Another 4 years of liberals crying about trump…
Kill yourself.
With what?
Who answers polls?
Blame the polls if you want. The race is a coin flip. I find it hard to stomach too, but I’m not in denial about it.
I did, a few weeks ago.
I’m part of that 5% thay says she aint left enough.
“If I can’t get universal healthcare, I’ll vote for the end of all social services and democracy as we know it. That’ll show em!”
Did I fucking say that?
Old people, mostly.
Just vibes will win the presidency…
Just like always.
Honestly, you can’t trust the tv news polls. They want people to watch and Trump gets them numbers.
Polling is broken.
Margin of error above 3%. Non-story.
Not to mention, NBC ran the numbers with different turnout cases. In one of those cases, a very realistic but small few percentage point changes in turnout assumptions of different demographics could make the poll swing to 49% Harris to 46% Trump
How different turnout models change the NBC News poll results
Further, two other national polls released today showed the race as Harris+3. A lot of the dooming tends to be based on single polls. Yes the polls suggest race is close, but only paying attention to anything bad/mediocre isn’t helpful either
Don’t doom, take action instead
Make sure to register to vote. Deadlines are fast approaching in many states
Find opportunities to volunteer for dems around you and online
Write letters to voters in swing states or in competitive downballot races
People who downvote are encouraged to take Statistics 101.
<3
The media wants a race. That’s the only way they get viewers.
Landslide stomps get views too. They made a game of Reagan’s run in literally 1984 trying to predict if he could win all 50 states or not. (He fell one short).
It can be both things.
There are no definitive data points that should lead anyone to believe that either candidate has a significant advantage.
I’m not sure anyone who is well versed in election projections or polling would say anything other than it’s a toss up. As a heavy consumer of said data and reporting, I haven’t seen anything to the contrary.
You’re not wrong about media incentives, but they’re also not wrong that this is a very close race.
Thank you! That was point. It’s close. Harris holds a steady, yet small lead. The media will always make it seem closer than what it is though for ratings.
Or… it really is THAT close of a race. When we shrug it off as “the media just wants a race” we get complacent.
www.vote.gov make sure you’re registered and double check even if you think you already are. Early voting is happening in some states. Get active
Always vote like your vote will make a difference. It might, especially local races. If we accidentally turn the election into a sweep by everyone voting, oh well.
Who’s shrugging off anything? Did I say that? Nope. I’m just saying that we can have a close race and it still be true that Harris holds a 3-point lead nationally and small leads in the swing states. My point is that the media ALWAYS try making it even closer than what it is. Do you disagree with that?
It could also be true that Trump holds a 3 point lead. It could go both ways.
Fucking HOW?
A) Has Biden markedly improved your day to day life or indicated a massive amount of progressive changes to the system?
B) Is the system likely to radically change away from corporate control/lobbying and towards a strong government agenda any time soon?
If you answered no to both these questions, you should understand why people want Trump in. He represents radical change, a concentration of government power in the executive branch. Sweeping changes under the guise of helping “real Americans” and harming the usual scapegoats (immigrants, gangs, socialists).
That’s the thing; Harris has played towards a center that is greatly weakened/absent in times of political division (she’s not selling herself as being a progressive change, like for instance Obama did with his HOPE campaign).
Where as Trump has played to the far-right, which is actually present and there in divided times like this.
You have to play to the side that’s there if you want enthusiasm.
Harris didn’t play towards progressives who want change (Bernie Sanders crowd). So they’re only voting to prevent Trump’s fascism, not because they actively expect sweeping progress from Harris (who champions establishment causes like border control and Israel).
She hasn’t escaped Biden and the status-quo corporate grind. Trump has escaped his conscience about appearing centrist. Division serves him, counts against her, because she’s playing to the absent center, where he’s not.
He represents radical change, a concentration of government power in the executive branch. Sweeping changes under the guise of helping “real Americans” and harming the usual scapegoats (immigrants, gangs, socialists).
While we know Trump is a conman, I would understand this as a rationale for those that didn’t believe he was a conman, except we’ve already HAD 4 years of a Trump Presidency. If he was promising these great reforms for the little guy, why didn’t he do any of them in the 4 years he was in office? Why do people think this time will be different?
