How good would Harris be in the general?

Politics & Elections
261

Okay, this was an argument about how many people are paying attention to the presidential race now. My position was that only a relatively small proportion of Democratic voters are paying attention at this stage of the Presidential election process. You took the opposite position: that “a wide group of people must be paying attention.” Your reason for taking this position was that

So, basically, your claim is: ‘large changes in favorability prove that a wide swath of Democratic voters are paying attention now.’

Without getting into it back then (five days ago), I was trying to suggest that your understanding of how polling works as a model of reality wasn’t quite correct. To begin with, your premise was shaky: you claimed “bumps and troughs” in favorability for the various Dem candidates had occurred after a debate (the first set), and that in itself was a questionable interpretation of the data generated after that event. Certainly there were no large changes in favorability after the second set of debates. As DSeid had pointed out:

So the claim that there were large changes in people’s views of the candidates was doubtful in itself. But where the claim really fell apart is the theory that bumps and troughs (even if they had happened) prove that “a significant number of people” are paying attention to the Democratic race now.

It would be perfectly possible to have large swings in the favorability of candidates at the same time that relatively few people are paying attention.

For example: A representative random sample of registered Democrats who had voted in the last election and had watched the debates might show big swings in the favorability numbers for the top candidates—but prove nothing whatsoever about the topic of contention between you and me: ‘what proportion of Democratic voters are paying attention now?’

And the reason that poll would prove nothing about the relative sizes of the groups of voters (the ‘paying attention now’ group as compared with the ‘not paying much attention now’ group) is that the sample included only people who have a collection of traits that make them a minority in August 2019: they are registered; they voted in the last election; AND they watched the debates.

This collection of traits describes the narrow band of Democrats that I posit are paying attention now. It does not describe a “wide group” of people.

So you could see wide swings in favorability in a poll without being able to draw any conclusion whatsoever on the question ‘is it just a small proportion of voters–‘woke Twitter’ and such–who are paying attention now, or is it a wide group of voters paying attention now?’

The crucial thing to know in interpreting a poll is: what’s the nature of the representative random sample polled?

…and I should have said so five days ago, when we first started arguing. I guess I was some combination of short-on-time and lazy. So, anyway, here it is.

I don’t like standing on his damn lawn anyway!

262

You really completely misunderstood my post. Reread it please.

My objection is to characterizing this as at most the second inning … it is much farther along than that. (And personally I’d pay more attention to Iowa polls than anything else in that regard.) Seventh inning down (or up, depending on your perspective) by 3 is much more like it. THINGS CAN STILL CHANGE. Fortunes turn when that’s the score in the seventh … but not all that often.

Even using your Obama Clinton example, how it was in August '07 (Clinton +6 in Iowa) was about the same as it was a month before the Iowa caucuses (Clinton +6) … was a month before also “early in the game” for Iowa? Same for that matter for national polls. Same lead for Clinton in December as it had been in August.

263

What about Kerry in ‘04 or McCain in ‘08?

264

GOP '08 interestingly saw the same thing as Dem '08 did. Early '07 polling was quite tightly correlated with late '07 polling. It wasn’t until Iowa was imminent that it was in that sense no longer “early”. So I’ll concede that until Iowa’s eve it can be considered “early” … now no more so than four months from now though.

Again, 538 is talking about probabilities … not absolutes.

And one must note that the same 538’s analysis can be spun another way: Biden, by those metrics, is both by a good measure the candidate most likely to become the nominee and more likely to not be the nominee than to become it. Well known at 30% average polling (say) is at, what a 40% chance of being the nominee. That is 60% chance not. Sanders and Warren well known both under 20% each with something like a 10% chance and Harris less well known at 10% something like 25% chance (by this metric only, not paying attention to her directionality, and calling her not well known, which is a subjective call at this point). That would leave the rest of the field together a 15% chance.

Obviously reality is that each election is not an average of all past elections but its own special case to be pled …

265

Good analysis.

266
267

This thread has been dormant for almost two months - reflecting her poll numbers.

Tulsi Gabbard, the candidate who didn’t qualify for the last debate, seems to have totally derailed Harris with that attack in Debate 2.

268

I don’t think that was it. I think she just failed to capitalize.

269

She’ll be much like Obama, a disappointment to those she can manage to fake her way past and an evil woman of color after the fweedumbs of the victimy downtrodden white male; but the donor class will be nicely rewarded and no one will advance education and/or healthcare under her watch. There will be plenty of “leftyish” noncommittal rhetoric that goes absolutely nowhere for the unsubstantial people. This is after all the role of a president and the political system itself; illusion.

270

The system is not going to allow for Gabbard’s continual outting of the military/surveillance/militarist/corporate police state/industrial complex.

271

They were successful, but they weren’t progressive. You could call them moderates or even liberals. To me progressive implies decidedly left wing, which they were not, except by the standards of neofascists like the new Republican party.

272

I read it as accomplishing the most in that direction. That’s the paradox. Center Lefts have moved the ball down the field more than hard Progressives have.