And just for the shits of it, here is Silver’s at the time take on 2020’s misses.
I agree that we don’t throw out polls or ignore them. But they are tools of only so much value. I’d rather my side ahead in them than behind and I believe the net directionality as they aggregate. But systemic errors usually happen so confidence based on them can be misplaced.
There’s a feeling of “fighting the last war” here. They’re trying to fix the errors they saw in the last election, on the assumption that they’ll see the same errors this time. I’m not sure that’s accurate.
For example, I’m seeing reports that voter registrations in some key demographics have surged since Harris was put on the top of the ticket, but this hasn’t been reflected in any significant change in general polling. So, are the polls missing these people, or are the reports of a surge in registrations incorrect? Who knows? Not I, for certain.
Of in this case the last two wars (2016 and 2020), besides Germany wouldn’t go through Belgium again, would they?
Silver’s very next sentence:
The model is also applying a convention bounce adjustment to Harris’s recent numbers, who has made gains in national polls, and you could argue about whether that’s the right assumption.
Both Silver and 538 are temporarily suppressing Harris’ poll numbers in their models to mitigate convention bounce. I’ll be interested to see both models after the September 10th debate, which happens to be about when the presumed convention effects will be removed from the models.
Trump also has the problem of “voter fatigue”. Even when not president he is always in your face and in the news. Harris is hardly new, but because voters don’t know her well she has some advantage of seeming like a breath of fresh air.
We have two hybrid candidates that have elements of both the incumbent and the challenger. It’s a weird dynamic that I don’t think we have seen in a presidential election since Nixon rose from the dead in 1968.
The two people running the Votemaster. They exclude all polls that have in the past demonstrated a systematic partisan bias. If you read then daily, as I do, they have discussed this at considerable length.
Other than polls what evidence is there that the race is close? She’s raised far more money in the last month that he did. She’s signed up far more volunteers. I haven’t heard anything about (X) for Trump Zoom calls raising millions of dollars. Her VP candidate is wildly popular, his is treated as a joke at best. You would think that will all the enthusiasm she’s generated his campaign team, or even his followers, would try to show there’s just as much enthusiasm on their side, and they haven’t.
Well, there’s past experience. We’ve seen this before in 2020 and the race was super close, even if the popular vote count was not.
The swing states are super swingy. We know those will be close one way or the other. Trump having a million fewer (or more) votes in Alabama than 2020 or Harris having a million fewer (or more) votes in California than Biden did in 2020 won’t matter for the POTUS race. They will matter for downballot but not for the big chair.
But either of them gaining or losing 30,000 votes in Pennsylvania or Minnesota or a few other states absolutely does matter. The race is close because it is a function of our electoral college system. Yes, you can use enthusiasm in those states to estimate chances of winning, but they are so close that the margins of error in such estimates are bigly HUGE.
When is the infamous IRS audit going to be done? Not that it matters because he still wouldn’t release the records because of … reasons. I guess Vance won’t release his because of… other reasons.
Exactly. 2020, 2016, both close. Trump outspent two to one in 2016 and by roughly 50% more in 2020.
Significant shifts might occur. But it is reasonable to not expect such. Likely mostly the same people who voted Trump before will do so again. The election will mostly be decided by Harris getting turnout for her, against him, not as many against her, and a few swingable voters. Maybe that enthusiasm will accomplish that but … damn that maybe.
Yes, thats the point. Harris should be crushing Trump in the polls, but for some reason she isn’t. The great mystery is why. Are the polls wrong? Are Harris’s seeming advantages only a mirage? We just don’t know.
50% of Americans are fascist assholes.
I know, I still have trouble digesting that fact, too. But it’s plain as the nose on your face. Why keep trying to invent alternative explanations? I’ve tried and tried and tried, and I’ve just had it with that shit.
Why keep beating your head against the wall about inaccuracy in polls, when actual votes in 2016 AND 2020 demonstrated this to be true?
Sadly, you are correct! Not sure if it’s quite 50%, however. There is the evil factor, and then there is the stupid factor. Some people just always vote R and aren’t paying enough attention to what Trump is actually doing.
Exactly this. If you are friends with a Trump voter, you are friends with a fascist.
I’m blessed by the fact that I don’t know any Trump voters, except my mother-in-law. She’s not a kind person, nor a bright one. My wife once tried to talk sense into her, it became a very heated “discussion,” the worst I’ve seen between them.
Yes, she has an alternative factual record she thinks supports her position, but I have the feeling that the fox news bullshit is more to support her decision than to inform it.
So, for those of us in very Blue America, the fact that 47% or so voters prefer Trump to Harris is unfathomable. I’d believe 10 to 15% perhaps. But here we are.
Harris’s advantages are largely meaningless to close to half of the voting population, who have (a) already made up their minds, and (b) have allowed themselves to be convinced that any Democrat will destroy the country as they know it.
This is what Republicans think:
Cenk of TYT weighs in on exactly this:
He’s quite positive on where we are at.
She’s been the official nominee for all of a week. She’s been the de facto nominee for less than a month. She’s raised an ungodly amount of money, but she’s had precious little time yet to spend it. She took over a campaign apparatus that was geared toward the particular political needs of another candidate and had no campaign staff of her own until a couple weeks ago.
By any reasonable standard, expecting that she should be crushing Trump in the polls right now is insane.