Why I’m skeptical of some puzzling polls
There was actually some news recently that these polls might actually be wrong here: apparently there’s a large amount of people lying that they’re Hispanic/young in online polls. This was discovered both because: 1. The “20% of youth are Holocaust deniers!” Poll that made the waves wasn’t reproducible and 2. There’s some BIG inconsistencies being found in many polls too, like some polls somehow managing to have a cohort of Hispanics that are 20% nuclear submarine engineers.
Basically, we might have a vicious cycle making polls wildly inaccurate here: youth (and Hispanics?) are harder to poll -> pollsters value the data more vs other demographics-> people lie to obtain the rewards being offered to get this data -> youth/Hispanics become harder to poll.
Polls usually can handle some “lizard man’s constant”, but everything falls apart if there’s significant lying.
“National head to head polls”
Which is meaningless since our elections ARE NOT “National”.
States like Washington, Oregon, and California are going to Biden. Full stop.
States like Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana are going to Trump, full stop.
So the ONLY polling that’s worth following is in the states which may be questionable and, frankly, there aren’t a lot of them.
Arizona - Trump +7
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/arizona/Georgia - Trump +6 to +7
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/georgia/Michigan - Tied to Trump +3
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/michigan/Nevada - Trump +6 to +10
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/nevada/New Mexico - Biden +8 but from August, not useful.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/new-mexico/North Carolina - Trump +9 to +10
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/north-carolina/Pennsylvania - Biden +1
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/pennsylvania/(this one has been flipping back and forth)
Virginia - Biden +4
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/virginia/Wisconsin - Trump +3 to +4
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/wisconsin/Here’s what that looks like on a map:
293 to 245 Trump.
Biden CANNOT win without Michigan and Wisconsin, two states that Clinton infamously neglected to campaign in and lost. Getting them, with this equation, puts Biden EXACTLY at 270.
Polls out this far from the election are essentially meaningless, so there’s also that
And also, this was news to me, but apparently they’re for the most part still doing polls by calling people on the phone from a random number. I cannot possibly imagine that that’s true but that’s what the article says.
They’re like micro optimizing for individual per cents, and then doing something which will eliminate 80% of Gen Z from their polling, and when you ask them about it they apparently say “¯_(ツ)_/¯ IDK we do phone”
Yep. For the last half a dozen elections, the polls have overestimated Republican strength, and underestimated Democratic strength. I think it’s in large part because the pollsters still haven’t managed to figure out how to poll people who simply will not answer unknown numbers.
Also, the Republicans rig the voting machines sometimes.
Polls were really bad in 2016, but the seem to have largely corrected that. 2018 polling just before the election was accurate. 2020 was projected as close and it was, there were a few problem states, but nothing like 2016. 2022 was again very accurate.
Polling around the presidential election or maybe just Trump is less accurate, but it’s been getting better since 2016.
Not quite. Polls underestimated Democratic support in 2018, 2019’s special elections, 2021’s special elections, the 2022 midterms, and last year’s elections. It’s been remarkably consistent how far off they’ve been.
Do I prefer that to the other way around, as happened in 2016? Sure. But they’ve clearly over-corrected, and are having significant trouble getting back on track due to the difficulty of polling young people.
Which is why you keep following them to spot trends.
When I started following these states, it was roughly 50/50. Now it’s almost all Trump and the gains are increasing, not decreasing.
Right now, Biden has a chance of winning Michigan and Wisconsin, best to know that NOW rather than Sept/Oct/Nov.
Are you a campaign manager or a pundit getting paid to talk about politics? There’s honestly no reason at all for the average person to care about polls this far out
There are some circumstances you may want to make certain preparations based on the possibility that one candidate or the other may win, and polling trends can help you determine what sort of plans and preparation you should be making.
One example that comes to my mind is that prior to Trump getting elected, my wife was concerned that a trump presidency could lead to Republicans killing Roe V Wade and/or making it more difficult to access birth control, and so she opted to get a longer-lasting IUD prior to the election.
Ok, but didn’t the polls have Clinton winning leading up to the 2016 election?
The popularity polls, yes. She also won the popular vote by a significant margin.
Trump won some battleground states by slim margins, mostly because Clinton did a terrible job of deciding where to campaign. Also a lot of sketchy voter suppression tactics made those battleground state wins questionable.
They did, but she was doing her own analysis of the polls and had some concerns that made her think the race was going to be much closer than the polls suggested.
You shouldn’t just blindly take the polls at face value, you also need to be thinking critically about them, theres a lot of ways to misrepresent data, a lot of issues that can crop up due to how the polls are conducted, etc. and when she took all of that into account, the polls suggested to her that it was going to be a much closer race than most of the media coverage was saying.
She was still a little surprised that Trump actually won, but it wasn’t totally out of left field.
There’s plenty of reason to care. It’s a sign Biden’s campaign is not yet effective, and Trump is. While most incumbents don’t really step up the campaigning until closer to the election, it gives an idea of the ground they need to make up.
