There has been a massive shift over the last decade in making voting easy. Many states have gone to vote-by-mail (either fully or partly) and even my ass-backwards state of Missouri has finally allowed no-excuse early voting this year (for which lines are huge).
Higher turnout can at least partly be explained by making it easier to vote. In the past this has helped Democrats, but signs (including 2020 results) seem to indicate this may no longer be the case. Trump has an inordinate sway among low-info low-education low-propensity voters and Harris (and anti-Trump in general) tends towards the hard-core always-votes crowd.
It’s a hammerlock that this will not happen nationally – Harris will win the overall popular vote. Red-wave pollsters are overplaying their hand.
Nothing broadly mind-changing has taken place since, say, the week after the September debate. Why should I take current polls as tablets handed down on Mt Sinai, and ~Sept 18 polls as outdated? It beggars belief that ~3% of the populace switched from Harris support to Trump support in five weeks. I say “Prove it!” on Election Day.
Sure, there are reasons why it’s changed. The point is, it goes well beyond there just being more eligible voters, which was the point being discussed.
Red Wave pollsters like NYTimes? You can argue that the move isn’t meaningful, but I wish you would stop with the red-wave pollster nonsense that has been repeatedly disproven. The non-partisan pollsters are showing the same shift.
I agree not much has changed, but some people do only pay attention to elections late and that can move the margins. It is also possible that Harris’s numbers were a bit inflated after the debate and the current numbers are more real.
We’ll know two weeks from today, at the very very latest. And no, there won’t be interminable recounts holding up the results for days and weeks on end (not your words, but a too-often-repeated narrative).
Not recounts – initial counts. Some states (including Pennsylvania and Georgia) have laws that state that the counting of mail-in votes may not begin until election day. If these states are very close, it may well take days (although not weeks) for the state to have a sufficient count such that the winner can be validly projected.
Because the polls say Harris is slipping and there have been no new policy announcements or messages to reverse that. Polls tell us the direction things are going. It has nothing to do with who you personally do or don’t support.
Rallies don’t really matter. Rallies attract people who already support you. Trump does rallies, Harris does rallies. Trumpists say the same thing you do; look how great the rallies are! Look, we had a boat parade! Trumpists were sure he’d win in 2020 because, wow, look at the awesome rallies!
Republicans have prevented the rules being changed so that votes could be counted as they came in. (Not just in Pennsylvania, but other states as well.) Preventing states from being called on Election Night is a tactic for them to sow doubt in election results if they lose.
There are so many logical problems with hanging any credibility on this sort of thing I don’t know where to even begin, but I’d point out two things:
Lots of people do this and at least a few will hit nine out of ten, especially since not every election is in any sort of doubt - a monkey could have called 1988, and
Lichtman’s analysis is highly subjective to say the least. Describing Trump as not being charismatic is nuts. He’s wildly charismatic. You and I may think he’s a piece of shit but charisma is how he assembled his cult. It is, to be honest, maybe the only reason he’s in this position at all.
Credible or not … I give Lichtman A LOT of credit for at least getting a pass/fail prediction for the 2024 general election out there on the record. Lichtman doesn’t get to scurry back behind “the math” if his call is wrong – he has to take the hit.
Ah yes, that famously red wave New York Times/Siena pollster.
No, I’m not just looking at known red-tilted polls.
You shouldn’t. You should consider all the polls, but take into account source, methodology, and yes, when it was taken.
If Harris jumped three points in a few weeks the victory celebrations in this thread would have already begun. What one needs to do is look at all the polling evidence. What are the smart analysts saying? What’s the OVERALL trend? Because this, historically, works. It shows you the likely probabilities. Has for many election cycles.
If there is one bright spot though it’s that it looks like the Democrats may have a slightly better than even chance of controlling the House come election time. That would allow them to block a lot of Trump’s nuttiness.
Sure – but Trump has stepped in the bucket several times in recent weeks, and any of that would be reasonable explanations for Harris picking up steam. There’s no flip side – you can’t point to the things Harris did to drop three points.
Followed by the lawsuits. And refusal to certify. And other ratfucking by the R’s. And the death threats against election workers. And the MAGAts storming government buildings.
Why precisely the polls are moving in the way they are is the product of a zillion factors. If I were to be asked to guess, Trump has assembled a lot of influential assholes with a lot of social media clout, chief among them Elon Musk, who is using Twitter to hide some information and emphasize others. Musk, we know, is a bobo of Vladimir Putin, who wants his thrall elected so that he can go about his plan of genocide in Ukraine and, eventually, invading the Baltic states and Poland. (And yes, that’s his plan.) Social media is immensely powerful and Musk for some reason is worshipped by millions. RFK Jr helps Trump too with a fairly large contingent of people who think vaccines have nanobots in them.
But my guesses don’t matter, my opinions of rallies, interviews, whatever. What matters is who people say they’ll vote for. There, Harris is slipping. She can still win of course, this isn’t like 1984 or 1964.
I was specifically addressing your counterfactual – that had Harris picked up three points, a bunch of us would be touting that in this thread. In your counterfactual … she DID pick up steam. My point is that if the real-life movement “the polls” were favoring Harris, there would be reasonable explanations for it.