2024 Presidential Election - Take II

[Edgy MD]

Polls certainly are statistics, as are many models and estimations.

[rchurch314]

they're not like coin flips though. They're opinions. These polls are not revealing facts the way you'd calculate odds in a game of chance for instance. Nor is it sequential. "trump lead in July but now Harris leads in October" is an incorrect way to view information that has not changed, because it's information that has not happened yet. Hence, opinion. It's good for writing stories, but it really tells us next to nothing about what's going to happen because the future hasn't happened yet.

Oh, there's also this.

SOURCE Iowa Poll of 808 likely voters, Oct. 28-31. Margin of error: plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.

Like, the lead isn't even within the margin of error, and we're talking about like 24 people difference. Nearly 2 million people will vote in Iowa, but we're going to predict it based on a dozen or two?

Note they rounded the total numbers but went precise on the MoE. So that 3% difference could easily be 2.6 with rounding, or like 21 people, meanwhile the error number is 27 people.

[Edgy MD]

I certainly wouldn't suggest that polls are coin flips.

But polls are a recording of information that has "happened."

[whippoorwill]

I just texted this to a spam political texter


I decided when I got my 50th unsolicited text about voting that I was changing my vote.
Congratulations

Lying of course. But maybe in 2028 they’ll find something else to do on a nice autumn afternoon

[Edgy MD]

Here's a reason for MAGA-resistors to be optimistic about Pennsylvania — the Keystone State electorate are the ones that sent Dr. Oz packing in favor of a guy recovering from a brain injury, and who seems to hate dressing for work.

[whippoorwill]

Lol. Yeah he’s a nice guy though even though he looks like a thug.

My daughter in law and some of my friends have spent a good deal of time with him and he seems sincere

[Chad ochoseis]

they're not like coin flips though. They're opinions. These polls are not revealing facts the way you'd calculate odds in a game of chance for instance. Nor is it sequential. "trump lead in July but now Harris leads in October" is an incorrect way to view information that has not changed, because it's information that has not happened yet. Hence, opinion. It's good for writing stories, but it really tells us next to nothing about what's going to happen because the future hasn't happened yet.

Oh, there's also this.

SOURCE Iowa Poll of 808 likely voters, Oct. 28-31. Margin of error: plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.

Like, the lead isn't even within the margin of error, and we're talking about like 24 people difference. Nearly 2 million people will vote in Iowa, but we're going to predict it based on a dozen or two?

Note they rounded the total numbers but went precise on the MoE. So that 3% difference could easily be 2.6 with rounding, or like 21 people, meanwhile the error number is 27 people.

They're not just someone's opinion, and they're not pure science either.

The pollsters spoke to some number of people. They got 808 answers. Of those 808 answers, 47% of them said they planned to vote for Harris and 44% said they planned to vote for Trump. These are facts.

"Margin of error" is possibly the most misunderstood phrase in political discourse. The margin of error, which is really just a statistical convention, is two standard deviations. If your sample is unbiased, there is a 95% chance that the right answer falls within two standard deviations of the answer you took from the sample.

The statistical theory states that in a situation where you're taking a sample of a massive group of people and they're choosing between two options where about half will choose one and half will choose the other, two standard deviations in percentage points is 1 divided by the square root of the sample size. 1/SQRT(808) is 0.035. This is close to the 3.4 points they're using.

What the 3.4% margin of error means is that, assuming there is no sampling bias, there is a 95% probability that between 43.6% and 50.4% of Iowa voters support Harris.

That's the math. That shows that the 21 person difference isn't that much of a problem statistically. Or, at least, the size of the problem can be measured mathematically, and it's 3.4 points one way or the other.

You're correct that they would have done better to get a decimal point extra of precision in the percentages.

