Apparently there’s a strong possibility that the pollsters are fucking up again in as they did pre-election in underreporting Trump’s popularity. (Surprise, surprise).
So land line phone surveys which skew heavily toward the elderly angry misinformed show negative approval ratings but automated online surveys that can be exploited by bots show that he’s the tits?
Wait, let me get this straight, the national popular polling was off by 2% in the election but now polls are supposed to be off by 6% in a national popular poll? So you’re argument is that polling is 3 times worse in January then in was is November? Are they getting worse by 1% per month can we expect the polls to be wrong by 51% by the time Trump leaves office?
I’m still not convinced that the polls were wrong so much as people were simply lying to the pollsters. Why do I believe this? Just look at the turnout at the inauguration. There may be many ways to interpret the comparatively low turnout: the way that I interpret it is that there are a lot of people who voted for Trump who don’t want to have to look someone that they don’t know for sure is sympathetic in the eye and admit out loud that they voted for Trump.
Really? Trump breaks 50% with anonymous internet polling? :rolleyes:
It’s like you’ve never been around 4chan. They love to distort internet results. They perfected that art a decade ago.
Anyway, even if Trump were popular, so what? Cigarettes are popular. Barbie dolls are popular. Doesn’t make cigarettes good for you, or Barbie a good president.
It’s possible the polls underestimate his support. I hope everyone working against him believes that the polls are underestimating and works that much harder for it.
There is more support for Trump than people here in the SDMB, and big media, think. It’s confirmation bias.
A perfect example is my brother in law who is in academia at one of the Boston Universities. Per him last summer the Dems were going to sweep all 50 states for Hillary. That what everyone in his work and social environment thought. However he seldom gets outside of that circle.
In my work I was seeing a lot different. I get out into the working world and talk with a lot of different people at different levels from the office to the field. I absolutely was not seeing what he saw and had a strong feeling all year long Trump would win.
When I said this to brother in law he just laughed at me and pulled the common lefty approach of name calling and insults to all those people.
There is more support out there than you think and name calling, insults and violence won’t be changing it.
All of which means pretty much nothing. We know national polls can be relatively worthless in terms of Presidential elections. I know the term Fake News is a fashionable term at the moment. I suspect these Presidential approval polls are the type of stories Fake News suitably describe. These polls probably hold an element of truth in them, but they in actual fact mean jack shit in the greater scheme of things. These polls are pushing a narrative, they are reporting nothing substantive in terms of politics, or the likelihood of Trump’s re-election.
Well, it’s certainly good to have confirmation how many people think the rights of CERTAIN other people are meaningless. Gives you an idea of what you’re fighting against.
His mistake was having too much respect for people to think that they’d vote for someone like Trump, not “name calling”.
And if “name calling, insults and violence” reduced political support, Trump and the Republicans would have lost. Their election was among other things the American public putting their collective stamp of approval on those things. Trump was the one calling for his opponent to be murdered in a “Second Amendment solution”, not Hillary.
Like other people have posted, I believe that the polls are generally right. I know that there are people who have regretted voting for Trump, though I don’t know how big of a percentage they are, and how many were Trump supporters, and how many were just Republican voters who wished they could have voted for someone else. The Trump Regrets twitter account is collecting a lot of tweets from unhappy people who say they voted for Trump and now regret it. Here’s just a few recent tweets:
I know that there are supporters who are still cheering every move that he makes. And there are some others who think it’s still early and we should give him more of a chance. But I know that there are some others who thought he’d stop being so bombastic and be more presidential when he got into the White House and are disappointed and concerned that his behavior hasn’t changed. And there are some who voted for him for specific reasons, like hoping that he’d bring jobs back, and weren’t concerned about other things he’d say he’d do and are more concerned now.
Also, I don’t know how many of his supporters truly believed he’d do what he’d say he’d do. I remember hearing multiple people saying something like “he doesn’t really mean that” or “he’s not actually going to do that”, but they liked that he was stirring the pot and playing a different game than other politicians. I heard it said that the press took him literally but not seriously, while his supporters took him seriously but not literally, and it seems true to a certain extent.
If someone voted for Trump and regrets it now, I might find their reasons for voting for him in the first place baffling and wish they had changed their minds sooner, but I’m not going to make fun of them or try to alienate them. I want as many people protesting against the wrong things he’s doing, whether it’s with calls and emails or out in the street.
“relatively worthless” in terms of who will win the electoral college, but they did predict closely the popular vote.
They mean Trump isn’t winning over people by the bedazzling quality of his first two weeks of presidenting.
Of course they don’t mean anything regarding the presidental election four years away, but they do mean something in terms of politics, not a ton, but saying they mean nothing is just as much wishful thinking as going “Look! No one likes Donald Trump!”
So true. Why, the right wing has been politely and respectfully talking about grabbing women by the pussy, calling Mexicans rapists, incesssantly sneering at coastal elites in bubbles, calling Atlanta a disaster area because of all its black folk, threatening to sic the feds on Chicago if it doesn’t stop opposing Trump, making up massacres, calling the press the opposition party, and what do they get in return for their politeness and respect? NASTY WOMEN!
Winning the popular vote was proven to be pretty much worthless imo.
I think these polls really are all but worthless. Add a small % of possible shy Trump supporters to the irrelevance of the popular vote and you have a very dubious narrative indeed. Only 3 months ago poll driven narratives were shown to be not only irrelevant but possibly even detrimental to Clinton’s political campaign. Yet barely a few weeks into Trump’s Presidency and these polls are being cited and tweeted by many of the same folk they embarrassed very recently.
If folk want to delve deep down into Trump’s electoral prospects a way of obtaining his approval rate among working class whites in a dozen battleground states is probably the more accurate way to go. His approval rate among Latino females in California is irrelevant. In fact if you add this Latino female sub group into the polls then you are probably obtaining a very misleading Trump approval rating indeed.