I know, right? Honestly, sometimes it feels like none of y’all think I was serious when I issued that decree.
Frankly, I find it kind of disrespectful.
“Stop Looking At Us,” Agree Media.
Yeah, not seein’ it.
The RCP running average has had Trump and Clinton tied (or nearly so) at four separate times. Why should anyone be surprised if he is tied at several more times in the future?
And why should anyone care? Or pay any attention at all? The electoral vote is the only thing that matters. Trump could get every vote in the red states and he wouldn’t gain anything.
Why this idiot obsession on the horse race? Speculating on how long their toes are is exactly as meaningful and you’d have the advantage of not having any misleading numbers to confound you.
It’s because of reporters filling air time and column inches with a minimum of actual thought and analysis and work that would go unappreciated by the proles anyway.
Preach it! I think it’s mostly media-driven. A horse race sells, whereas a blow-out does’t. And a “can’t really say yet” isn’t of much interest either.
So, yeah, there are 2 problems: Polls at this point don’t mean too much, and you need to look at state-by-state results anyway. But it’s a lot more work to poll state-by-state and even more work to explain it. Since most people probably can’t be bothered to care about the difference anyway, we get this garage of national polls in the middle of summer when few people are paying attention anyway.
I really hope you guys don’t have as huge a shock coming to you as we in the UK did a week or so ago. Politics is in a strange place these days.
The problem with hoping Trump wins because it would help the Dems or progressives is that it would never help us for long enough to fix everything he would break.
Apropos. Summetime is the season to clean the junk out of your garage.
It’s more difficult now for anyone to win as big as Johnson, or Reagan/Bush I, more polarized electorate. But while I can see a anti-Republican hoping for a washout of Trump, I can’t really see a Republican hoping for that. Because not enough voters split their voting for GOP to avoid massive Congressional losses if Trump loses by a lot, even by today’s standards.
If Trump loses enough for GOP to lose Congress then Democrats have free rein for at least 2 yrs, and while Democrats (or people to the left of the Democrats) posing as neutral commentators might wax philosophical about how that would morally cleanse the GOP and be best for them, you can’t really expect Republicans to agree.
GOP is probably best off if Trump can’t* say he did a lot better than Romney, but doesn’t do a lot worse.
*credibly, I don’t mean in Trump’s mind, which IMO will likely include insisting he was cheated in various places and/or overall.
Nitpick. We don’t care if that would be best for the GOP. It would be best for America, though. Nobody should be neutral about that.
Sorry reign, not rein. Anyway it’s not good for the GOP IMO for Trump to lose by a lot and not good for the Democrats, net, for Trump to win. Yes there’s a silver lining element for Democrats if Trump wins and does an obviously crap job. The problems with that reasoning though are at least two.
- It’s very hard to predict how well or poorly things will go under a given individual, even as unusual a candidate as Trump. A lot of events don’t really depend who is President, serious element of luck to ride positive events/trends not of their making.
- It neglects the effect of not controlling the executive oneself for 4 years (and the advantage even a mixed record incumbent will have to run for re-election). Especially consider court nominees.
In general it’s people too confident ‘my side is always right’ who subscribe to the idea of benefiting from the other side winning and proving they’re ‘wrong’.
As to polls, there’s no way to say Trump is likely to lose except polls. If you don’t pay any attention to polls, you’re left with ‘everyone I know hates X so they can’t win’. As to state v national polls
-
the pattern for Trump is worthy of some concern to Democrats. He’s tending to do worse in strongly GOP states than Romney did (barely ahead in UT etc, much narrower margin in TX etc), though it’s partly wasted doing better than Romney in states he can’t win (eg NY). However he’s been competitive in OH, FL and PA, and isn’t clearly behind in any state Romney won.
-
‘Delta’s’ of national and state polls tend to correlate closely. National polls now are noisy, that’s a valid knock. However if the average of national polls improves by say 4% points for Trump, he probably does something like that much better in most states, and that would be a problem for Clinton. The pattern of state results tends to suggest Trump could win the EC with a bigger popular vote loss than Bush did (-0.5%) in 2000. Right now he appears to be down too much nationally for that to pan out, but it’s not as if ‘electoral college’ is some magic mantra that means Trump has to lose.
-
National polls this time of year are mainly ‘registered voter’ not ‘likely voter’. Usually that makes them look a bit more favorable to Democrats than the race actually is. However this time that might not be true.
I don’t see a reason to think Nate Silvers estimate of 20% chance Trump wins is way off. But it’s 20%, not 0%. And if it’s not 0%, I don’t understand why we’d have no interest in polls, unless we have no interest in the election.