That's the fact part of polling. The opinion part is how to be sure the poll is unbiased. If you telephone people at random, but it's 1952 and there are still a large number of people who don't have telephones and that demographic breaks heavily for Truman, your poll is going to be inaccurate no matter what the math says. If it's 2008 and you're still conducting polls by calling land line phones, you're going to miss the younger voters who have gone 100% cellular and went heavily for Obama.

Or, if you believe Nate Silver, you might just pitch a poll that doesn't produce results that don't conform to what the other polls are saying.

The Des Moines Register is respected because they generally do a good job of avoiding biases like this.

My long winded point here is that the poll isn't perfect and it isn't conclusive. But it's based on data, not bullshit.

[batmagadanleadoff]

[whippoorwill]

Explain please

[batmagadanleadoff]

Explain please

It's a series of cards I first posted almost exactly four years ago, just before the 2020 election, when the Hitler was the actual sitting U.S. President. They're a continuation of the cards posted at page 17 of this thread.

[MFS62]

Can I claim I'm schizophrenic and vote twice?
If I claim to be bi-polar, the votes would cancel each other out.
Later

[Frayed Knot]

Final Des Moines Register poll shows Harris leading Trump 47-44 in Iowa. Let's just say if she wins Iowa it'll be an early night......

If that's even close to accurate it would be big.

"J. Ann Selzer is retiring from election polling just weeks after her once-respected poll showed that Kamala Harris was leading in Iowa — only for Trump to win the state by more than 13 percentage points on Election Day."


And I'll repeat: something is wrong within the Democratic Party if Iowa went from voting 'Blue' in six of seven presidential elections ['88, '92, '96, '00, '08, '12] only to then
lose the state in each of the next three including the most recent by 13 percentage points.

[rchurch314]

And I'll repeat: something is wrong within the Democratic Party if Iowa went from voting 'Blue' in six of seven presidential elections ['88, '92, '96, '00, '08, '12] only to then
lose the state in each of the next three including the most recent by 13 percentage points.

It's not complicated. Republicans have had their finger on the scales for decades. Things were bad under trump last time, and they'll be bad this time, but they were also pretty damn bad under both bushes, and reagan.

March 8, 2021, 6:03 PM EST / Source: The Associated Press
By The Associated Press
DES MOINES, Iowa — Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds on Monday signed into law a Republican-backed bill that makes it harder to vote early, potentially eroding a key aspect of Democratic campaigns.

from 2014

Curbs on Restoring Rights to People with Past Convictions. Florida, Iowa, and South Dakota all made it significantly harder for Americans with past criminal convictions to have their voting rights restored. In Florida and Iowa, those citizens are essentially permanently disenfranchised. Nationally, 5.85 million Americans who have done their time have lost the right to vote; 1.5 million are in Florida. Overall, 7.7 percent of African Americans have lost their right-compared to 1.8 percent of whites.

from 2017

The Iowa Senate gave final approval Thursday to contentious legislation that will require voters to show government-issued identification at the polls and will reduce the time period for early voting.

Iowa’s governor signed a broad-based law that will require voter ID, restrict voter registration efforts, and impose new burdens on Election Day registration and early and absentee voting. Although not as restrictive as a North Carolina law that passed in 2013 (and was blocked by a federal court), Iowa’s law similarly restricts voting in a number of different ways.

[Frayed Knot]

Y'see, this is part of the problem. Dems go from winning six of seven national elections in Iowa to losing three straight by increasingly large margins and decide that losing states they used to win regularly can't possibly be due to their message and/or their messengers. No, it must be because the number of early voting days isn't quite right, or that not enough non-citizens and criminals are voting. Yeah, that's it, procedural matters are why we went from +10 to -13 in the last decade and a half.

