Anyone who’s wondering how well Gary Johnson will do in the general election should watch the following interview of him by Samantha Bee. No offence to his supporters, but this guy isn’t electable.
50 years ago (:eek:) I worked for the Conservative Party in New York, and this is exactly how we got our votes. We certainly didn’t have any easy to characterize positions or in 1966 a charismatic candidate.
Before you condemn me, we’d be damn socialists in today’s climate.
A lot depends on his level of support. Normally, third parties are around 3-5% in pre election polls and fall to 1% or even lower when the actual voting happens. But when third parties are in double digits, they tend to actually perform pretty close to their polling. The reason is pretty obvious, IMO: once you are demonstrating a certain level of support consistently, the media and voters take you as a serious candidate. It’s not longer just a protest vote. So if Johnson is at 10% or above heading into October, he probably gets at least 6-7%(which I believe was John Anderson’s result in 1980).
Being taken seriously is the worst thing that could happen to Libertarians. They thrive best when all people know about their beliefs is a few platitudes. If a Libertarian candidate was ever a serious possibility, it would result in the media reporting the Libertarian platform in depth and the general public response would be “They believe what?”
I saw Gary Johnson give an interview the other night, first time I laid eyes on him. I like him, he’s got a pleasant aura of goofy.
I don’t see it throwing the election to Clinton. I think this election is Clinton’s to lose. The only way I see her not winning is if her idiot supporters allow this election to become a referendum on guns. If that happens, Sieg Hiel, Herr Trump. Otherwise, Clinton wins in a Reaganesque landslide.
I can’t call somebody goofy if they intentionally throw away a peace offering from their primary opponent. I call them an asshole.
Yeah, he’s probably a great guy. He’d probably be a great CEO of a hemp clothing line. I wouldn’t vote for him for president.
I don’t know. It’s kind of shitty but apparently immediately after the “peace offering” the guy started attacking Johnson’s preferred running mate.
The Libertarian Party got 0.4% of the vote in 2008 and 1.0% in 2016. Although many people are using them as a “none of the above” in polls, there’s no real indication that Johnson’s actual percentage will be out of line with history. Even less so for Stein.
Clinton will beat Trump because she will get a majority of the electoral vote. Nothing else will matter.
Don’t be so sure of which side would win a referendum on guns.
And that will be because she’s a respectable Democrat. If you accept the premise that a state that has gone D in the last *six *elections will go D again this time, that’s 242 EV’s right there. Any R, not just Trump, has to virtually sweep the rest, and that obviously cannot happen.
I’m surprised they haven’t started the bill to amend the Electoral College out of the Constitution, unless it’s because their Senators are largely from states that would lose influence there and they think they couldn’t sell it back home. Well, how’s that built-in losing going for ya?
Yes.
I understand this is the worst possible thing to say here. All people want to do is follow the latest poll and ask about ridiculously unlikely possibilities.
But the polls are meaningless. They’ve been so all year. They will continue to be. Please, please stop your focus on polls. To mangle Lombardi: Electoral votes aren’t everything. They’re the only thing.
And for completeness, the six-straight-elections Republican states add up to 102 EV’s. Each of them may plausibly not make it seven, the way Trump is going.
I am a liberal/libertarian and will vote for Johnson (voted for Obama twice).
Hillary can win my vote by openly endorsing the TPP and Free Trade in general.
I despise both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Hillary could be acceptable to me.
Really, Trump can communicate his entire message to the rest of the world with just one finger.
Their available choices, given present-day reality, are for the government to actively support liberal social values they hate or for the government to just shrug and butt out. Johnson and Weld offer them the best option that is actually on the table.
Since all people with an ounce of brains characterized Bernie Sanders, who isn’t a Democrat but caucused with them, as having no chance of getting anything on his agenda accomplished because he didn’t play ball with anybody, why would anybody with an ounce of brains think that a president outside of the existing party structure have any more chance?
Or are you saying that people who would vote for a Libertarian don’t have an ounce of brains?
Really no.
Unless there is a major realignment (and there is no evidence there is) then most states will stay roughly as far above and below the national mean as they have been.
Electoral results will roughly follow national popular vote results. Under most scenarios with current demographics a 50/50 popular vote election will go Democratic. That said in a 50/50 election the devil’s in the details with modest relative changes in a few states (and we all know those states) mattering lots. But if national results are the Democratic candidate +3? Those states go Democratic pretty reliably. D+6 so does NC and maybe GA.
And if you drill down and get polls by demographic groups and have a good sense of who is or is not a likely voter in a particular cycle … predictions are better yet for state by state, made easy by that 538 app.
Yes, national polls will have lots of noise until at least August, individual polls can be oversold in significance, and with adequate volume of polling Wang’s aggregation of state polling data approach is likely better, but no, polls are not “meaningless”. Even regarding third party candidates and their potential impact.
I quoted elbows from the By how much is Trump over-performing, in terms of polling? thread and DSeid because I want to emphasize that my position is in between.
It’s true that polling accuracy is probably at the lowest point in the last 50 years, a period in which experience and money overcame most of the many problems that polling inherently has. That understanding has shredded over the last few years. It’s much harder to poll over mobile phones than landlines. People are less likely to comply. They’ve less likely even to answer, since they can now see who is calling. (People tend to be polite and hate to hang up, especially when asked for their opinions.) The population is far more diverse than ever before and getting representative samples of thousands of subgroups is nearly impossible. Political opinions are far more partisan while at the same time far more people call themselves independents than ever before. After inadequate samples are weighted to an imaginary standard, fine details are lost. I’ve done door-to-door and phone bank polling. It’s an art and a mystery.
And yet polls do converge on the actual results a great majority of the time. How can this be? We need to remember that those of us who have been talking about the presidential election for a year are the minority. Most people will not really tune in until after the conventions. Until then, opinions are often based on name recognition and party labels. Moreover, only a smidge over 50% of eligible voters bother to vote. Some polls differentiate between all voters and likely voters but nobody can be sure who’s an actual voter until November 9. The polls on November 7 will be far more accurate than any today, at all levels. (Remember “Dewey Defeats Truman”? The expense of running polls was ended two weeks before a seemingly certain election, but many people made up their minds in those two weeks.)
My position has been consistent. Any individual poll this far back from the election is meaningless. It may turn out to be right, but nobody can know that. Putting together a number of polls and averaging them knocks off outliers and bad data, but doesn’t rise to the level of accuracy. Trends of averaged polls are a bit better still for the same reason. The RCP chart of daily averages shows that the polls have been consistent and yet volatile. The differences between Clinton and Trump have been utterly obvious from the beginning and Clinton has never fallen behind - yet Trump has risen to tie her on four separate and widely spaced occasions since September. Anyone who talked about their being tied at any of those times was spouting nonsense, no matter that one form of the data backed it up.
Polls do work. But. They work best for the largest elections with the greatest pool to sample from. They work best closest to the election when most people have made up their minds. They work best with two and only two choices. They are not worthless to the parties involved, because they get information on how to apply strategy and money in the future. They are meaningless to casual watchers, and especially anyone who claims that a poll has significance for the final outcome.