The quote I was answering specifically distinguished those two things, saying “A Trump win would be bad for the country, bad for the GOP, and good for the Democrats”, then went on to offer the unrealistic (IMO) combination “Best-case scenario at this point is a resounding loss for Trump, while the GOP retains control of Congress.”
If you’re saying it’s ‘best for America’ if the Democrats have complete control of govt you’re entitled to that opinion, but it seems to me just cluttering up a potentially serious discussion with political bumper stickers. There’s more meat on the bone, in terms of political analysis, to explore whether it’s good for either of the parties themselves to lose, or lose by a lot.
Corry El, you’re making good, serious points of the type I love seeing. Please continue.
My comments are truly more like nitpicks. Obviously, the winner of the polls and the winner of the electoral college highly correlate. 2000 was the exception and the odds of another election that close are low. Using the polls as a shorthand for the bigger picture could sometimes be defended. Not this year. The electoral college is designed to magnify close voting. Concentrating on close polls lessens understanding of that all-important fact.
Stories that say that Trump has possibilities in some swing states obscures the equally tentative but equally intriguing reports that Clinton is close in some red states. Fivethirtyeight.com has Clinton winning the electoral college with Obama ease. Silver’s 80% chance of Clinton winning is the current story, but that’s also meaningless. (Can anyone really say which is the one time in five when a candidate with an 80% chance of winning has actually lost?) I’ve said for a year that Clinton was going to win over any Republican.
I’ve also said that the Republicans have forfeited any right to government. Anywhere, any time, any level. What other “potentially serious argument” are you going to make? That Trump wound up as the presumptive candidate is irrelevant. His ascendancy only makes the obvious visible even to blinkered eyes.
I am not reading anyone stating that we should have no interest in the polls. The comment is more that our interest should be not so myopic that we are paying constant and excessive attention to noise and caring less about signal. We are in a point of the cycle when the noise to signal ratio week to week is traditionally quite high and reacting to noise as if it means that the race is suddenly pulled heavily one way or the other is good for selling clicks and all, but not for actual fair description of the race. (The best analogy I can think of is that many of us are like dieters weighing themselves ten times a day and getting excited and/or upset if the scale is marginally up or down from the last weigh in.)
Anything greater than 0% is too high for me to feel comfortable with. I won’t be comfortable until the election is over. And even then I will fear Carrie’s hand grabbing from the grave.
As for what’s “good for a party” … well there are different interests within each party. For those of the GOP who want the party to be something other than the party for resentful willfully ignorant White males, for those whose conservative principles are other than that, a humiliating loss for Trump, keeping the House while losing some ground there, puts them, and specifically those who recognize the need to embrace the “others” of this country, many of whom might like the conservative message if only it was not bundled with demonizing them, is the best shot they have at entering the team rebuilding season and rebranding phase they desire and believe is in the party’s best long term interests. If they can hold onto the Senate at the same time all the better. As they have been under Obama with a clear understanding of what the future path must be.
Exapno, per 538 it was Bush v Kerry. It happens.
In answer to the bolded part: I can’t answer that question. But if you translate from probabilities to polls, there are numerous examples of candidates blowing considerable leads. I can’t remember the numbers, but in 1988, Dukakis had a pretty safe lead over Bush around the time of the conventions. And it’s worth noting that some of the same people running Trump’s campaign (Paul Manafort, Roger Stone) were running Bush’s 1988 campaign. (Of course, four years later, that same team* failed to get Bush re-elected despite a one-time 90+% approval rating).
*Pretty much the same team - Lee Atwater had died.
This makes me smile.
Spy magazine once observed that there was a brief silence after the death of Roy Cohn (who was a mentor to both Donald Trump and his advisor Roger Stone) before the stories of his mid-deeds came out, until people concluded that even he wasn’t capable of revenge from the grave.
It’s taken Obama eight years.
Who ever thought Kerry had any chance to win, let alone an 80% chance in July 2004?
I’d believe Bush/Dukakis since Dukakis had a polling lead before the conventions. But that was 6 elections ago. When was the swing election before that? Truman in 1948? That’s 10 additional elections.
Very few elections have an uncertain outcome. And in those the winner wasn’t an overwhelming favorite months in advance. I stood up for Nate Silver throughout the 2012 elections, but I’m not as impressed this year.
Yeah my brain fart it wasn’t Bush v Kerry it was the older Bush v Dukakis per 538 (linking here). It widened further after the convention. End of July few would have said that there was any reasonable chance of a Bush victory.
Dukakis gave new meaning to the word “tanked.”
Here’s an 538 article I saw a while ago, suggesting there aren’t that many shy Trump voters.