For the first time since 538 published our presidential election forecast for Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, Trump has taken the lead (if a very small one) over Harris. As of 3 p.m. Eastern on Oct. 18, our model gives Trump a 52-in-100 chance of winning the majority of Electoral College votes. The model gives Harris a 48-in-100 chance.
Just fucking vote. Polls don’t win elections. Plus, the majority of the most recent polls are backed by red wavers. I wouldn’t put much stock into them regardless, but especially not the most recent ones.
Polling aggregators like Nate Silver and 538 take those Republican leans into account.
You can read about it and their methodology here:
https://www.natesilver.net/p/are-republican-pollsters-flooding
Edit: lol, love the “I was told there would be no fact checking” attitude on the downvotes.
No matter what Nate says and how many times you link his website, polls do not matter.
ETA: maybe, just maybe, you’re being downvoted because you keep linking the same article from the same pollster to defend polling.
They’re already getting ready with the same excuses they used for Hillary. If Kamala loses, it definitely can’t be a result of the fact that Dems seem to actively despise the left.
How is anyone planning on voting for this giant piece of shit? 2016? Ok I could sympathize with one or two people. But in 2024!? Jesus fuck, you have to be a real knuckle dragging hood wearing degenerate to try and make that case. How about trump and everyone that loves him just move to Texas and build a wall? I’m sure the entire world would be grateful.
It’s the result of settling for “not trump”.
To some people “good” is binary. So they do think both parties will fuck them over economically and not actually fix the shit that honestly the majority of Americans agree need fixed.
So all the economic policy is a write off.
That leaves social issues they don’t really understand because they were raised vaguely religious and have fallen for right wing propaganda.
All politicians are corrupt liars
Is something you will hear damn near anytime politics come up in deep red areas. Which is why yelling about how trump is a corrupt liar to your face turns blue doesn’t accomplish anything.
They know that, they’re not even in denial about.
To be clear, I’m voting D. But the county I grew up has never voted less than 95% for trump.
That’s what they’re ok with voting for him tho. But if Dems ran a charismatic progressive who people believed was different and authentic?
Well, look what Obama did
While moderates have favored the Democratic candidate in each of the past five elections, Barack Obama gained the support of more voters in the ideological “middle” than did either John Kerry or Al Gore before him. He won at least half the votes of independents (52% vs. 49% for Kerry), suburban voters (50% vs. 47% for Kerry), Catholics (54% vs. 47% for Kerry), and other key swing groups in the electorate.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2008/11/05/inside-obamas-sweeping-victory/
His gains wasn’t from progressives, we always show up. His gains were because people in those deep red areas believe all politicians are corrupt liars, and if a rare one shows up that seems authentic, they don’t give a fuck about party labels.
I was a big Bernie fan :( you make some great points though. The big problem I see is it’s not just a difference of ideology, you literally have one candidate calling himself a day 1 dictator and shitting on poor and brown people and women, and the other not doing that. How can you go for ketchup steak Hitler? I guess if the Old Testament gives you a boner for all the slaves and genocide and stuff, then that’s your answer.
I’m not just defending them because that’s where I came from, I’m not defending them at all honestly.
Just explaining the “why”. If you just write them off as evil idiots, it’s harder to prevent it next time. We need to understand “why” because the fight against facism is literally never over. Might be 5 years, might be 50, but they’ll be back.
How can you go for ketchup steak Hitler?
Because they think both parties are the same, and they see Trump’s comments as “telling it like it is”.
When you think both will be dictators “at least he admits it” could be a positive.
They believe all the rightwing bullshit about what Kamala will do despite Biden not already doing it. From that perspective they have the choice of two evils and “the lesser of two evils” for them is the one that’s “honest” about being a dictator and says he agrees on social issues, not even getting into SC seats.
Every excuse for voting R for them tho disappears if we run a good candidate. So the most extreme will stay home and the moderate ones will vote D.
That’s how we win votes from Republicans, if we try to meet them in the middle with conservative policy, it just legitimizes the conservative party. Those voters don’t want a negotiator.
Obama showed us the path relatively recently, it’s just the money behind the party would rather trump wins. Someday we’re going to have to re-evaluate why the people running the DNC are just whoever gets the most donations from corporations and billionaires and put someone that knows how to win elections in leadership
I have family: TL;DR they want more Christianity in power, several specifically WASPs, and somethingsomething the end justifies the means to structure that authority.
I think it’s the same sort of reactions that you see on the vote pattern for this post or anything else suggesting Kamala might not win.
People don’t want (or maybe nowadays lack the capacity) to hear/read/engage critically with news they find upsetting. So you get these echo chambers, immune to outside info.
From someone who doesn’t follow non-Conservative news, inflation is absurd, housing is increasingly out of reach and uncontrolled immigration is a problem. I personally think some of these are global issues, some are deep systemic and other than immigration, I’d be stunned if the republicans actually addressed those issues. But, the same mental habits that lead Lemmy to downvote statistical reporting because we don’t like what it says are the same that prevent trump voters from changing.
I don’t think you’re entirely wrong there. I think you describe the human condition in a lot of ways. I’ve felt for a long time the biggest problems are socioeconomic and classist rather than purely political- and those issues are only indirectly addressed by the currently political spectrum (at best).
