While election almost certain to be decided by swing states, pollsters explain why growth in national polls is meaningful

While election almost certain to be decided by swing states, pollsters explain why growth in national polls is meaningful

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  • paf0@lemmy.world
    120·
    2 months ago

    It only matters in the swing states. The ones where they’re trying to purge the voter registrations, sometimes successfully. The system is broken.

    • Ben Hur Horse Race@lemm.ee
      43·
      2 months ago

      kamala harris isn’t hillary, though. I heard a recording of myself from like 2005 and a someone was saying “yeah hillary clinton can unite people” and I said “…against her” and I barely cared about politics back then.

      • Fedizen@lemmy.world
        9·
        2 months ago

        the gop has made inroads on the young white dude demographic, largely because of incels. Its more of a tossup for that reason and the electoral college (which lets all agree needs some kind of proportional rank choice fix, or to be dropped entirely for popular vote)

        • vividspecter@lemm.ee
          3·
          2 months ago

          Turnout is typically very poor amongst young people. It will be interesting to see how much young people vote, and the gender breakdown. Because if turnout is consistent across gender, then any of those gains will be wiped out by young women leaning strongly progressive (or at least, liberal).

    • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      34·
      2 months ago

      Does no one remember Jame Comey, Director of the FBI, coming out just before the election and saying they were reopening the investigation regarding her email server?

      The polls were right, at the time.

      • lennybird@lemmy.worldEnglish
        18·
        2 months ago

        Many of the keys are subject to arbitrary interpretation; Nate Silver criticized his process and arguably has a better probability model with more consistent accuracy across thousands of races somewhere around 90%. Key 2 was given to Biden despite the writing on the wall that 2/3 of Democrats wanted a contest both before and after the primaries. Key 3 Incumbency these days is more of a liability with both candidates distancing themselves. Key 9 Scandals have lost a lot of meaning in the Trump era.

        Should be noted that he gave a full-throated endorsement of Hillary Clinton… only to predict she’d lose. The thing is, he had originally referenced in two different publications ahead of that prediction that she would specifically lose the popular vote. She didn’t. He then changed his model.

        Also I’m not a fan of this guy because he belittled with insults those who called for Biden to step down… Despite not giving a prediction on Biden at the time.

        • FlowVoid@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          2 months ago

          arbitrary interpretation

          They aren’t as arbitrary as they seem, it’s just that the media don’t go into the full detail.

          For example, key 2 is actually “The candidate is nominated on the first ballot and wins at least two-thirds of the delegate votes”, which is clearly true

          Furthermore, the entire point of this method is that it ignores opinion polls. So it makes no difference whether the public actually wanted a primary contest or not. Likewise, it doesn’t matter whether scandals have “lost meaning”.

          • lennybird@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            2 months ago

            His entire methodology is contingent on history repeating itself. But we know we live in times of historical firsts that defy extrapolation.

            With key 2 it’s less about the definition and more about the allotted weight of importance. Like, imagine if the DNC simply said that “we are unilaterally awarding all delegate votes to Biden and skipping a Primaries voting process for our Democratic voters.” Yes, the key would still be True, but would that mean jack shit? Not really. And again, Incumbency is more a liability when the incumbent President’s approval rating matches Jimmy Carter. His Charisma keys are another example of subjective interpretation and which itself is clearly reflective of opinion polls.

            For all our sake, I hope he’s right. But his prediction is just as if not more useless than the aggregation of A+ polls in moments of time that can actually adapt to changing circumstances, including things like impactful scandals, military success / failures, and social unrest.

            At the end of the day Perception is Reality; even if the economy is doing well in short and long-term on paper, we again unfortunately live in unprecedented times where that is not being felt by the actual people who are, you know, going to the ballot box.

            • FlowVoid@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              2 months ago

              His entire methodology is contingent on history repeating itself.

              Any prediction is based on history. Even pollsters believe the history of polling results before an election can predict how people will actually vote on election day.