It’s not rational, it’s based on feelings.
You’re not dealing with rational fact based thinkers. You’re dealing with people who see him as a proven common type person who shoots from the hip.
… and they don’t mean he’s common in that he’s poor. They see him as honest/common/like them BECAUSE he shoots off hit takes and says things other politicians wouldn’t.
That’s why they love it qhen he says hlw crappy Detroit is IN Detroit. He’s done similar in several cities now, and they see this as proof he’s like them. They’re down, he’s down. They want to MAGA, he wants to MAGA.
The thing that stopped him last time was all these deep state lawsuits.
Again, these are not rational people.
All that said, maybe it is a rational response to that Black Mirror episode about social credits.
These are all good points, but it’s really not that complicated. Imagine if there were only two NFL football teams. The right are simply die-hard fans of their team and nothing will sway them to change their allegiance to the other side. Nothing.
Policy doesn’t mean shit to them.
Integrity doesn’t mean shit to them.
The Constitution doesn’t mean shit to them.
Upholding a democracy doesn’t mean shit to them.
As long as “their team” wins, that’s all that matters. That’s are not smart people we’re dealing with here.
If that is the case, it’s still a better ratio in the US than in Israel. Israel has a solid majority of far right supporters, the left have no possibility of winning over there.
Hope my society goes the European route of having multi party democracies such as the Open List Proportional representation systems in like, Germany, or wven further afield like in Japan.
Either way we get Reagan’s 12th term
You got downvotes, but I get your point. We still have scars from Reaganomics and other crimes.
13th
quick we must go even further right! - dnc strategists
Democrats keep conceding right-leaning policies as if Republicans actually just want those policies
Republicans are reactionary - they don’t just want tougher immigration policies. They want to hurt immigrants. If democrats push right, Republicans will just go further.
There is no moderate right-wing position that can win over moderate Republicans that they can’t beat by going further right.
I’ve seen some of Blue MAGA begging for George W Bush to endorse Harris. wtf.
I remember how mad they got when Romney didn’t endorse like they felt entitled to.
So you are one of those.
Blue MAGA? Wtf are you talking about?
WTF is “Blue MAGA”?
I don’t see people on the left holding onto what was and getting stuck on reverting to times of old. Preventing the forward march of changing times.
Blue Maga: we need to talk about the cult-like turn of the Democratic party https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/15/democrats-joe-biden-maga
That’s a laughable bad take.
The left, known for picking apart their candidates and platforms and fucking themselves by letting perfect the enemy of good repeatedly being called out as “cult-like”.
I’m voting for Harris. But lemme tell you, I’ve got issues with her. Especially her history as “pro cop”.
The thing is, many people on the left vote for “harm reduction”. We know there’s better candidates out there, but we’re stuck with what we’ve got in the FPTP voting we have.
Objectively, voting for Harris will cause the least harm in this election.
Especially if our alternative is a ratfucking tyrant that wants to be a “dictator”, wants to “ban protests”, revoke the broadcast licenses of media outlets critical of him & his party, would authorize Israel to wipe out Gaza with our direct support of our troops, would consolidate wealth to the top, and is openly working with the deranged likes of a man that dreams of making his workers indentured servants and would push the USA to reflect apartheid South Africa to relive the glory his father did.
A dead heat in polling is not an even race. We know Democrats need a significant lead to be break even on election day.
The Electoral College gives Republicans a significant advantage.
Its not just the EC. That exists, yes, but its not the biggest stumbling block for team D’, this is:
Trump historically outperforms his polling. In 2020, even though he lost, he over performed his polling by 8 points. As in, he lost 2020, but he should have lost way worse based on what polling indicates. This is most-likely an issue with “likely voter” demographics models, in that Trump voters are regularly under surveyed as the don’t look like likely voters on paper.
Don’t you think the pollsters have compensated for that by now? This has been known for years and years.
Yeah thats a great question. Short answer, no, I don’t. Long answer, is that its complicated and too hard to know. Safe answer is, just assume the above as the best guess for what biases will look like on election day.
