In addition, most people make up their mind by early October and so revelations this late in the game won’t change anything. Not to mention the fact that lots of people have already voted! At this point Trump’s only hope is that the polls are totally wrong or a lot more angry Northern people come out to vote.
The main article in my Dutch newspaper was about the divisiveness of this election. That this election has split the US in two. They pictured that as a highly disturbing developement.
On the Rep/Trump side, there’s businesses, and rural people.
On the dem/Clinton side, there’s politics, media, educators, and city people.
Do you think he actually would have paid her ? :dubious:
The paper’s wrong, of course: Most businesses don’t want a damned thing to do with Trump, and this has been true since he effectively equated Mexicans with murderers and rapists when he announced his candidacy.
The Republican Party is usually the Party of Big Business, but it isn’t this cycle, and that’s one of the things that’s killing the Trump campaign.
In fact, if the Republican Party can’t get its shit together and moves closer to the explicitly racist and generally hateful Breitbart end of the spectrum, businesses will move away from it because businesses don’t want to be associated with that shit. We’ve seen this with businesses disassociating themselves from North Carolina over that state’s bathroom bill. Hate is only good business if you’re willing to limit your market to a small minority, and most businesses want as large of a market as possible. This leads to bland ad campaigns, but it keeps them away from overt ties to explicitly hateful groups.
It’s true that this election has split the US, but the paper has the divide in the wrong place.
On the Trump side are all the racists and misogynists.
On the Clinton side are people who have joined the 21st century.
Actually, business is mostly on Clinton’s side. Trump has rural people. And that’s just about it.
As for Democrats joining the 21st century, whatever. Democrats and progressives in general have often described their policies as “the wave of the future” even, and perhaps especially, when those practices were barbaric or harebrained. That’s why despite their predictions, they are not actually the dominant party, and not even the dominant movement WITHIN the Democratic Party. And the Clinton Presidency is going to marginalize them even further, as minorities become even more loyal to the Clinton wing of the party and leave the angry white progressives looking for an angry leftist white guy to save them.
There’s a distinction between:
33 percent more — (36-27)/27 = 33 percent
11 percentage points more — 36-27 = 11 percentage points
Nine.
The rural/urban divide has been going on for some time. Small town America is economically depressed as well as appalled by loose-living city ways.
I think you could only portray this election as unusually divisive if you’d been living on Mars since the year 2007. Granted, this is the first election in a while (modulo Palin) where one candidate had absolutely no business being on the slate. Most election years, we’d greatly prefer one candidate over another, but a Kerry, Romney or McCain, say, is not likely to burn things to the ground. So I’d actually say that this election is, in one vital way, less divisive than some years, in that the near universal reaction to Trump is “Christ, what an asshole.” Mind you, a lot of people regard him as their kind of asshole.
What is unusual about this election is the allegations by one candidate that the system (polls, electoral process, and media) is “rigged” and that honest, upright citizens may have to take things into their hands. That kind of rhetoric is just plain dangerous. Especially when there’s a reasonable explanation for the polls and media bias (see “asshole”, above).
Polls do not attempt to adjust for partisan identification. The party anyone claims is not a demographic but is a result or finding of the polls themselves.
Imagine this scenario: a poll says that 50% of those polled will vote for Clinton and a Trump supporter says “wait, that’s skewed. The poll should balance out and ask an equal number of Clinton and Trump supporters.” That’s essentially what people are doing any time they argue that a poll should ask an equal number of people who identify with a party. The fact that more people are telling the pollsters that they identify with a party is something the poll found, not something the poll designed.
I understand your point about it not being something the poll designed, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t skew the poll.
Imagine a population of 200 people, half of whom are Democrats/Clinton supporters, and half of whom are Republicans/Trump supporters. I call 100 random people while conducting a poll, but I randomly end up calling 60 of the Democrats and 40 of the Republicans. As a result, my poll tells me Clinton is winning 60% to 40%, when that’s not actually the case.