              What people usually don’t realize about the “keys” is that they aren’t advocating some political position, like “incumbency is good”. It is more like a retrospective clinical study, where you look at a bunch of factors (smoking, exercise, TV watching, eye color) and see which ones best predict some outcome of interest (lifespan). If smoking has an association with lifespan and eye color doesn’t, then smoking is a predictor and eye color isn’t.

              It doesn’t matter if people don’t understand why smoking would affect lifespan. It doesn’t matter if people think eye color should be more predictive than smoking. It doesn’t matter if people think cigarettes today are not the same as they used to be, so smoking should no longer be a predictor for lifespan. Predictors are predictors until they actually fail to predict.

        • Fedizen@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 months ago

          I mean if we understand he is a quack but he’s somewhat good at reading vibes… I would guess he’s just accurately reading the vibes, which means very little.

      • Frozengyro@lemmy.world
        4·
        2 months ago

        Polls use scientific methods too, that doesn’t mean they aren’t wildly incorrect from time to time.

    • frezik@midwest.social
      2·
      2 months ago

      Really? Because I remember:

      People learned the wrong lesson from 2016 polling.

  • Phegan@lemmy.world
    46·
    2 months ago

    We need to win by a lot more than razor thin margins, republicans are going to try and steal this one.

  • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    2 months ago

    Yesterday, I saw a few of donnie’s loyalists standing out on a corner at a place with steady traffic, trying to get cars and pedestrians to honk/give them a thumb’s up. In the hot sun. No idea if they were paid or not. They were way up in years and probably could be doing almost anything else but that. But these people love dimbulb donnie, no matter how much of a disaster he’ll be. The worse off it is for the country, they’ll cheer it on, as long as they believe donnie is going to hurt the right people.

    Just made me look forward to filling out my ballot all the more. But definitely, everyone: go vote. Don’t believe the polls.

    • tired_n_bored@lemmy.world
      22·
      2 months ago

      As a non-american this scares me.

      What the fuck does Trump have to offer to the average citizen? He is basing his campaign on

      • tax cuts for the extra rich
      • iMmIgRaNtS (who Harris wants to stop anyways)
      • licking the ass of Putin and Nethanyau
      • Oyml77@lemmy.today
        9·
        2 months ago

        Unfortunately, politics is teams sports in this country. Too many people are concerned with their side winning rather than what is best for the country or even for themselves. The propaganda machine has pushed people to support a small subset of issues as the biggest issues and these are often not the issues that actually have any impact on the day-to-day lives of most Americans. Critical thinking is not part of the discourse anymore for a large percentage, just rhetoric and slogans.

      • OhmsLawn@lemmy.world
        6·
        2 months ago

        As an American, this scares me.

        I try to share this site when national pole articles come out, because these are the only numbers that matter in our election. It doesn’t matter how blue California is if they rat-fuck the elections in the swing states.

      • nifty@lemmy.world
        5·
        2 months ago

        Trumps pov is easy to understand, and so he’s easy to buy. You only need to stroke Trumps ego and speak his language and he’s on your side. That’s why Republican politicians think they can control him, except he’s too neurotic and unstable, likely because of narcissism made worse by dementia.

        No one really votes for Republicans, that’s why they have to gerrymander and keep the electoral college alive. There’s like maybe 35%-37% of the American pop. which really supports their pov. The swing states are only ever an issue because of voter disenfranchisement, not because people actually swing. Very few people actually swing vote.

        • JimmyMcGill@lemmy.world
          3·
          2 months ago

          The electoral college favors Republicans but the narrative that “no one really votes for Republicans” is fucking bullshit

          Yes, they tend to lose the popular vote but even then % wise, it’s way closer than it should be.

          The way you phrase it, makes it seem like they are a fringe group that through cheating manages to win even if they only have half as many votes as the Democrats.

          They are popular even with, or perhaps actually because of, all of the racism, sexism and fascist tendencies. Do not downplay that.

