Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium just wrote an op-ed in which he explains at length his main thesis this election, which basically is that nothing changes because people’s minds are made up.
In other words, we are so polarized politically that people have picked a side and there is nothing that could happen in the news that would make people change their votes. That includes both pu**ygate and the recent FBI revelations.
That’s why I almost never discuss politics any more. It became far more trouble than it was worth, I lost friends, and I don’t believe I ever changed even ONE person’s mind - not with all the facts and cites in the world. ALL that time wasted talking and typing and looking up cites, for no effect.
Now if someone discusses politics, I leave the room. I only read about it, and very occasionally, discuss it anonymously on the 'net. Never with ppl in IRL, and I never get caught up in trying to persuade someone. It’s almost entirely a waste of time.
I’ve started reading about it more again with the presidential election coming up, though. I just can’t help myself.
Haven’t polls changed though? I don’t think the scandal of the week the news try to play up as game changers really matter all that much, but the first debate most certainly did swing the election heavily towards Clinton.
I think that’s misleading. Most voters have long picked a side and are entrenched, but there’s that mysterious and substantial set of “undecideds”, presumably self-described independents. God only knows how their brains work, but there they are. The fact is that polls have changed dramatically in the past month, and indeed just in the past week, even before the impact of the current FBI fiasco. If Wang is making the point that Hillary has an insurmountable lead, that’s one thing, although the evidence doesn’t seem to bear that out. But the idea that polls don’t change much is prima facie wrong, though it may not be obvious exactly what makes them change. It may, of course, just be variations in sampling, but I doubt that. Hillary will likely win, but there’s sufficient uncertainty to be frightening, considering the alternative.
According to Wang’s calculations, the polls haven’t really changed much. Clinton’s lead over Trump, aggregated over all polls, has varied between 2 and 8 points, a range of 6 points, throughout the campaign. That’s tiny by historical standards. Swings of 30 or 40 points used to be common, he says.
Not just “Wang’s calculations” - the actual numbers in pretty every aggregator’s datsets have shown that how he called it, very early on - long term trend about Clinton +4 +/-3 - has been pretty what has occurred despite major news cycles pushing hard one way or the other.
For illustration look at RCP’s graph. Got outside that range Trumpward briefly around the GOP convention and for two days by a 0.3 hair during Clinton’s pneumonia debacle. Got outside that range Clintonward by less than 1 point during the post Democratic Convention Khan twofer for a couple of days and by 0.1 on 10/18. Now? Dang. Within 0.2 of that long term average that was called way back when.
Now Wang’s calculations don’t use the same national polls that RCP uses but are based on states data labelling the number as “the meta-margin” and using that he sees it as even more stable - a four point spread only. But the race actually being pretty entrenched the whole way? That’s just the simple reality.
Wang’s right about that, but that doesn’t mean the race will be at +3-4 Clinton on Nov. 8. Silver’s model incorporates that uncertainty a lot better, whereas Wang pretty much called it long ago. Given how badly he stumbled in 2014, if Trump wins he’ll be right up there with Glenn Beck.
Of course it does not mean that it will be +3-4. It means that final polling aggregates are highly improbable to be more than 3 away from Clinton +4.
Silver’s model incorporates a lot more uncertainty. Whether that is better or not is a matter of opinion but his level of uncertainty makes him as much of an outlier as wang certaintude makes him.
I will state again that I feel there is uncertainty not in what the final polling aggregates will turn out to be but in how well the polling houses modeled who will come out this time. My personal WAG remains that the aggregate overestimates Trump voter enthusiasm translating into voting and that the quieter Clinton voters will actually show up.
That assumes that Democrats have all of a sudden started to vote when someone uninspiring is not on the ticket. That would be a rather new development.
ABC has independents +16 for Trump. That would be an unprecedented way to win for Clinton, winning with just Democrats. That would be a game changer.
