Swings in polls are notable, and there’s reason to believe Trump’s conviction hurt his approval among independents.
Will this last? Idk. Hillary was up by 10-pts in October and crashed to a dead-heat on election day. But it should be worth considering what current events have a positive or negative impact on a candidate’s approval.
Assuming you’re actively participating in GOTV, its useful to know what talking points engage people and what don’t.
Assuming you’ve got some vested socio-economic interest in the winner of the next presidential race, it might inform personal financial or business decisions.
We can thank the “trumpland” FBI for that swing. I know it’s a fan-fave to blame Hillary for that swing, but it’s not like she told the FBI to open an “investigation” into Buttery Males, and not mention that donnie was under investigation when making that big splashy announcement about Hillary…
Can we talk about how the graphic didn’t sort the results in any kind of chronological order? Today, then October 2023, then May 2024 is an insane way to present this data. Go either oldest first or newest first sort order.
I don’t care if Biden’s lead rises to 3,141,592,653 points. GET OUT AND VOTE!!! Make sure you are registered, get your friends to check their registration, go and vote when the time comes. Democracy is literally in our hands.
The Biden campaign has been running polls and focus groups for weeks, and the message has been clear: a felony conviction is a turn-off and a dealbreaker for some meaningful number of voters
To me these polls were NOT important because of the swing to Biden. They were important due to the swing in important issues. To 68% of those surveyed the most important issue was “the Preservation of Democracy”. This tells me that people are taking the totally insane Trump ranting seriously and all Biden really has to do is let Trump be Trump. Trump can’t win losing independents.
In the moment, sure. We’ll see how much people care about his conviction when its four months in the rear view mirror and “Hunter Biden Newest Dick Picks” bombard the latest media cycle.
But maybe - just maybe - the Dems will see prosecuting high ranking conservative crooks as a boon rather than a hazard as they run into the next election cycle. Maybe someone will have the bright idea to bring federal charges against Ken Paxton or Ron DeSantis or even Elon Musk.
Or maybe not. Maybe we’ll just scratch Trump off as “Uniquely Prosecutable” and never do this again.
Polls illustrate popular sentiment in the moment and give a picture of changing ideological trends over time. This informs people about likely possible futures and assists in long-term decision making.
The polls are absolute shit. You can draw a little bit of a conclusion that if Biden went up by 2 points, that probably means that wherever the real answer is, it might not be crazy to think it went up by somewhere from 1 to 3 points because of something that happened. That part may be worth being slightly happy about. But whether that real answer is +2 like they say, or -10, or +20, modern polls actually can't tell you, and all these people that are telling you they can, are lying. In my opinion.
Source: I looked through the methodology they actually use for this polling and found it to be dogshit, and then looked up a few polls for recent elections and found that the poll differed from the actual result of the election by an average of 16 percentage points.
True but what the poster said is important: polls do not work well in close races because they don’t sample correctly. The average poll respondent is older, whiter, and more conservative than the average voter. So you end up with a skewed sample. Plus you sample so few of the other voters that you can’t make a guess as to what they think.
No younger people answer the phone for pollsters, so this is hard to fix. They are probably going to have to start paying people to answer surveys. I know I won’t answer them for 15 or 20 minutes for free.
The average poll respondent is older, whiter, and more conservative than the average voter. So you end up with a skewed sample.
Any reputable polling group will adjust for that. Granted, fewer and fewer people are answering their phones and taking these polls, but basic demographics are a well-known and pretty easy to adjust for thing. Most polls take a lot of that information for that reason
People here and on Reddit really think that polls are made with just a few calls and then some average/extrapolation and that’s it.
Meanwhile it’s an entire field with a lot of complex math and people with more knowledge about it than everyone in this comment section combined.
And then the classic “polls are shit, they always get it wrong”. By definition polls are correct because they just represent an objective data set. Then they translate it into a phrase that we humans can (somewhat) understand but people then take it wrongly.
