Care to participate here?
It is good to have such divergent polls at the same time. I’m expected Emerson to be humiliated.
What Im curious about is the correlation between Iowa and Wisconsin. I can certainly see a big swing in Iowa being attributed to the abortion ban there (8 weeks), and that’s not entirely dissimilar to Wisconsin (abortion banned at 22 weeks).
But there are massive ad buys in Wisconsin right now - how much of that bleeds over into bordering Iowa?
But is it worth the actual loss of Roe? Interesting question (and not really answerable, because we’ll never for sure know if Trump would have won with Roe intact).
Best outcome is that the loss of Roe led to Trump’s defeat, AND Roe is then restored fully.
The border area is not huge and not near significant population centers.
Dubuque, which narrowly went Trump in 2020, borders, but no major media market near on the WI side. Platteville maybe?
The Selzer poll demonstrates to me the harm done by adopting a median approach that I was questioning. She may be wrong, outliers sometimes are, but boy this single outlier, really raises the probability of the herd having systemic error overestimating Trump support dramatically, and by itself virtually eliminates the possibility of a systemic error that is underestimating his support again. She may be wrong but she won’t be that wrong.
Are you sure she has that kind of response rate?
I would have guessed that the phrase “Iowa Poll” is well known in Iowa as a state point of pride, so lots of people answer. Or am I hopelessly naive?
Well, I mean, she could be, right? It would be catastrophic for her, but it’s certainly possible with her methods to get a sample so unrepresentative that you get a result significantly outside the MOE.
That was a quote from Morris form 538 - I don’t have the tweet on hand. Here’s a quote from an MSNBC article: " Nate Cohn of The New York Times reported a 0.4%response rate to his polls in 2022."
ETA: But yeah, her response rate could definitely be better.
Her reputation for being right when her result was the outlier is such that even being that wrong once wouldn’t be catastrophic for her. But yes it is possible.
Looking at the two polls, and throw in that she had the Biden Trump matchup in June at Trump up 18, what combination of wrong can we come up with?
The odds that there is not a real trend line in this population seems small.
Silver apparently still gives Iowa to Trump by 3.4. I for one would not bet against Selzer.
This 2015 interview with her may be of interest to some here.
I would not bet against Selzer either.
But I also would not bet that as Iowa goes, so goes the nation. It may be that the timing of their 6 week abortion ban (effective late July 2024), plus something about the mood in Iowa, hurts Trump there in a unique way. All that may not translate to other states.
A lot of it bad. I’m quite convinced it gave us Donald Trump quite possibly being re-elected.
Good points.
I think it raises* Harris’ chances in Wisconsin modestly; in Michigan, a tiny bit; and that’s about it.
But that’s still pretty important.
(*Better to say “it exposes what have, for a while, been higher-than-most-thought chances…”)
With their fixed democrat republican and independent percentages, all the polls get to say: we were right, it was close!
I don’t understand how VP Harris can be deadlocked with him in PA (per the last NY Times / Siena poll), but in the PA Senate, Casey (D) is polling consistently ahead of McCormick (R) by 6-ish points.
It seems odd to me that there could be that much “ticket splitting” going on.
Honestly, that sounds like more or less exactly what I’d expect, considering that Casey is 1) male; 2) white; and 3) a longtime incumbent who, as far as I know, hasn’t been involved in any major scandals or done anything exceptionally likely to piss people off. Harris was always going to lose some votes on account of her race and gender, and I expect that dynamic would be especially strong in a state with a lot of white working-class voters who are trending away from the current incarnation of the Democratic party, but might still be willing to vote for an old-school Democrat that they’ve voted for several times before.
FWIW, NYT/Siena dropped another set of battleground state polls:
- TOO CLOSE TO CALL!!
- Arizona: Trump 49% – Harris 45%; Gallego up by 5 Over Lake
- Georgia: Harris 48% – Trump 47%
- Michigan: Trump 47% – Harris 47%; Slotkin Leads Rogers 48-46%
- North Carolina: Harris 48% – Trump 46%; Stein Leads by 17 Points
- Nevada: Harris 49% – Trump 46%; Rosen by 9 Over Brown
- Pennsylvania: Presidential Vote Tied; Casey 50% – McCormick 45%
- Wisconsin: Harris 49% – Trump 47%; Baldwin 50% – Hovde 46%
Wow, no breathing room with those results. If Trump wins the two tied states as well as the ones with a lead, Harris can’t lose any others (unless she loses Nevada and flips Iowa.)
Focusing on the degrees to which polling is broken.
Selzer may be a special case. The Iowa population is less demographically diverse, and it is widely believed that voters there are more likely to answer their phones and participate in that poll than other states. She famously does NOT model what she thinks the electorate should look like, but lets the responses tell her what it does look like. Her line in that linked interview was that history is a great predictor until it isn’t, or something like that.
I don’t think that approach works in more diverse voter demographics with different participation tendencies.
I’m not sure which would amuse me more - Harris winning with Florida or Iowa being the tipping point. Iowa being the less improbable.
NYT/Siena changes from where they had been strikes me as odd. Did voters really move like that? Sunbelts significantly better for Harris and Blue Walls to ties? Or is this just their having one set of funky numbers. That much real shift this late? Really?
I’ve found a sort of possible map where we have, horribly enough, a tie:
This requires Trump to win Maine-2 (likely) but Harris lose NE-2 (unlikely) but it’s possible.
Were Harris to win NE-2 she wins 270-268, which, honestly, might be even MORE terrifying. For Trump, 269-269 is a victory. The state delegations will hand him the crown. But if it’s 270-268, I do not believe the Trumpists incapable of anything in their rush to fuck things up.