Well … the question is now “Are poll numbers a close proxy for final election results?” I have my doubts, but doubts aren’t quantifiable … so …?
Activote, you can probably disregard. Nate Silver kicked it out of his aggregations over a month ago for methodological reasons:
Yet… the Times/Siena polls just came out, and for the first time since Harris joined the race, found her up nationally, 49% to 46%:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/us/politics/harris-trump-poll-national.html
Since this poll has been so tough on Harris but is also respected, this was taken as a big deal.
On top of this, FWIW, the NYT/Siena poll has been progressively increasing the size of their likely-voter sample set since their late July poll (their first Harris-vs-Trump poll). Scroll down to “Poll Data”, then choose “New York Times” from the dropdown filter at right.
Presumably, this means that the most recent NYT poll result is “truer” than the earlier ones.
Individuals may have integrity, but the system itself is broken beyond repair. Trump and other evildoers on the right have hacked it and can now use it fairly freely for their own purposes. Further, they’ve successfully established their own propaganda arm masquerading as traditional media: Fox, OAN, etc.
This is how 75% of hack works, however: use the media as a normalizing context. The desire to be “fair and balanced” to Democrats and Republicans runs deep and used to be healthy. But the media has been unable to respond since the GOP became a fascist insurgency and criminal organization.
If you hold debates, ask questions, and simply report on the two parties as if both are real, normal parties, that makes the GOP seem normal enough for all the stupid people to vote for Trump and his ilk.
Ah, but the other 25% of the hack is to use the media to throw bombs and get attention. Trump has been one of the greatest in world history at this. Calling him out on his lies is just giving him more attention.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are trying to use the media in the traditional, civically responsible manner to reach and influence people who, you know, give a fuck about right and wrong and making the country better. So the media’s criticizing Trump does next to nothing, while their criticizing Democrats does actual damage.
Harris’s approach has been not to take this bait, and it’s been very clever and disciplined overall. But in some ways she has failed to get her own attention from the media. Now that she is actually doing interviews, etc., she getting more attention but also taking some damage. Sigh. It’s hard to be real politician instead of a fascist cult leader!
Right. And speaking of “truer” polls, one guy I saw on YouTube yesterday made a point I found interesting (though I don’t know if it’s true or not, as I am not an expert in these matters): That pollsters become more accurate as they approach the election, since they want to be known as “good polls” and be included in aggregates, etc., in the future. Thus, they may do less in the way of bullshit, partisan things late in the game.
(my emphasis)
This point is made frequently on the higher-profile liberal Substacks as well (e.g. Hopium Chronicles, Status Kuo).
“What would I do differently? Well, since, unlike Joe, I’ll be following one of the most successful Presidents in American history, and not the most incompetent, I won’t have to spend any time fixing my predecessor’s messes.”
Yep, I poked my head back in to this thread yesterday after a long hiatus, and just reading backwards 8 hours it seems like the “tone” here must never have changed.
First we were promised “Don’t worry fellas, he’s not even gonna be the nominee”, then we were guaranteed “Well nevermind it’s okay, because he won’t show up to debate Biden”.
And apparently we’re still being told that he’s in an unrecoverable tailspin, with the stick-shaker coming off it’s hinges. No need to worry, because VP Harris has this one in the bag already - not sure why we’re even wasting our time on an election, right?
Seems like a better title for this thread would be “There’s no fucking way he SHOULD win, right?”. That I’d be 100% on board with.
But “How could he win at this point?” Just the handful of posts I’ve scrolled through, I’ve seen dozens of reasons given and they always get dismissed, ignored, and handwaved away.
I sure as hell hope this one ends up being the “third time’s the charm” thread and we finally get one right. But anyone who thinks this is any better than a coin flip is delusional. It SHOULDN’T fucking be that way, I totally grant you that, but it is what it is.
Indeed so. But the “why” is still important, even if that seems like looking the proverbial gift horse in the mouth. Being right in the stopped clock sense is nice and all but it doesn’t really help for future elections or for all those pesky down ballots that are actually pretty darned important.
It’s a long thread, and I’ve already gone over some of the ways in which I’ve been wrong. One major thing is that I underestimated how much his base is willing to stick with him, as well as GOP politicians.
One way in which I’ve been right, however, is that the argument of the OP has held: Trump hasn’t been able to gain new voters since Harris took over. His campaign has been terrible. His public performances have been execrable and embarrassing.
So he has done nothing to win and, more likely than not (according to the aggregators), will lose.
Or the Russians have.
I believe the influence of Russia on the US media is in fact much, much greater than most people would guess.
I would point out that
It is a matter of enormous self-interest to the Putin regime to have Trump elected - in fact, it may be a matter of existential urgency,
Buying off Tim Pool, Scott Adams, Candace Owens, a hundred Republican legislators, etc. and setting up bots is extremely cheap as compared to other expenditures related to national security - it’s a tiny fraction of the cost of fighting the Ukraine war but could result in winning the war, and
The USA has no defense against it. There is nothing to stop Russia.
I cannot construct any rational argument why Russian interference in US media and bribery of media figures is not in fact ten times worse than most people assume. (The GOP blather about how the federal government is refusing to help hurricane victims? That’s Russia, folks.)
It would be irrational for Russia to NOT do this; it simply would make no sense for them not to.
One more point in Trump’s favor to keep his chances high.
If so, it still looks like Russia’s efforts for Trump are rather lackluster and half-hearted. I’d expect to be seeing hundreds of ultra-realistic AI Kamala deepfakes, etc. going around, along with whatever the best that an intelligence agency has to offer.
Much in the same way that it’s easier to burn a building to the ground with a match than it is to build the structure in the first place. The Republicans are simply arsonists and vandals at this point.
Agreed. They are winning at any cost simply to keep their jobs, money, and power.
Yes, I’m not sure what’s going on with Russia. They have another problem on their hands right now. One would think there has to be some interference, but the scale is unclear.
Also, as with everything else, the media has done a poor job of reporting on it. Where’s the big article, “The State of Russian Interference in the 2024 Election”? I haven’t seen it.
There’s 130 million people in Russia. They can do two or more things at once.
Yup, I was thinking more about money and the bandwidth to organize a major effort.
To make things worse for Trump, he has made the bafflingly head-scratcher decision to spend the rest of the election campaigning in blue states rather than swing states.
What could be better than a night at the Garden?
(my emphasis)
Specific to the bolded … I just posted Simon Rosenberg’s recent take on the Harris campaign’s various advantages over Trump’s:
For anyone reading this thread wondering how anyone can get to a headspace in which Harris looks significantly more likely than not to win the election … read through Rosenberg’s points and consider what outcome someone who accepts all of those points uncritically would expect from the general election.