Bad data is potentially of harm, possibly leading to incorrect conclusions and actions, in ways that no data does not.
Not sure if that is the point at this point though. What we have, as I understand it, is lots of historical data that polls at this point before an election have no significant correlation to general election results, beyond say something like +/- 10 points. Barring events that change things. Of which there are almost always many.
We probably have enough recent historical data to be fairly confident of reasonable floors of each party being 45%.
The conclusion we can state right now based on that is that polling data being reported at this point is insufficient to tell us anything. Now IF polling data was saying it was Trump 58 to Biden 42, or visaversa, it might be of note.
Absent that a thousand times something worth zero is still worth zero at best.
Democrats have 22 million more voters, but they tend to be a more limp, unmotivated bunch than Republicans. Republicans have greater intensity.
At the risk of a bad analogy, in the Yom Kippur War, Israel had less artillery than the Arabs, but fired its artillery much more quickly and efficiently. So the net amount of shelling was the same. That’s what Republicans do.
This goes more deeply to the OP’s question than individual polls. The U.S. long ago left any world in which voters pick candidates by anything other than party, except for rare occasions. The vast majority vote for the R or D.
We’ve certainly had close presidential elections and evenly divided Congresses before. That the country remains this knife-edge close for this long is, I believe, unprecedented. That it’s occurring at the exact time period when the ability to easily reach a representative sample of the population after an 80-year run is confounding.
Zillions of pundits have dumped on us their thoughts on why the parties are as split are they are. Why they happened to sort out into two almost exactly equal groups and do so in several states hasn’t been explained as well. Or at all. I know of no reason why R’s and D’s should be equal. It’s freaky.
If we were physicians making decisions on cancer care, sure. Low quality data is usually wrong.
But just batting ideas back and forth for fun, I find it harder to see.
And, if I can say it politely, I’m not sure that you really see it, since in your next post you provided that data on the 45 percent of Republicans who told a pollster that they wouldn’t vote for a convicted felon. Based on your 45 percent floor hypothesis, you may not much believe it to be significant, but it is real data and it makes sense to me that you provided it.
One reason I don’t believe the 45 percent is this:
Most of those convicted criminals can vote, and a whole bunch of close relatives, who can also vote, love them. This, and the crazy U.S. incarceration rate, make me afraid that Trump being convicted, and even sent to prison, could help him appeal to a constituency normal politicians ignore.
So your hypothesis is that being a convicted felon will get Trump the felon and family vote? Okay.
I take the poll I cited with several grains of salt and still believe something like 45% for any GOP presidential candidate is a floor, based on past elections. And I believe that this poll is very suggestive that there will be some meaningful negative impact on GOP turnout if Trump is convicted of a felony. (Turnout and a few swing votes in key states decide.)
That position is not without any evidence, and that big of a number holds up to a wide error bar.
1000 people is lots of people. It’s plenty as long as the random selection criteria is suitable. The good polls know how to do that so a thousand is enough. So many people think you need to poll 100,000 or 1,000,000 people or more to do an accurate poll. I don’t think most folks understand the math of probability and statistics. And it’s really simple math that even I can do.
Didn’t Verizon have a “Felons and Family” plan? I don’t really remember but wasn’t the way it worked that when the family signs up for a two-year plan then the felon gets three free burners each month?
Well, there probably are more misdemeanor criminal ex-cons. And they can actually vote.
It’s more of a fear than a hypothesis.
If Trump goes to jail or prison, a lot will depend on how DJT behaves there. News stories saying how he took up a wing of the lockup, with the remaining inmates forced to double up in already overcrowded cells, would hurt him. A few stories on him socializing with fellow inmates would be golden.
The other problem is that sensational stories about crooked Trump prevent Biden’s messaging from being heard.
If the Secret Service wants to go to jail, and Trump sends them away, ex-cons will like that. Is Trump gonna do that? Probably not. But he might.
Presumably he means that Trump would have a Secret Service detail-- as all ex-presidents are entitled to-- even in prison. It sounds bizarre I know, but we are in a bizarre place right now.
No, what I meant was about the pair of them, in response to Mean_Mr.Mustard.
As to Biden, it’s been very nearly a year since he had 50% approval. I think he has done quite a good job in a country that is practically ungovernable. That the only candidate even remotely fit for the job has gone a year without 50% approval is itself pretty surprising.
As to Trump, I think if Lincoln could come to life and see his party, he would never stop vomiting.
I think this just points out the idiocy of approval ratings. 45% of the country will automatically say they disapprove of the president’s performance if he’s from the opposite party, so if even half of the undecideds (or 10% of same-party voters) aren’t happy, the president can’t clear 50%.
