DO.NOT.GET.SWAYED.BY.POLLS.OR.STATS.
VOTE
It should, however, be a nice encouragement to the people out there in red or purple states: You can do this. It’s worth going out and getting your voice heard. The weird loser can be defeated for good, and if it’s overwhelming enough his entire fucking party can go the way of the Whigs.
Living in WV right now and you know I’m getting out there to vote
Same in Kentucky. We elected a democratic governor, we can do this!
his entire fucking party can go the way of the Whigs.
Or the Know-Nothings.
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this looks like a misrepresentation or partial representation of Nate silvers.
This looks like polls not probs
Nate Silver is a gambler. That’s how he got into this. No disrespect to the actual journalists who’ve worked at 538.
You’re saying that the numbers displayed are indicating the % of polls that favor each candidate in that state, not the probability the candidate will win each state overall?
So the text of the tweet says % chance of winning, but the figure seems to show the poll numbers.
A poll number isn’t the same as the probability of winning at a given poll number. They are related but not the same.
It just looks like maybe the full tweet wasn’t screenshotted?
I subscribed to his substack but I’m on mobile and lazy and don’t want to go grab the numbers.
Both the text and the map show probability, not polls.
Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump in 5 battleground states, tied in Georgia, poll finds
yeah I pay for nates blog, I but the issue I’m taking is with whoever retweeted this. They are conflating polling and probability.
All the toss-up states are still toss-ups. States are starting to look competitive were always competitive. No Republican has won the popular vote since Bush in 2004. Prior to that, no Republican won the popular vote since Bush in 1988. (No irony intended).
Americans just love bush…
It’s ok to post just a picture? I thought I’d point out that these actually aren’t polls, they are poll averages. There’s no cross tabs, where the real story can be seen.
These are neither polls nor poll averages, they are probabilities.
Probability based on averages of polls
Not just based on the averages.
Remember 2016 polling? Vote!
Even if a state is polling blue now, the reds have been doing their damndest to suppress a lot of votes, and that will probably have a greater effect on election day than in these polls.
VOTE
Oh thank fuck
I never understand the concern of the “don’t look at polls just vote!”
Do people really think voting is just a “if enough of us do it I don’t have to” thing?
It’s your civic JOB and you should make every effort to vote, to that best of your availability, regardless of your perception of the race
Do people really think
Literally yes. People in swing states weren’t all that enthusiastic and stayed home assuming Hillary was a shoe-in for POTUS that night. And then we got three new fascist SCOTUS justices and a fascist executive branch for four years.
I’m not attacking you, but source? Like, a source identifying this specific situation (about poll perception)
Cause that situation could just have been:
- A swing but bluish place, where analysts considered Clinton viable
- Voters uninterested in Clinton
I don’t think you can find proof of what you’re asking for, it’s like proving a negative. You’d first have to prove that they were going to vote, yet then chose to stay home. I’ve never seen a poll that does that.
I’ll offer this, though: How Trump won the presidency with razor-thin margins in swing states
Of the more than 120 million votes cast in the 2016 election, 107,000 votes in three states effectively decided the election.
So it wouldn’t take a lot for us to guess that a bunch of people stayed home and didn’t vote because of the suggested reason, or maybe they just didn’t like HRC in the way some republicans don’t like trump - they aren’t going to vote opposition, but they’ll sit on their hands.
I guess that’s my point.
There’s just this common trope that people should “ignore polls” but I’ve never seen evidence that poll-comfortability is a real problem.
Things like access to voting stations, harassment near voting stations, purging of voter lists, now those, those are real problems.
Check your registration status folks
Clinton lost the Electoral College by a collective 80,000-ish votes across three swing states: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. (It was 80,000, not 107,000. The overall amount of turnout wasn’t bad (for example, in Michigan, it went from 63% 2012 to 61% 2016 and shot up to 71% in 2020 to get Trump the fuck out of office). However, Trump’s turnout was considerably better. Per the NYT:
If the turnout had been as good for Mrs. Clinton as it was for Mr. Trump, she would have won by our analysis. But even then, she would have only scratched by.
And the thing is, there should have been even stronger turnout by the Democrats to keep this insane threat out of office. This man was a raving lunatic, and every Democrat saw him as one. But there wasn’t. All the polls showed Hillary winning, and so I imagine plenty of people just assumed it to not be their job. As shown above, for instance, people turned out in droves in Michigan in 2020 to boot Trump out (Trump lost by about 150,000 votes there). So my main contention is that turnout was depressed compared to what it should’ve been with what an obviously insane threat this man was to our country but simply wasn’t because the other candidate was whatever and was basically sure to win anyway.
“so I imagine”
Registered voters who didn’t vote on Election Day in November were more Democratic-leaning than the registered voters who turned out, according to a post-election poll from SurveyMonkey, shared with FiveThirtyEight. In fact, Donald Trump probably would have lost to Hillary Clinton had Republican- and Democratic-leaning registered voters cast ballots at equal rates.
The biggest reason given by non-voters for staying home was that they didn’t like the candidates.
Clinton, apparently, couldn’t get those who disliked both candidates — and who may have been more favorably disposed to her candidacy — to turn out and vote.
So I can’t substantiate through hard numbers the idea that people didn’t turn out because they assumed she was winning, but we were both there. Polls ranged anywhere from a 3/10 chance to a 1/100 chance for Trump. The talk among Democrats was that we had a female president like it had already happened. If you talked to your friends about it, the consensus was that Trump was an unviable clown and that we were in for four boring-ass years of the status quo. If you ran in progressive circles, the idea was that since the Democrat was a shoe-in anyway, it should’ve been Bernie, because even his more radical ideas couldn’t lose against a trainwreck like Trump. Literally everyone was shocked when the election was called for Trump. I can substantiate through a reliable source that those who liked neither candidate but would have likely preferred Hillary stayed home and were a large factor in her not winning by such thin margins. But I have to ask you to take my hand and believe that a decent portion of those apathetic dislike-both voters who would’ve preferred Hillary didn’t go vote because of the sort of premature consensus around Hillary’s victory.
These are not polls they are odds of winning.
Latest Quinnipiac poll of Pennsylvania has Harris up by 3 points, 50% to 47%. Based on that low level of undecided/3rd party voters, trend lines, historical movement of polls from mid August to November, Nate Silver’s model predicts that 59% of the time, the candidate who is winning 50% to 47% right now will win the state in November.
If these were the poll numbers she’d probably be in Texas trying to flip it, that would be crazy.
Polls can be (and are) easily manipulated. It’s well known that historically the left stays home “because the polls looked so good!”
Voting wins elections. Not polls. Vote!
