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Hey, just curious: who is down-voting this Reuters article and why? Come now, don't be shy!
I encourage people not to bury their heads in sand to ignore hard truths.
13 people is a pretty piss-poor basis for an article.
This is a focus-group of undecided voters -- a small population set to begin with and a sample set designed to be small, but who will clearly decide this election on the margins. You do understand how focus groups work and quite literally all campaigns use these, correct?
And finally, little data is better than no data. Nobody came away from the debate thinking Biden won; so it's not particularly a stretch to see this would hurt him with critical battleground state undecided voters.
Edit: Whew, talk about vote manipulation. I'm astounded by the complete and utter lack of substantive rebuttal.
Focus groups aren't meant to be used for gaining an understanding of a broad swath of the population. Focus groups are used for exploratory research, concept testing, and understanding the "why" behind opinions and behaviors.
If you want to generalize trends towards large populations, you're going to need a large sample size. It's statistics that suggests that many respondents will leave you with extremely low confidence in the outcome.
For example, if you are trying to judge the voting preferences of a population of 100,000 people, you'll need 383 randomly sampled people in a survey to reach a 95% confidence interval. 13 is nowhere near the amount of people required to cover those that considered themselves "independents" before the debate.
That's not to say this tells us nothing, but it's by no means a predictive study.
*edit: I actually would say it's harmful because I think that it portrays the narrative as if it is predictive, when it's not.
Not to say this falls on deaf ears because I appreciate your actually understanding how scientific surveys work, but as you said yourself: These focus-groups of undecided voters are certainly warning-signs, and if it was flipped around, users would be up-voting this and BIden's campaign would be touting this as a great thing.
I'm all for larger studies being conducted to show the damage done; the question will then be: How will you change your perception on what needs to be done?
And golly, if only we had large sample sizes of populations comparing Donald Trump and Joe Biden in battleground swing-states. If only we could then compare those numbers to their respective numbers in 2020.... That, combined with said focus group insights, sure would be useful! /s
https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2024/05/13/new-york-times-presidential-poll-donald-trump-joe-biden-battleground-states
https://pro.morningconsult.com/analysis/swing-state-polling-may-2024
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-poised-beat-joe-biden-6-key-battleground-states-poll-1904688
And that's just the start, pre-debate no less. I cannot think of a single data-point where Biden isn't doing significantly worse than his 2020 performance. National approval ratings, black/hispanic vote, voter enthusiasm, etc.