You really know better than to cite single polls at this point. Especially one that follows that paragraph with the appropriate caveat: “Many of these results are not statistically significant”
It’s 6 weeks old but this 538 article on why independent voters are overrated is particularly notable relevat to this for the table shown. Meant to show that Trump has an overall advantage among independents it is more notable for showing that the range was flipping from poll to poll by 24 points (!) within the same three week period.
Fun bit though:
So much for unprecedented! 
The more interesting bit to me is how that poll plays into the LV screen issue, especially since they state that the changes they’ve been seeing are “not mainly about people shifting in their candidate preference, but about changes in who’s intending to vote” - It seems that LV is a one question screen: “Are you absolutely certain to vote” with the preference questions asked of those who are saying they are certain.
How does that compare to LV screen that weight past voting behavior more heavily? Or more sophisticaed screens?
It’s unprecedented to lose independents by a wide margin though. And independents have decided the last few midterms by going overwhelmingly one way or the other. If they do that in a Presidential election by double digits, whoever they vote for almost certainly wins.
But sure, Clinton can overcome a 5 point loss among independents. Obama and Bush did. 10 points is another matter entirely.
Scott Adams makes an interesting point on undecideds. Adams claims that most undecideds are simply parking their vote at the moment. Secretly they know which way they are leaning; often strongly leaning. I know Adams is much criticized on here lately but he is not entirely without merit in his insights. I think there is a strong element of mind your own f*ing business from the undecided camp towards pollsters(this can benefit either candidate). There will be a small element of truly undecided voters right now but they will be a tiny minority.
Undecideds are full of shit; they’re either lying or playing coy in their own heads.
Anybody truly undecided at this point won’t vote and probably doesn’t even know where to vote.
We’re only talking 5-10% of the population who are truly undecided. The undecided person rarely talks about or thinks about politics, and true, they also might not vote at all when you get right down to it. But they do exist, they are all around you, you just don’t see them because they don’t have strong opinions to express.
I actually do talk about politics a lot and sometimes have trouble making a decision. Too many partisan folks assume that all choices are obvious(vote for the party you prefer, duh), but when you take into account competence, character, a single issue where one party isn’t necessarily superior(like the deficit), then choosing gets a lot harder.
Just think of the true undecided as if they were a primary voter. Primary voters tend to make up their minds very late in the process, because they’ve been trained to think that they should always just vote their party. But what happens when you’re voting intraparty? They get confused, indecisive, their allegiances shift, they start thinking about issues besides, er, issues, since the candidates mostly agree. That’s how the undecided independent voter thinks. Just think of the undecided voter as someone having to pick between Clinton and Obama in 2008. How many Dopers had made up their minds in that race early and stuck to their guns?
I think of them as the guy who holds up the line because he doesn’t go to McDonalds very often so he can’t decide whether to get a Double Cheeseburger or a McDouble.
Heh. Yeah, if someone can’t figure out what they want from McDonalds, they aren’t going to be good at making choices about anything else.
But sometimes it is hard and new information can make you reassess. Kerry vs. Bush was tough for me because Bush was clearly a failure, but Kerry… argh, so liberal, so weak. I ended up going with Kerry, but it was a tough call. Choosing between Perot and Clinton in 1992 was tough too. I went with Perot.
From OP’s link:
Interesting. Just as severing the corpus callosum is the treatment for certain brain disorders, so a complete loss of Internet and cable news might offer us the best hope of restoring political sanity. :eek: :smack:
Has anyone *ever *met someone of reasonable intelligence and awareness who said, sincerely, “I don’t know how I’m going to vote [on a major candidate or issue] because I don’t have enough information yet”?
I’ve said that about California propositions sometimes, because they can be very confusing. I remember a few years ago when there were four competing propositions having to do with gambling on Indian reservations. The differences among them were very hard to figure out.
Fair point. I was there a few of those years.
But when it comes down to a major candidate (prez, governor, senator, mayor) - have you ever met a genuine undecided even a month before the election? (I haven’t.)