          • nifty@lemmy.world
            1·
            2 months ago

            Last time Republicans won the popular vote was because of 9/11, so 2004, but they always lost otherwise since 1988. The racism and sexism are open wounds from the civil rights movement in the 60s and the women libs movement in the 70s. Most of the red voting states are super low population, so there’s no love for republicans other than their gerrymandering and electoral college fixing.

            I am pretty sure Trump is winning it in 2024 because of the way some of the swing states are removing access to voting. It’s such a fucking fraud

            • JimmyMcGill@lemmy.world
              2·
              2 months ago

              That doesn’t change anything I said. A significant portion of your population votes for them. Almost half of the voting population votes for them. You can’t ignore these facts.

      • FlowVoid@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        He is similar to popular non-Americans like Berlusconi, Meloni, Le Pen, and Kickl. Americans aren’t unique in that regard.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 months ago

        So they believe that Democrats automatically means higher taxes for them, regardless of income level.

        Should you manage to get them to consider the taxation would only target the wealthy, they are afraid the wealthy class will fire them due to the loss of money. Similarly afraid that stronger worker protections would just lead to the jobs going away. They think the benefits achieved by Democrats favor cities and rural areas don’t see their moneys worth. Now they didn’t spend that much money on taxes and they do get great benefit, but they see the cities get bigger stuff and that leaves an impression.

        Speaking of jobs going away, they fear immigrants. Both on racist grounds and the general perceived increase in labor competition.

        Fewer arms to Ukraine because they see it as wasting money on a cause that has nothing to do with them. More arms to Israel because they are afraid of Muslims.

        Particularly dangerous as key people recognize this is a lot of people, but not the majority. So there’s a great fear that democratic voting means they would ultimately be marginalized. So they also are the party most inclined to game the vote however they can, mapping districts, limiting voting access, stalling absentee ballots.

  • Buffalox@lemmy.world
    5·
    2 months ago

    Is that like rubber bands, it’s the same amount only stretched? Like we changed the scales on the graph to make it look bigger.
    Is it really normal to write like that headline in English? Because to me it sounds stupid.
    Seems increases would be the “normal” word to use.

    • A_A@lemmy.world
      6·
      2 months ago

      i agree but the title would become :
      “Harris stretches increases lead over Trump in what could be significant increase”
      … so then you have twice this same word in the title, which doesn’t sound so good.

          • Buffalox@lemmy.world
            1·
            2 months ago

            No it’s stupid because stretching something generally means by using less like stretching resources by using less, or stretching a band by pulling it making it thinner.
            That’s why it’s stupid because it contains none of the original meaning.
            I can figure out in sports it probably comes from stretching out (muscles), like giving it a bit of extra effort. But the headline doesn’t work in that context either.

            So in short, it’s a stupid use that is erroneously used out of the original context and meaning where it had a common denominator that made sense.
            There is no stretching going on in Harris increasing her lead.

            • fartemoji@lemmy.world
              4·
              2 months ago

              If you stretch a rubber band it gets longer. The two ends of the band get farther apart. This might be easier to imagine with a broken rubber band rather than a loop. If you stretch a lead, whether in sports, politics, or anything else, the gap gets larger. The two sides get farther apart.

              • Buffalox@lemmy.world
                2·
                2 months ago

                OK a stretch can also be a distance like: “a stretch of road.” I suppose that somewhat ties it together.
                We actually have the equivalent of stretch of road and to stretch something being similar words, but we would never say stretching a lead.

    • makyo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      Semantics but I mean it does actually indicate more people polling for her instead of Turnip so it’s not stretching in that sense.

      I think they use that word because in American politics things are so polarized that it really feels like any gain really does seem like stretching the tiny group of people that can be won over like a rubber band.

  • Optional@lemmy.world
    4·
    2 months ago

    AND HERE THEY COME INTO THE BACK CORNER IT’S TRUMP IN THE LEAD WITH HARRIS SURGING UP THE INSIDE!!