Really? According to Wikipedia, the popular vote was 51.3% Biden, 46.9% Trump.
Must have been the result of a disingenuous Faux news graphic.
With political polling, there is a test where we can check the final poll results against actual. If polling accuracy was going down, we thus can know. Although 2020 polling performance apparently was substandard, the articles I’ve come across at 538 don’t show a general falloff of accuracy in the cellphone/internet era.
In terms of horse race handicapping we do at StraightDope, my problem with criticizing polling has to do with what to replace it with. In my view, the two leading alternatives to the polls are wishful thinking and catastrophizing. While I might be psychologically inclined a bit in the latter direction, neither is likely to improve on imperfect polling.
I think @TeroSunbear was saying the election was 51% Biden and 47% Trump. They just rounded the numbers.
Maybe so, but not mentioning Biden’s name there made it seem like they were saying “The election went for Trump, 51%-47%.”
Me, too.
Sorry, was on phone, 51% Biden. Anyway, that is still very close, and the support for the two is likely to be still similar. Disgruntled people who voted for Trump are still disgruntled.
I think Trump has peaked and then slid in terms of voting popularity. I see Trump as always finding ways to lose voters, and not gain new ones. With margins like we’ve seen, every bit counts. Trump lost to Biden when they faced off, and his stink has only gotten stinkier since then.
He gained votes between his two presidential elections.
It’s a valid point. But with the losses of his endorsed candidates, and the lack of a midterm red wave, I guess both parties gained votes. More people voted for Biden than for anyone before.
I guess my point is that I believe Trump turns more people off than he turns on, and in increasing proportion.
He’s like the durian fruit of politicians.
But, so did Biden relative to HRC, as I believe any reasonable Democratic candidate would equally have done. Voter turnout in 2020 was higher than it had been in decades. On the other hand, as I noted above, due to the machinations of the Electoral College Biden won the election by a whisker.
ETA: I noted that in the other current thread linked in one of the early replies.
The decisive factor in Biden’s victory wasn’t his seven million vote margin in the popular vote, but the fact that he carried some key states by mere thousands in addition to all the millions of votes he got from the safe blue states.
This just in (Reuters):
Georgia charges Trump, former advisers in 2020 election case
Moderating:
While I understand the impulse to share here, there is a whole thread dedicated to the indictments in Georgia.
I think MAGA voters just couldn’t/can’t believe he lost because, after all, they took the effort to go vote for him. So Trump couldn’t POSSIBLY have lost.
And then, when faced with those pesky facts, like Trump, they can’t believe the facts.
They are ‘neck and neck’ because they will answer polls. I’m not so sure they will vote again though, ‘cause the election was stolen’. They didn’t get their way.
This is a very good point.
I remember how there were runoffs in Georgia for 2 seats just after the 2020 main elections, and Trump had been beating the “election is rigged, your votes didn’t count” drum very loudly by that point. Both of those elections fell to Democrats, which was a bit of a surprise, and a number of people attributed that to Trump discouraging his followers from voting (though probably unintentionally, he just didn’t care because he wasn’t the one running).
Likewise, in the midterm elections, while Republicans did well enough to take the House, it was nowhere near the “red wave” that was predicted. They actually lost ground a bit in the Senate, and MAGA candidates in particular fared very poorly across the nation.
Now, things might be very different when it’s Trump himself running. I can see him saying something like, “They stole the last one but if enough of you vote for me even their election fraud attempts won’t be enough, and I’ll be able to make it like I did in 2016.” While a thinking person could poke a thousand holes in that argument, we’re talking about MAGA people.
But still, there may be an element of apathy among some of his followers. You never know.
These are good points in terms of the election being unpredictable.
Widespread election day rain could easily push Biden over the top now that Democrats mostly vote in advance, while Republicans wait it out until election day.
But there are circumstances going the other way. One: Likely Green Party candidate Cornel West is going to get more votes than Howie Hawkins did in 2020. This is from an Emerson College (A- 538 pollster rating) poll out today:
Might be a hijack, but I’ll never understand why Greens like West run. They know they can’t win. And they know that they will likely pull far more votes from the D candidate than the R candidate, increasing the likelihood of the R winning. And they know that the R candidate will be worse for the environment than the D candidate. So add it up, and they know their candidacy will, if anything, hurt the very cause they claim to champion.
Yay, go prove your point. Better yet, fuck off.
It’s the classic perfect is the enemy of the good scenario. Yes, there’s a definite risk of this happening. It does in part explain the poll results, so no, I don’t think it’s a hijack. Lot’s of people seem to have forgotten Ralph Nader.
Perhaps the Constitution Party can help you understand.
http://www.americanconstitutionparty.com/About%20the%20Party.html