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NBC/WSJ Poll: Oversampling | 51 comments (51 topical)

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Margin of error (none / 0) (#79)
by muffie on Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 01:47:43 PM EST
doesn't really depend on the population size, at least when the population is large.  If the population of the US was 100 million or 1 billion, the poll would have almost exactly the same margin of error.

Basically, we suppose the popular preference is fixed.  We can model this preference as a weighted coin, which lands heads some unknown percentage of the time.  If you do 1000 coin flips, you'll have a pretty good idea of the odds of getting heads vs. tails.

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NBC/WSJ Poll: Oversampling | 51 comments (51 topical)

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