They read “Poll X says candidate Y will win” when instead they should read “According to the data obtained for Poll X, candidate Y has a Z% chance of winning with a confidence level of W%”. And that isn’t wrong unless someone wants to find the mistake in the math.
True but what the poster said is important: polls do not work well in close races because they don’t sample correctly.
That’s not my point. My point is that the poll movements are almost always correct, because pollsters are at least consistent with how biased they are / errors in sampling.
Fox News had Trump leading Biden a few weeks ago. Today, Biden is ahead of Trump. We don’t know where the “truth” lies, but we can 100% conclude that the typical American has lost a bit of favor on Trump in the past few weeks.
Remember that it’s not the popular vote that counts, it’s the electoral college, and current polling gives Trump a 2-in-3 chance of winning the college:
I’d say Biden is in an even worse position, his push to the far right on immigration, economics, genocide etc. because he thinks he has voters over a barrel has alienated and demoralized a lot of voters. He’s quite literally to the right of Ronald Reagan at this point on so many issues, it’s a tall order to ask non-conservatives to vote for him when he’s literally just a Republican.
His inability to change course very well might cost him the election, and even if he does squeak out a win it guaruntees that the Democratic party will continue to see moving right and supporting genocide as the way to win elections.
US democracy is kind of a walking corpse at this point I think. People just don’t want to acknowledge what the problems are and think kicking the can down the road some more will help.
This is why things are shit and nothing changes. You can’t just show up to vote for the president and then fuck off for four years. You have to vote in every local election too. Its not a walking corpse, the flies just know when nothing is around the shit.
You’re right that we need to vote in all elections to enable more progressive politics. The problem is even when we try to do that, establishment democrats come in with millions of dollars in PAC money to back the establishment candidate instead and keep the political outsiders out. Jessica Cisneros would have been amazing, but Pelosi did everything she could to keep the corrupt goon Cuellar in place, who is now indicted on 14 federal corruption charges. Of course Pelosi still backs him, full-throatedly.
It’s not going to get better until we stop the corruption and end the legalized bribes by getting money out of politics. Until then it’s just a dog and pony show to keep us distracted enough to not be in open rebellion in the streets over how badly the working class is getting robbed. And the elites are in a panic because they are losing that grip…it’s going to be a wild election season in America to say the least.
Dems do have an amazing ability to learn the exact wrong lessons from situations such as this. It’s also mildly infuriating that most attempts to point out these shortcomings are met with shaming or outrageous claims of nefarious intent instead of a modicum of introspection. Those are the interactions that make it hard to hold on to hope for me.
I think people need to stop thinking that “most likely outcome” = prediction. They gave Trump a 1/4 chance of winning in 2016, which is far from impossible and better than most were saying. Their latest trackers have really emphasized the probability aspect of things, rather than the expected vote share.
They actually did a project about this. Here’s how close they were with US House predictions: …fivethirtyeight.com/…/us-house-elections/ (you can look up other elections but since there are so many to work with here I thought it was a good place to start)
They gave him a 1/4, with a bunch of caveats like “If we see these midwest states start trending red, that’s a good sign for Biden”. And then Hillary lost Pennsylvania, and 538 basically called it for Trump on the spot.
But polling in 2016 was generally stronger, because we had more professional pollsters and fewer partisan polling operations. Modern polling is increasingly polluted by unreliable narrators, push polls, and polling-as-propaganda for partisan news sites. The problem with 538, structurally speaking, was that it got people to stop doing their own polls and fixate on aggregates to the exclusive of internal research. This, combined with the ongoing consolidation of domestic media markets, means we have fewer and fewer people doing professional polling research.
So the data firms like 538 use has degraded. The interest in their results has faded, as a consequence. And the trend towards eye-polling click-bait headlines has resulted in pollers being defunded in favor of automated screen scrappers and headline generator scripts.
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