Completely agree on Trump. If this country were sane the polls would be 98-2 in Biden’s favor.
FWIW I don’t think the problem is a lack of motivation. It’s that those on the far left tend to think things like there’s no difference between them, nothing will change, or why does it matter who wins. That type of thinking also seems to occur when Democrats have been in charge (after Bill Clinton’s first 2 years, after 8 years of Clinton, after 2 years of Democratic control when Obama won in 2008, after 8 years of Obama in 2016). In other words, the far left will get up to vote against someone like Trump, but are a lot less enthusiastic about voting for a moderate Democrat.
The polls reveal a ridiculous result because, at the end of the day, people are ridiculous. There’s a very small percentage that aren’t and, unless you have a voting procedure that minimizes their impact, you’re going to get ridiculous, “Bat Boy Lives!” style results.
The Framers of the Constitution were professional politicians and lawyers, who spent their lives dealing with organizing groups and taking votes off of them. When they sat down to design our government, they had the Senate and the President both be elected by secondary bodies. That wasn’t for no reason. The democratic push to remove that gives us the present world that we see.
Back room politics, where some political machine selects who has which job, isn’t good and shouldn’t be restored but the old way and the current way aren’t the only ways to run an election. There are systems that could be put in place to get the riff-raff out of the election and still reduce corruption. Making everything public - lobbying money, corporate interests, voting record, etc. - and putting the question to the average voter clearly doesn’t do that.
Or perhaps the fact that it was a special election in which the two parties each quickly found someone anyone to run against him, candidates who did not have name recognition, and which had extremely low turnout, had something to do with it?
Now that’s light turnout!
Of course people are ridiculous. But I have a hard time imagining a system designed by those in charge to get rid of the riff raff being designed to actually accomplish anything other than to entrench power to those who have it.
One thousand people, properly selected as a random sampling, is sufficient to give a high probability of the whole within a few points of error. That’s completely established.
And also irrelevant to what I was saying. If the U.S. ran presidential elections by voter totals then such a national poll would point to the winner. The U.S. does not do this. The winner of the election depends on winning the Electoral College. Therefore 51 separate totals (including D.C.) must be estimated.
Splitting 1,000 responses into 51 pots will not, except by extreme chance, give an accurate reading for each state. As I said above, a state with 1% of the population will have on average 10 responses. You can read nothing into the way they split. They could be 10-0 by sheer chance. In fact, if you do sufficient polls and they are never 10-0 by sheer chance you need to check your methodology. The swing states in the last two elections - Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin - only have 2-4% of the population, meaning that on average they would have 20-40 respondents. That cannot predict the result of a less than 1% margin in the final voting. Even the slightest split, 21-19, is a 5% margin (47.5-42.5%).
National polls at that level cannot determine the Electoral College outcome, which is the point about polls given out to the news that most people don’t understand. A Clinton margin in a national poll says nothing about state-level voting but could have been very accurate in giving the actual voting percentages.
They were, in fact. Most polls asking voters to choose among the four running major candidates gave Clinton a 2-4% lead. She won by 2%. The polls were far less accurate for overstating the number of votes that Gary Johnson and Jill Stein would get. Apparently many people who said they would vote for third parties actually voted for Trump. And people get to answer “no answer” or “none of the above” to polls, so 2-4% were unaccounted for.
The parties commission polls of far more respondents for the swing states so that the outcomes are more meaningful. That’s expensive and gives valuable information to the opposition so you hear less about them. They don’t pay attention to the latest Baskin & Robbins/Cheetos poll and neither should you.
Jim Messina, who served as then-President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign manager and has at times informally advised Biden, said that 2024 will feature “the smallest map in the history of American politics.”
Glad to see that Messina has found something to do after Kenny Loggins dumped him.
And he makes a valuable point. The election will be decided in maybe a half dozen states unless spectacularly weird stuff happens in the next year. (Which is not only a possibility but probably more likely this year than at any time in our history since Kennedy’s assassination a year before the election decided 1964.)
All campaigns concentrate their people, time, money, and ads on states that are close. Biden can’t campaign as the quiet, reassuring grandpa from his basement this time. He has to shout just as loud as the other side will be shouting, and make his accomplishments crystal clear in simple language. He also has to hope that the economic indicators that are looking favorable at this point continue to do so for another whole year.
For those tending to panic, remember he won by 72 electoral votes. He can afford to lose Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Nevada if he keeps the rest. Or both Georgia and Michigan. Or some mixture of these. Trump has to flip three or four of these states to get to 270. That’s hard to do in a 50/50 contest. A strong third party taking votes from Biden could change everything, of course. Or it could take votes from Trump. In meantime, since nobody knows nothing about the future, sticking to the expected is the only way to go.