It’s also worth considering the Trump has been and continues to be great at campaigning. You can not like the guy, but his ability to get large crowds excited at multiple events per day can’t be ignored.
There’s likely going to be something that really swings the election still, but hoping a random event helps your party is poor strategy. In Trump’s case it’s unlikely a poor comment is going to hurt him, like the deplorables or binders full of women comments. Hoping for a conviction to change things is an OK backup plan, not plan A.
There absolutely is. You follow them continually to establish a trendline.
Since I’ve been following these key states, I’ve watched them go 50/50 to virtually all Trump, to all Trump by a wider margin.
Following polls over time lets you see the momentum.
By the time the election comes around, there should be no surprises.
If your goal here is to not be surprised, I hate to tell you polls have margins of error that mean surprises are inevitable. Also, many polls are not infrequently found to be outside their SE when the actual results come in.
Again, you can reduce the margin of error by plotting the trend line.
It’s the same science for watching climate change:
If one candidate is trending up towards election day and another is trending down you can tell which way it’s going to swing.
Unless the Electoral College magically goes away, this will be a rough election for a majority of Americans. Lots of long-standing issues are coming to a head with the realization that we’ve already been fascist for a while.
There IS a plan to move to the popular vote, but it only kicks in if we get enough states to represent 270 electoral votes.
As of now it’s at 205 enacted with 88 pending.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
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Genuine question, what’s wrong with it? Isn’t it basically just a blog/self publishing platform?
Its had some “nazi bar” issues, i.e “we dont like nazis, but its cool if they come to our bar with their nazi friends and spend their nazi money here. If more Nazis show up, the more the merrier!”
They back tracked from the above a ways after outrage, but it’s soured people on the platform.
Except it’s not a bar, it’s a web site where you only interact with people you have affirmatively decided to interact with.
It’s like if there is a Nazi living in your apartment building, and specifically forbidden by the laws of physics from doing anything physical to anyone or making any statement or posting any literature to anyone who hasn’t decided they want to hear from them. The risk of everyone in the apartment building deciding to become a Nazi in that situation is small.
I actually agreed with their viewpoint, and the fact that they had to backtrack after a noisy section of the community blew up at them, and that noisy section of the community decided that they were still bad people even though they’d backtracked, and now are “soured,” is to me much more of an indictment of that section of the community than it is of Substack.
Being unaware is very different than knowingly accepting their company.
I think you and I are just not gonna see eye to eye on this.
The one additional thing I’ll say is, the Nazis on Substack were absolutely undetectable to anyone who didn’t choose to interact with them, but a bunch of people absolutely freaked out about them, to the point that it did a bunch of damage to a platform that was absolutely a positive force for good, just because people would have had to share the platform with literally about 0.05% Nazis somewhere out of sight.
Contrast with that, Lemmy clearly has some level of infestation of shills masquerading as real people with political opinions, and they impact the discourse every day. Some of them, if I had to guess, I would guess are actively funded by people who are actively in league with Nazis. You know the ones. Although, that’s pure speculation on my part with basically nothing at all behind it beyond guessing. The impact to the discourse is the only part I’m confident about.
I haven’t seen any level of freakout about that. Just an occasional bleat of “yo it’s not cool that this is happening,” and then business as usual.
Me
Being unaware is very different than knowingly accepting their company.
You
The one additional thing I’ll say is, the Nazis on Substack were absolutely undetectable to anyone who didn’t choose to interact with them, but a bunch of people absolutely freaked out about them, to the point that it did a bunch of damage to a platform that was absolutely a positive force for good, just because people would have had to share the platform with literally about 0.05% Nazis somewhere out of sight.
It’s like you can’t read and understand a simple sentence. Or you just like defending nazis, that could be it too.
My point is that the Nazis were not “in my company” on Substack. I didn’t read them, I wouldn’t even have known where to find them or how to interact with them without putting some effort into finding out. The fact that I knew they were there somewhere doesn’t change that.
There’s no call to get insulting with me about that or pretend that I’m saying it because there’s something I can’t understand. It’s simply the truth. You have your viewpoint, which as best I understand it is that even using the same platform as an overt Nazi is unacceptable to you, which, okay, fine. But pretending I just can’t understand something or I like Nazis is why we’re disagreeing is just condescending and wrong.
Like I say, I think we’re just not gonna see eye to eye on that aspect. Just repeating ourselves at each other probably isn’t productive.
Yeah this is exactly what it is.
The commenter above likely read something they disagree with on substack and has chosen to hate the entire platform because of it.
The admins of the platform said Nazis are welcome.
This is inaccurate. They backtracked pretty heavily on their earlier stance. Which by the way, was never ‘Nazis are welcome’
Misinformation is wild these days.
They explicitly said they would not remove Nazi content.
