Adults who are not registered, and registered voters who are not likely to vote, both tend to lean toward Democrats. But you have hundreds of pollsters using many different methodologies to determine who will actually vote, and collectively they’re pretty darn good at it. Plus, unregistered and unlikely voters are disproportionately found in noncompetitive states. So it’s pretty unlikely things will be any different this election with respect to the slumbering giant that is the Apathy Party.
I said
“Obama and Biden are good surrogates for Clinton to some audiences. However as to the general tone of the election and current tie, the reference to Bill Clinton 2000 shows the lack of any paradox in Obama’s approval rating v (Hillary) Clinton’s struggles. (Bill) Clinton’s approval avg over first half of 2000 was higher than Obama’s first half of this year, but Gore struggled.”
As a couple of times previously, I’m struggling to see the relevance of that response. I know Bill Clinton didn’t campaign a lot for Gore, though it’s not true that he didn’t at all. This was discussed in the recent thread ‘Is Obama’s stumping for Clinton unprecedented?’
But I don’t suppose you’re actually saying you know that Gore would have had smooth sailing if he’d just chosen to use Bill Clinton more (I hope you don’t claim such an ability 
). As that article said at the time, Bill Clinton was viewed as radioactive with a lot of voters despite the reasonably high overall approval. That could be disputed, or the same comment made about Obama, or that one disputed too.
The actual point is the lack of much reason to think a second term president’s slightly above 50% approval means a lot in favor of a would be successor from the same party in the big picture.
I think her superior ground game is a real advantage if Clinton is holding on to slim advantages across several states. However, if Trump starts to pull away in Florida, Ohio, and perhaps another state like Colorado, the ground game is there just to keep her competitive. But at that point, the writing would in a sense already be on the wall. Hillary Clinton is (pardon my bias) an inherently superior candidate to Trump, but if she’s still struggling to make that case to voters in early November, then her ground game probably won’t matter. Clinton needs to have a strong performance in this debate in the eyes of voters, which might be different than how we at SDMB might view a strong performance. Whatever these voters want, Hillary needs to give it to 'em tonight. She has to stop the bleeding now, or people will start accepting and possibly even getting comfortable with the idea of President Trump – which we absolutely don’t want.
I haven’t noticed much interest in Sam Wang on the SDMB as of late, but HRC just made some encouraging gains in his predictions in his most recent update. Predicting 307 EV, Meta-margin at 2.4%, up from 1.5%, and roughly 10% gains in both random drift and Bayesian win probabilities (currently 79 and 87%, respectively).
His newest article, Three Reasons To Ignore Debate “Expectations,” currently featured on the linked page, hopefully has some truth to it.
Do you have a cite for this? It would be pretty unethical for them to not put massive caveats/MOE for these sub-polls and for other people to report same without mentioning those caveats.
In fact Sam Wang had a comment in that article in which he said, essentially, that Nate Silver’s current figures make no sense.
Pfff…frankly this kind of thinking is exactly why we have the problems we now have in this election. If people would just fucking vote based on who’s qualified instead of whoever is capturing our imagination we wouldn’t have to worry about Trump. Bernie Sanders, however kewl and hip he might have been, would not have been the right choice. He might have defeated Trump but he would end up being nothing but a gadfly as president just like he’s been a gadfly as a senator. This country doesn’t need a gadfly anymore than it needs a reality TV buffoon. What it really needs, what it really lacks, is a population of people who are demonstrably competent at voting.
Ooooooohhhhhh, looks like the stat geeks are talkin trash and getting ready for an online bro-down.
Yeah, and with all due respect to Nate Silver, I really hope that Wang is right.
It’s from my memory of a 538 article (by Nate, I think) explaining all those new state “polls” with small sample sizes from the last few months. I did a 2 minute search and couldn’t find it – I’ll try again later. Maybe your google skills will be better, if you feel like looking.
I don’t think anyone truly knows at the moment what the real probability for this race is – too much polling and not enough of it settled. But honestly, given the recent trend line, Wang’s probability seems a bit overconfident. I’m assuming I’m reading his site correctly, which I admittedly might not be. I think Clinton has a very slight electoral college advantage, but even with the more optimistic interpretation of polling, the trends probably suggest that Trump has enjoyed a good 6-week run of success and that, at best, Clinton has probably only managed to slow his momentum somewhat. Worst case scenario? Trump’s actually even or winning.
Electoral-vote.com is making the argument for “gut” analysis of the race. That Trump has a ceiling on his support, which is why he can’t win.
Except that’s what I assumed in the primary. Plus Gary Johnson is an outlet for any voter who doesn’t like either candidate, so Trump’s ceiling is irrelevant.
For what it’s worth, my gut tells me electoral-vote.com is right. Clinton probably wins most Stein voters on election day. But that’s a skewed polls argument and you know how good I am with those.
I have to say, I like the fact that you stuck around after the last election and took your lumps, and that you can poke fun at yourself.
One thing to think about – Hillary Clinton has the same data team as Obama in 2012, and Obama’s 2012 data team and internal polling were much, much steadier and more accurate than the national polls. So we can keep an eye on which states she’s focusing on – and IIRC, she’s not putting money into CO, PA, WI, and MI, which might be a really good indication that her internal polling shows that those states are in the bag.
Wang alludes to it here. Not so good for individual states but in aggregate very useful.
From comments in that thread we can link to this discussion on electoralvote.com:
Which seems consistent with Wang’s take. Individual state results are garbage but for aggregation purposes they can have a place.
What I thought was most cogent was this observation:
nm
That is quite an interesting article. I wonder what sort of data team Trump has assembled? Of course, he has only the VERY BEST people. Apparently Cambridge Analytica has the job - some people are saying that other, more exprienced firms did not want the job at all. Cambridge Analytica’s claim to fame is that they worked on Cruz’s failed campaign, so they have that going for them.
Well, one thing that can be said is that if she loses, it won’t be because her campaign failed her, but because she failed her campaign.
Good campaign teams will typically have better polling than campaigns – getting accurate data and knowing, down to the precinct, which voters are enthusiastic about their candidate and which aren’t is their business. So I would have to agree that even looking at RCP averages may tell us a lot, but the campaigns probably have better data – or at least the better campaign does typically.
I think there are two polls out now showing that Florida has flipped back to Clinton. I’ve been wondering whether or not Trump’s foundation problems might hurt him - and if there was anywhere that it might, Florida would be the likely place. Hard to know if this is just a blip or something deeper, but it’s a good sign for Clinton. Hopefully she can build on this by having a strong debate and not letting other states slip. But even so, if she can win in FL, that would be pretty close to a mortal blow to Trump’s chances. He’d really have to get out the vote across a lot of geography and that’s not something his campaign is in a position to do.