From the point of view of an outside observer without extensive knowledge of how polling works (a.k.a. me) that seems to have been what happened with the ABC poll. Now, if the ratio of Dems to Pubs nationally is actually 4:3, then the poll would seem to reflect reality. But I can’t find any data to support that ratio.
(N.B. I hope I’m wrong. I’m not a Trump supporter “just asking questions.” I’m a Clinton supporter “actually asking questions.”) 
RCP’s definition of a tossup is very broad indeed. Trump absolutely will win Texas unless his polling numbers really collapse.
It seems unlikely to me the polls will change much between now and Election Day. They’ve been stable for awhile.
This is precisely the argument that Dean Chambers of Unskewed Polls, along with many others, used in 2012 to say that the polls weren’t reflecting the makeup of the electorate based on their notion that they were undersampling Republicans. Moreover, their idea was that party ID was static and roughly equal. This is obviously not the case and it turns out that when you run an unpopular candidate, fewer people want to identify with that party.
In 2004, exit polls found it was basically equal, with 37-37-26 D-R-I, but by 2008 it had moved to 39-32-29, with a similar breakdown in 2012.
CNN sez the campaign is in limbo - I don’t buy it: http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/24/politics/election-2016-donald-trump-hillary-clinton/index.html
That Vladimir. What a kidder!
I think this is valid as to Trump. But not necessarily as to the down-ticket R votes.
Big business cares deeply about regulation, environmentalism, and tax policy among other things. Small business does too.
As above, and as you say, no big business is publicly pro-Trump; the advertising downsides are too yuuge. That does not mean they’re not pro-R for the down-ticket races.
IMO many D’s have converted this race into a moral litmus test. In their view it goes like this: Trump has so stained the R brand that one is either totally anti-R in all races everywhere or one is Deplorable (or at very best a deplorable-sympathizer).
I’m a D, but I reject that simplistic moralistic thinking. Many R voters (and businesses) are deeply pragmatic. They want an R Congress for what R congresses have historically delivered. Trump has little to do with that.
To the degree the Trump effect is harming the R congressional candidates’ polling results so far, we’d expect to see this making business, and especially big business, *more *pro-R. But not overly pro-Trump. So we’d see corporate-shill PAC ads for various R congressmen. Or, to skirt the law, issue ads that highlight the policies they want. Which policies are linked in voters’ minds to the R candidate.
How strange that this shocking smoking gun has only been mentioned by some rando on twitter. Wonder why that is?
Sure! As I thought I made clear in my post, I understand the math. (And I forgive you your calculation error; I know you meant to post 9 percent, not 11 - no big deal and your point still stands).
But there is more than one way to state the same information, and saying something like “there were 33% more Democrats than Republicans in the group polled” could very easily be misconstrued (innocently, or with bias aforethought) to mean something like “10% were Republicans and 43% were Democrats.”
Personally, I favor wording/explaining that leaves no room for misinterpretation. There being lies, damn lies, statistics, and all.
I’d be a crappy politician, because I prefer explication to spin.
I don’t think this has been posted yet. Kellyanne Conway admits Clinton is ahead.
Since Trump has stated that one reason to vote for him is that voting for Clinton is the same as voting for another four years of Obama, I find it interesting that Conway apparently sees such a view is an advantage for Clinton.
Here’s the way Nate Silver, among others, explains it:
It’s always possible that one might get a bad sample, although the probability is small if the sample is large enough. In this case the issue is that unlike age, race, etc., Democrat/Republican is not an immutable characteristic of a person. People change their minds, so the percentage of Dems vs. Reps changes during the course of time. A poll typically wants to find out how many people consider themselves aligned with each party, but it can’t weight by party because there is no standard weight – it changes all the time.
Trump said in a speech yesterday “We’re doing well with women, and I hate to tell the men this, but if I could, I’d swap you out with women”
I’m sure you would, asshole. The woman would put you in.