Look, if people don't want to vote then don't vote, and a big part of Harris's problem was that too many democrats who voted for JB in '20 simply stayed home this year.
But if they do want to vote it's not complicated and it certainly isn't harder or more complicated for blue voters than it is for red.
1) register when it's time to register
2) vote when and where voting is locally established (Election Day used to be a single day, now there is more time and methods than ever so stop crying 'Suppression!')
3) be a citizen
4) don't be a felon

The larger point being that when you're no longer winning in states and in regions where you were had the upper hand in most years and were at least competitive in others then it's time to stop playing the victim and look in the mirror. Your message(s) either isn't the right one or it's not getting through. Fix it!

[batmagadanleadoff]

4) don't be a felon

How do you know that disenfranchising felons isn't a pretext for racial discrimination? Or a pretext to specifically target likely Democratic voters? We don't deny felons the right to own property or to drink liquor.

There's a lot of truth in your post. But don't minimize or condone the effects of voter suppression.

[Centerfield]

It's clearly the messaging. The Republicans have run the worst guy in the world the last three elections and won twice.

I think it's pretty clear that white folks, and specifically white men, and even more specifically straight white men, don't feel that the Democratic party represents them. It was driven home by that "they/them" ad. But the underlying sentiment was already there.

I don't know what can be done. The Republicans have used hate and intolerance to galvanize the white population and have a lot of folks terrified that gay brown transgender muslim immigrants are going to take over the nation and dominate their middle school girls soccer games.

I don't know how the Democrats can counter that. Sympathy and tolerance are a lot harder to sell then mass hysteria. But FK is right. Scolding them and repeating messages of white guilt are certainly not working.

[batmagadanleadoff]

The latest take (we'll be getting plenty of these) is that the madman's margin of victory was narrow -- one of the narrowest ever by vote count (objectively provable) and that the election was swung by the least informed voters out there -- voters who are easily susceptible to the sound bite torrent of never ending lies and bullshit put forward by the GOP and that these voters are in for a rude awakening because they don't have a single fucking clue as to what or whom they actually voted for.

Most voters don't have time to watch cable news and read anywhere from half a dozen to maybe 20 news articles a day. They don't know what gerrymandering is and couldn't name a single SCOTUS justice. All they fucking know is that if eggs are eight bucks a dozen, it has to be Biden's fault.

[rchurch314]

It's clearly the messaging. The Republicans have run the worst guy in the world the last three elections and won twice.

I think it's pretty clear that white folks, and specifically white men, and even more specifically straight white men, don't feel that the Democratic party represents them. It was driven home by that "they/them" ad. But the underlying sentiment was already there.

I don't know what can be done. The Republicans have used hate and intolerance to galvanize the white population and have a lot of folks terrified that gay brown transgender muslim immigrants are going to take over the nation and dominate their middle school girls soccer games.

I don't know how the Democrats can counter that. Sympathy and tolerance are a lot harder to sell then mass hysteria. But FK is right. Scolding them and repeating messages of white guilt are certainly not working.

None of this is true, but the Democrats agree with you and are mostly saying "fuck trans people" trying to win those 3 moderate votes. We saw how well this worked with immigrants. No one was swayed by the stupid fake they/them ad, because republicans were never going to vote for her anyway, and democrats know that she isn't actually proposing being nice to migrants and that the current administration hasn't been either, of which she's a part.

Of course, trans rights on ballots gets better support than Democrats do. Most 'liberal' policies do. Things like trans people and abortion are so normcore now that they're really just moderate policies. The problem becomes when republicans are rolling them back (you can't roll back things that aren't moderate, common place things) and Democrats are basically arguing that "wait wait, let's roll them back a little more compassionately". Like, when you hang out with anti-choice politicians, why would anyone believe you're going to do anything to restore body autonomy?

When the sympathy and tolerance is fake, it certainly doesn't sell. I've seen very little sympathy and tolerance though, perhaps they could try it? When democrats vote for policies allowing the executive branch to strip non-profit status from charities on a whim (because they support feeding Gaza), it's not hard to wonder why people don't feel the Democratic Party represents them.

[Centerfield]

It's clearly the messaging. The Republicans have run the worst guy in the world the last three elections and won twice.