The problem with being able to compensate for what the above data show is that you have to have extremely good demographic models, specifically for demographics you didn’t capture in your original sample. I think part of the reason why stochastic modeling misses these things is that its not really a forwards-in-time facing type of analysis. You can’t compensate for a future state if that state is unknown, you can only go backwards to account for your prior (but even that is still facing backwards).
However, I don’t agree that stochastic models are where we should stop with trying to understand these kinds of things. There are plenty of phenomena where we engage with a range of classes of models to try to get an idea of where things should be. Some examples of these are things like process based models, which are a kind of simulation to estimate based on some parameterization, how things came to be. You’ll often do a kind of bayesian filtering on these kinds of models to get down to results that match your data, then use the priors to hopefully understand something about the system. So in the context of electoral politics, it would be trying to understand why someone gets off the couch to vote, or join a movement, or whatever.
So I think that the data in these stochastic samples are good, but the problem is that voting really isn’t a random effect. I think the results are likely good, but they are only going to be as good as the last time the voter demographics were sampled (if they were even updated for that), and then as relevant as those demographics are to the actually electorate who shows up when November 5th rolls around.
A great example of this phenomena in play was the Bernie/ Hillary primary race in 2016. Hillary had the support of basically every mainstream media outlet on the left, all of the DNC, all of Washington. Yet, she was on-track to lose until the DNC stepped in and put their thumbs on the scales. Why? How was that possible? How was Bernie out-performing all of his polls?
Bernie was outperforming his polls because he wasn’t drawing on the same distribution of voters for whom polls are focused. He was turning disengaged, non-voters, into engaged participants in a process. And you can’t measure that with your last demographic sample, because according to your best most recent measurement: those people don’t vote.
Trump does something very similar. He is gathering disenfranchised, disengaged, non-voters and turning them into voters. And you’ll never capture that with a polling model based on last elections voter demographics, when the strategy is to fundamentally shift the demographics.
If pollsters were to massively weight their numbers as I’m describing, Democrats would be getting thunked right now. Its why having a >5% polling advantage going into election day is so important for Democrats.
Thank you for a good write-up. Much appreciated.
I still think Trump is such a well-known commodity now and all of this is nothing new. We’ve been talking about his “hidden voters” so much for so long that I actually think polls may be overcompensating a bit for that. Or at least they could be pretty well calibrated for it at this point. Guess we’ll see in less than a month.
I still think Trump is such a well-known commodity now and all of this is nothing new. We’ve been talking about his “hidden voters” so much for so long that I actually think polls may be overcompensating a bit for that.
I would be ecstatic for that to be the case. Unfortunately, both the 2016, and 2020 polling disagree. But right now, the data we have at our disposal do not support that case.
I’m curious what you think pollsters are doing when you say:
Or at least they could be pretty well calibrated for it at this point.
Like, in stochastic modeling, you have to do things like having a truly random sample to develop your statistics on. Pollsters hands are kind-of tied in this regards and the data is mostly available for download. I’m curious if you think there is some kind of demographic weighting that you think pollsters are doing on the back end?
Yes, I definitely think pollsters are compensating for Trump’s hidden voters by now. Like you say, they’ve had both 2016 and 2020 to get it worked into the polling. It’s rare to get three tries to work it out. I’d be very surprised if they undercount it again.
Please note the momentum shift that started just around the DNC convention. Ask yourself what changed in the Harris campaign at that time.
No, it started after the debate. The DNC told her to abandon her working rhetoric of “not going back.” And they told Walz to stop using the weird moniker, which was the first negative connotation that ever really stuck to Trump. It’s like they not only don’t want to support actual progressive ideas that people actually want, but they also don’t want to win.
nbc had the race tied at this point in 2012. how’d that election turn out?
all gas, no brakes.
They had Hillary with a ten point lead at this point in 2016.
If Harris starts speaking like Clinton then I’d be worried… as worried as a wiped server… you know… with a cloth.
What about in 2020?..
A projected blowout is bad for ad revenue.
"Keep watching, our ad space is in great shape for the quarterly earnings report "
Not even giving them the click. I know who I’m voting for.
I got worried at first, but upon further inspection this is a return2ozma post.
Nothing here is truthful or holds any merit.
Good day
