The numbers are sad, worrysome, and disgusting, but there is a good chance they paint a picture bleaker than reality.
And roughly the same chance that reality is even worse. We’re not speaking about raw survey numbers here. These polls are corrected for the likelihood that people actually show up at the voting booth.
What is a reason to hope is the timing. Insecure times are good times for demagogues and it*s likely that the world will be a bit calmer around the next election.
IIRC they always did worse than in polls, am I really remembering wrong?
I’m too lazy to evaluate data for state elections, but in federal ones the AfD got less than expected in 2021 and 2013, but more than expected in 2017. The underestimations were both less than a single percentage point, the overestimation was closer to two.
https://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/archiv/2021.htm
So it seems that our pollsters don’t really have much of an accuracy problem and only a small precision problem.
My guess is that you’re comparing it to the highest poll numbers because those obviously made headlines. “AfD slowly lost a few points over the last months” is boring and therefore less likely to be remembered (if that headline even exists).
deleted by creator
And roughly the same chance that reality is even worse. We’re not speaking about raw survey numbers here. These polls are corrected for the likelihood that people actually show up at the voting booth.
What is a reason to hope is the timing. Insecure times are good times for demagogues and it*s likely that the world will be a bit calmer around the next election.
deleted by creator
I’m too lazy to evaluate data for state elections, but in federal ones the AfD got less than expected in 2021 and 2013, but more than expected in 2017. The underestimations were both less than a single percentage point, the overestimation was closer to two. https://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/archiv/2021.htm So it seems that our pollsters don’t really have much of an accuracy problem and only a small precision problem.
My guess is that you’re comparing it to the highest poll numbers because those obviously made headlines. “AfD slowly lost a few points over the last months” is boring and therefore less likely to be remembered (if that headline even exists).
deleted by creator