I think it's pretty clear that white folks, and specifically white men, and even more specifically straight white men, don't feel that the Democratic party represents them. It was driven home by that "they/them" ad. But the underlying sentiment was already there.

I don't know what can be done. The Republicans have used hate and intolerance to galvanize the white population and have a lot of folks terrified that gay brown transgender muslim immigrants are going to take over the nation and dominate their middle school girls soccer games.

I don't know how the Democrats can counter that. Sympathy and tolerance are a lot harder to sell then mass hysteria. But FK is right. Scolding them and repeating messages of white guilt are certainly not working.

None of this is true, but the Democrats agree with you and are mostly saying "fuck trans people" trying to win those 3 moderate votes. We saw how well this worked with immigrants. No one was swayed by the stupid fake they/them ad, because republicans were never going to vote for her anyway, and democrats know that she isn't actually proposing being nice to migrants and that the current administration hasn't been either, of which she's a part.

Of course, trans rights on ballots gets better support than Democrats do. Most 'liberal' policies do. Things like trans people and abortion are so normcore now that they're really just moderate policies. The problem becomes when republicans are rolling them back (you can't roll back things that aren't moderate, common place things) and Democrats are basically arguing that "wait wait, let's roll them back a little more compassionately". Like, when you hang out with anti-choice politicians, why would anyone believe you're going to do anything to restore body autonomy?

When the sympathy and tolerance is fake, it certainly doesn't sell. I've seen very little sympathy and tolerance though, perhaps they could try it? When democrats vote for policies allowing the executive branch to strip non-profit status from charities on a whim (because they support feeding Gaza), it's not hard to wonder why people don't feel the Democratic Party represents them.

You can argue that the Democrats need to move further left. I have no idea if that will work or not, but propose what you will.

You cannot argue that the white population doesn't feel represented by Democrats. White Americans, and in particular, white men, voted overwhelmingly in favor of Trump all three times he ran.

You also can't argue that Republicans have galvanized the white base through hate and intolerance. Today Nancy Mace is making a big show of banning trans members of Congress (I think there is one) from using the women's bathroom.

I don't know how to remedy this. But pretending like this isn't true isn't productive.

[rchurch314]

You can argue that the Democrats need to move further left. I have no idea if that will work or not, but propose what you will.

You cannot argue that the white population doesn't feel represented by Democrats. White Americans, and in particular, white men, voted overwhelmingly in favor of Trump all three times he ran.

You also can't argue that Republicans have galvanized the white base through hate and intolerance. Today Nancy Mace is making a big show of banning trans members of Congress (I think there is one) from using the women's bathroom.

I don't know how to remedy this. But pretending like this isn't true isn't productive.

We/The Democrats can fall into this trap over and over again if they want, until the country just withers away. There are very few "galvanized white voters" who would've voted for the Democratic candidate, no matter what. The myth of the undecided voter is nonsense, particularly this year.

Speaking to these people. About these people. About how to court these people. That's what's not productive, because it comes AT THE EXPENSE of what you might call the Democratic 'base', though one might argue that they can't really be your base if you constantly refuse to listen to them. There are some small percentage of people to the right of the typical Democratic campaign that you could woo, and a VAST percent of ones to the left, and it's completely infuriating that they continue to focus on the ones to the right.

None of this is actually complicated. Genuine compassion for human rights and progressive ideals is a popular position. Educated white people vote, if narrowly, for Biden and then Harris.

Uneducated people vote for republicans. Which is why they try to gut education and ban books.

Black people vote for democrats. Which is why republicans create policies that over-target black people. (see: War on Drugs. Police Brutality. etc.)



It needs to be stated again, but trump didn't really gain any new voters. Just disenfranchisement and voter suppression kept Harris voters from the polls.

Good thread on some of the postmortem. We'd be a lot better off with more politicians that listened to her.

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:p7gxyf ... rjy72ohk2i