According to this article quoting a report from the Washington Post, the Trump campaign seems to be in serious disarray right now. I hope it’s accurate.
You know, I wish nothing but the worst for Chump and all who support and enable him. But the fact that the race is still so close makes me wonder why a campaign in disarray will necessarily nudge the needle.
I guess I have to hope that it will be a combination of countless little factors - some disarray here, a black nazi there, and continued rationality and competence over there - that will combine to render the correct result. But this really supports the old adage that democracy is too important to be left to the people…
I think so.
At a minimum, it shows that Trump’s people are often disloyal leakers:
On the plus side, this shows Trump still has not mastered the art of exclusively hiring loyal toadies.
There is no evidence that it is false. Polling is pseudoscience at this point and the media goes out of its way to portray EVERY election as the closest election ever because “horse races” make good ratings.
I am confident that the results of the election will not be close.
For Trump to win he doesn’t have to be President, he just has to stay out of jail. With enough dirty deeds done dirt cheap, followed by a ridiculous number of lawsuits to prolong the stall, Trump can still win.
I would love to believe this but at this point expecting a Harris blowout seems like wishful thinking. Sure, the media likes to make things sound exciting, but I don’t see the responsible media slanting things in any extraordinary way.
As for the “pseudoscience” of polling, a competent poll will have a statistically valid margin of error. When Biden was still in the race, most polls were telling us that Trump was ahead. Now they’re mostly telling us that Harris is ahead, but not by much. But I have the general impression the she’s slowly increasing her lead. Will it be enough to overcome the EC disadvantage, or whatever shenanigans Trump will certainly try to pull? Who knows!
I think that’s about the best that can be said right now. If you have solid information to the contrary, I’m sure we’d all like to see it.
“The responsible media” would never have treated Trump like a serious candidate in the first place. We don’t have one of those. What we have is Hearst and Pulitzer making shit up to see who can sell the most papers.
What I have is the observable fact that polls have consistently underestimated Democrats and overestimated Trump. They overestimated his lead in the primaries by double digits. They were saying RFK Jr. would get 25% in Iowa and New Hampshire. They’ve consistently lowballed Democratic turnout in special elections over the last two years. They predicted a red wave in 2022 that never came to be.
I don’t expect a Reaganesque landslide, but by the end of Tuesday the 5th I expect Florida, NC, and Ohio to be called for Harris, and that’ll be all she wrote.
You’re at least partly correct here. The media didn’t elect Trump – the voters did; I still remember John King on CNN, calling the election results in 2016, sounding absolutely shocked and flabbergasted announcing Trump’s likely victory. But what the media did was give him endless free publicity and all the attention the narcissist craved, because it increased viewership and clicks and sold ads. So you’re right about that part. And of course they’re still doing it.
I’m not talking about the media in general. I’m talking about EVIDENCE. The evidence is that it’s very close - evidence consistent with 2000, 2004, 2020 and 2016, which were very close. Exactly the same sources of evidence said 2008 and 2012 were overwhelmingly likely to be won by Barack Obama. Exactly the same sources, to the extent they existed, said 1984 and 1988 would be one sided slaughters.
Polling is not a “pseudoscience.” It’s pretty well done by now. The evidence and track record shows that.
That was not true in 2016 or 2020. Polls slightly underestimated Trump both times.
Ohio? Hoo, boy.
Polling is accurate in a world where everyone has landline phones and publicly-listed phone numbers and routinely answers cold calls. That world no longer exists. You cannot accurately poll the American people anymore because the assumptions that underlie it no longer apply.
And they’ve responded by overestimating him instead. Polls had Trump picking up >80% in primaries where he barely topped 50.
I have this crazy belief that people don’t like when you try to instigate a race war in their backyard.
Yep. And the same thing happened In the democratic primary of Carter vs Jackson. Jackson would win a big state- say New York- and Carter a small one- but all the media talked about was Carters win- because dammit that peanut farmer sold newspapers.
Not Ohio, maybe you mean Iowa, which has been trending Harris, altho trump is still slightly ahead?
Okaaay, maybe Ohio might be pink rather than bright red.
I do think this is a valid point. At this point, those with traditional home phones, who actually answer them, has to skew really old and possibly rural. When I was in NH, cell service at the house sucked, so we kept a landline. But even that had caller ID, and an app that directed the home call to my cell. Once we moved back to civilization (which I still regret), we ditched the house phone.
That world never existed.
The U.S. has always been a hard country to poll. But other methods of prognostication are worse.
Well said!
The reason we know Donald Trump can win at this point is polls showing the election is close.
Scroll down in here for a chart showing polling accuracy has not deteriorated since 1998:
How this can be, when American pollsters cannot afford door-to-door and the percent of people who answer their phone, whether a land line or call, has declined?
I suppose it doesn’t matter in terms of saying that Trump can win at this point. But reasons include:
.1 Tighter weighting by demographic criteria.
.2. Almost everyone has touch-tone, making interactive voice response practical. This reduces cost, allowing larger sample sizes and more frequent polling.
.3. Multi-modal polling so that even a single poll is now often an average obtained by different methods whose weaknesses average out.
I think these are all examples of where polls can excel and where they can fail. During the Republican primaries, polling averages in New Hampshire and South Carolina were pretty on the mark. Later primaries – where Trump had already effectively wrapped up the nomination – were more lightly polled and thus more prone to error. Special elections are very difficult to effectively poll because by their nature there’s no or few preexisting examples to pull from. And I’ve discussed previously how the 2022 polls were pretty accurate, and the “red wave” narrative persisted in spite of the polls rather than because of them.
Given that polling was essentially founded in the USA in the 19th century and only spread to other democracies in the 20th century because of it’s ability to forecast results, I would suggest that is just another glib example of American exceptionalism.
Me too.
I predict that the Democratic ticket, in Springfield Ohio, will do better this November than it did in 2020 – and worse in Ohio counties outside the backyard (if only because Ohio voter registration is trending GOP).
I earlier linked to an article claiming that door to door third world polling is easy because people are almost always at home and cooperative. But I just now looked for statistical data on which countries have the most accurate pollsters and failed to find it 
The needle needs only a tiny amount of nudging. What is going on in NC by itself could be all the nudging needed.
Except for 2016 and 2020 which both severely underestimated him.