown, but it's rumored to contain the preserved tears of Sir Ronald Fisher.
Libertarians and Las Vegans alike might prefer checking the odds at gambling website William Hill or at Intrade, a site where you bet money that one candidate or the other will get elected but for some reason it's not gambling. The idea behind this approach is that people are a lot less biased when there's cash on the line; it's all well and good to root for the home team, but you're not going to take even odds against China in Olympic table tennis.
William Hill, as of this writing, gives a 60 percent chance that Obama wins and a 33.3 percent chance that Romney wins, leaving a 6.7 percent chance that, I dunno, Ross Perot makes a long-overdue comeback.
Intrade, on the other hand, puts it at about 63.5/36.5 in favor of Obama. It was 55/45 three days ago, and 61/39 three days before that, proving that either 18 million Americans changed their mind and then changed it back over the weekend, or maybe we shouldn't be taking this whole "futures market" thing quite so seriously.
Then there are all the ad-hoc polls made by commenters on message boards, ranging from, "People in my neighborhood tend to agree with me, so I'm right," to, "Every single poll, including those commissioned by Fox News, is being dictated to the exact decimal point by the Obama administration, except when Romney's winning."
And lastly, there are those who say, "The only poll that counts is the one taken on Nov. 6." I would argue that it's more like, "The only poll that counts is the one taken on Nov. 6, if you're in Ohio and base your political decisions primarily on which billboards you saw on the way to the polling station," but there's an 87.8 percent chance I'm just being cynical.
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Born helpless, naked and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg overcame these handicaps to become a voter, a boater and a self-promoter.