At the time, Substack CEO Hamish McKenzie addressed the mounting concerns about Substack’s aggressively hands-off approach in a note on the website, observing that while “we don’t like Nazis either,” Substack would break with content moderation norms by continuing to host extremist content, including newsletters by Nazis and other white supremacists.
“We will continue to actively enforce those rules while offering tools that let readers curate their own experiences and opt in to their preferred communities,” McKenzie wrote. “Beyond that, we will stick to our decentralized approach to content moderation, which gives power to readers and writers.”
Later, once people pointed out: that means Nazis are welcome, they removed a few especially blatant examples… and changed nothing else. They still won’t do any work, themselves, to stop taking money from fascists. They just wait until people complain loudly enough, and then maybe they’ll get around to it, on a case-by-case basis.
They literally did not even change their rules. Or their reporting system, which sends reports to the writer, not to Substack. So even the ‘hey this guy’s a fucking Nazi’ feedback they’re supposedly listening to now has to reach them through Twitter or whatever.
The admins of the platform demonstrably did not give a shit about Nazis on their platform. Effectively, they still don’t. Stop squirming.
As much as you have a point about the lacklustre response to literal fascism on the platform - Your point is a little tarnished by the fact that you’re currently complaining about said platform, on a separate platform that currently houses child pornography, anti-trans rhetoric, and Nazi sympathetic views, amongst a plethora of other disgusting things, arguably a worse situation than Substack currently finds itself in.
Don’t mistake this for me defending Substack, that kind of shit should be rooted out at the stem and destroyed wherever it is, but let’s not sit up on our high horses here.
Pictured: squirming. Desperate grasping for some way to nuh-uh despite being proven dead fucking wrong about smug tutting. Not even relevant bullshit, because Lemmy is a protocol, not a a platform. Like you e-mailed me back to whine that some people e-mail death threats.
Substack is a centralized website run by exactly one group of people, and those people don’t care about Nazis. My instance is one of many Lemmy instances, and Nazis have been told to fuck off from day one.
You accused someone of stupid selfish reasons. You were corrected. Deal with it on your own terms.
They let like 2 Nazis on, taking the viewpoint basically (1) it’s in the spirit of the 1st amendment to allow even reprehensible speech (2) guys it’s like 2 of them and the number of people reading and being convinced by them is likely to be 0
And the entirety of the knee-jerk fediverse politics community saw an opportunity to take a pointless stand on something, and in their eyes shone the promise of being able to make some smug self-important postings about how something good is actually really problematic and you’re just not enlightened enough if you don’t agree
And now Substack is literally Hitler even though it was doing a whole bunch of great things, outside of the 2 Nazis
When you sit at a table with 2 nazis, there are three nazis.
And a table. A Nazi table.
2 Nazis walk in to a room of 1000 people and there are now 1002 Nazis in there, right?
If you let them stay, yes there are.
If the 1000 people are fine with the nazis being there, yes.
2 Nazis at the University
OH NO FUCK IT’S LIKE 73,284 NAZIS NOW
(Edit: In all seriousness, I know you already know this, but the problem with the “3 people at the table” analogy is that, A, there are 500,000 people involved, not 3, and if you aren’t talking to the people at the table, or hearing from them, but merely existing on the same electronic computer without any interaction unless you decide to pursue same, which obviously most people won’t do because they’re fucking Nazis, then the risk of becoming suddenly a Nazi because they are next to you on the hard drive is in most cases pretty slight.)
I think the problem is that a lot of political discourse is super constrained, most of these polls are “do you like trump or like Biden” there’s no option to express the opinion of “I hate both of them but one slightly more”. Of course that’s going to create weird results! If they have to twist the answers to get there displeasure across and scare the DNC in to taking them seriously, that’s what they have to do.
I think there is possibly a dissonance being created by how lobby money influences the thinking of campaigns. Say voters care about reducing fossil fuel dependency, say they care about ending support for Israel, say voters care about ending for profit health insurance, say voters care about breaking up corporate oligopolies, these are all toxic pills to many donors. Campaigns don’t feel they can endorse or condemn these things, so they refuse to even engage with the topics. These incredibly important political issues are just… removed from official political discourse, thus such things are kept out of the polls or reduced to anemic platitudes, so people can’t accurately express what they care about.
Younger voters are pissed at the democratic establishment and there is no statistical data based way for them to measure why. So the democratic establishment is left flailing in the dark, boxing with ghosts because they’ve blinded them selves to issues that pit their continents against donors. WHICH ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUES FOR MOST YOUNGE VOTERS.
I don’t know how the polling would catch them, but the idea that people under 30 are more progressive socially or economically is probably a huge simplification. I only have anecdotal information, but what is see is they are spilt, and largely along gender lines, with both sides taking the idea of a breakdown of government as we know it almost as a moot point.
I recently saw a poll of current 18 year olds that showed the women are very democrat leaning, while the men are very right leaning, though not as extreme as the female lean was. Young people are leaning left more than ever, but primarily due to the women
