I thought we did?
Hmm, i ran into it last night, but i might have been reading old posts. 
@DSeid, I would considering merging the 3 identified and still allowing polls. @Aspenglow & @raventhief need to weigh in on this also.
Someone tried to start a 4th today and I already merged it into the Kamala Harris thread.
All 3 of those threads should not have posts about Nate Silver, just post saying what his latest numbers are.
I am against closing the 3 threads in favor of a new one. I think that is more of a problem than a cure.
Tentative new thread to combine the 3. Open to edits and suggestions.
I’m out for the day at this point.
As always …
Otherwise I appreciate it. I hope others do also. Thank you.
Of course no solution will be perfect.
FWIW @puzzlegal your skepticism regarding the predictive value of the polls and the forecasts is of course reasonable, but they are the data we’ve got, and they do tell us something, if only relative to their own trends.
Yes, that’s all true. I’d just rather be in a conversation that focuses on other things. But maybe I’m an outlier.
I agree with this. My reasons:
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If I’m discussing Trump and his campaign, I don’t want to trawl through dozens of Harris comments to follow the discussion. Conversely, if I’m discussing Harris, I don’t want to try and follow the discussion through a bunch of Trump posts. Those discussions can go in very different directions and trying to combine them seems like a messy way to proceed.
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In future (more on this shortly), we could have one thread for in-depth discussion of polls for parsing out methodology and such. However, I think it would be impossible to discuss (or moderate) candidate threads where polls can’t even be mentioned. I would suggest that polls can be mentioned, but more detailed discussions about them should be relegated to the dedicated polls discussion thread.
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We are less than a month and a half away from this election. To make a drastic change of combining everything for this election now seems chaotic and pointless to me. They are separate discussions and should remain so. Even combining the How Can Trump Win? thread with the Trump Run up to the Election thread at this stage will be confusing for those who have been contributing to those threads in a separate way. In future, we can be more strict about combining threads that essentially discuss the same thing as the two Trump threads herein referenced do. And I think we can agree, this has been an especially chaotic election, generating lots of discussions that in future could be combined with less confusion.
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We already have a rule that discourages people from making the same post across multiple threads. I don’t really care if people post links to polls in any of the existing threads, but they should do it once in one place and then link to that post in other threads if they wish to. Personally, I would tend to post about the poll in the Polling thread and then link to it in the candidate discussion threads. But however an individual chooses to post their poll link, the link should be one and done, not posted multiple times in multiple threads. This is a rule we can enforce now.
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Let’s just accept that people process information differently and we aren’t all going to get what we want. Some people like everything all in one place and don’t mind scrolling through lots of unrelated threads. Others like their information segregated into many different topics. There’s a reasonable medium and that’s what I hope we can strive for.
TL;dr, let’s keep things as they are through the November 2024 election and make an effort to corral duplicative threads into broad topics in future.
I am interesting in polling as its own topic. But I’d rather have campaign threads be focused on the nuts and bolts of the campaign itself. Polling mixed into a campaign thread turns it into a “horserace” discussion of who’s ahead rather than what the campaign is about and what it’s doing.
I endorse this. One poll for discussion about polling, including methodology, reliability, and tracking the polls in detail. And only brief mentions of polls in the main thread.
But i agree that it’s chaotic to move stuff and change the rules now.
Thanks for considering this.
Earlier today, I posted a quote and link to a new essay by Silver, extremely relevant to the particular thread and its ongoing themes. That had better be okay, even though it was not about his “latest numbers.” (I’m sure you all agree it’s fine – it wasn’t about him.)
Agreed. It’s what we basically do already (with the occasional over-frequent aggregate-based forecast model update in a “main” thread – something I promised to curtail myself, and I have).
Thank you Aspenglow, this send like the absolutely best path forward, and you detailed it beautifully.