The problem is, their simulations are based on their polling, and their polling is being manipulated.
As I noted elsewhere:
Yes, Trump appears to have momentum, but it also appears to be a phantom momentum driven by right leaning polling organizations.
https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/the-hungry-harris-campaign-early?utm_source=publication-search
"I now count 27 Republican or right-aligned entities in the polling averages:
American Greatness, Daily Mail, co/efficent, Cygnal, Echelon, Emerson, Fabrizio, Fox News, Insider Advantage, McLaughlin, Mitchell Communications, Napolitan Institute, Noble Predictive, On Message, Orbital Digital, Public Opinion Strategies, Quantus, Rasmussen, Redfield & Wilton, Remington, RMG, SoCal Data, The Telegraph, Trafalgar, TIPP, Victory Insights, Wall Street Journal.
In September 12 of the 24 polls of North Carolina were conducted by red wave pollsters. Check out the last 4 polls released in PA on 538. All are red wavers."
Yes, but their “house effects” (how much their polls lean Republican or Democrat) are accounted for by every worthwhile polling aggregator.
If they were just taking the averages and spitting out results, well, it’d be nonsensical. You could maybe argue that Republican pollsters have tweaked their systems to be more trumpy but that’d be a pretty huge red flag and mark you as completely non trustworthy in your professional field.
You can read Silver’s more in depth and interesting explanation here:
https://www.natesilver.net/p/are-republican-pollsters-flooding
My reading of Nate Silver’s article suggests that the OC (original commenter’s) comment is right though. Quote from the article:
the movement could just be random variation in the polls — if Harris really is ahead nationally by 3 points and in the Blue Wall states by about 1 point we’d expect her to have better and worse weeks that vary around that average.
Sounds like phantom momentum to me. And Nate also agrees with the part about there being Republican bias in the polls,
First, are polls from Republican-aligned firms more favorable to Trump this cycle? Yes, … Harris is ahead by 3.0 points nationally in this simple average. But when you look at only Republican-aligned firms, she’s up by only 2.0 points. Removing those polls from the average brings Harris up to a 3.4 point national lead. These aren’t huge differences, but they’re not nothing. Combined with a similar pattern in state-level averages, polls from Republican-leaning firms could push polling averages — and by extension forecasts — rightward.
This last sentence is important so I’ll repeat it,
Combined with a similar pattern in state-level averages, polls from Republican-leaning firms could push polling averages — and by extension forecasts — rightward.
Of course Nate believes, as you state, that he’s able to account for it by adjusting for the house effects and such. Which would overcome the flood.
He then seems to go on and justify that his house effects are accurate by comparing with pollsters whose averages are excluding Republican polls (thus avoiding the bias completely) and saying that he winds up with the same result as them.
However, it’s really interesting to note that most of the polling averages he compares with don’t include as many GOP polls.
In fact it’s Nate’s own average that is the lowest in favor of Harris. In fact I think 538 is the only other one that does even include those GOP polls.
And somehow these are the ones that show the GOP candidate with a lead.
In fact, VoteHub - the one using only high quality nonpartisan polls - actually has Harris winning the Electoral College currently., 270 vs 268: https://polls.votehub.com/
Electoral College average
Harris 270, Trump 268
National Average
Harris +2.3
Tipping Point (MI)
Harris +0.1
Electoral College Bias
R +2.2Now Nate can easily justify this as a tiny difference within the margin of error. And he’s be right, of course. But I feel that this shows, even after all the hard and brilliant work by Nate and folks, the flooding by the GOP polls seem to be off by just enough to push things over the edge. Ignore them for more accurate data, and the picture looks different.
This might be the best comment reply I’ve had on lemmy. When I’m not half cut coming home from soccer, I will dig into this and either agree or give you a worthy response.
Pleased to have been able to contribute. And, no rush here, but happily awaiting your reply - either way I’m bound to learn something new.
Hi there! Sorry for the delay, I rarely Lemmy on weekends. And made the foolish mistake of posting something that took off towards the end of last week.
Anyhow, I think your analysis is really interesting! Admittedly, I’m a cheapskate and haven’t paid for the Silver Bulletin, so I’m quite curious to see what Silver’s model would have done taking only the same polls as VotHub does.
That being said, I think that even the VoteHub models are showing the same sort of movement in the polls, as recently as Oct 6 VoteHub showed the two candidates seperated by almost 3.5% nationally, which is pretty significant. However, even their model now shows Harris’ lead cut by half, down to 1.7% And this is from a model that only accepts non partisan polling etc! Looking over their recent polls, of the four polls in the 3 Blue Wall states in the last week, none showed Harris ahead. (At least on the 20th, there was one that showed Harris up by 4 in Michigan.)
Now for the part that would fascinate me about the Silver/VoteHub model comparison (I’m not going to lie, this conversation is making me want to drop the $30ish, just to see and of course for election night/week/month) is that even using the exact same inputs, for a race this close, you could easily see different outcomes by different modelers. Some put more weight to the possibility of uncorrelated polling errors between states, others between correlated polling misses by certain demographics (and of course, models might split those demographics differently, e.g., figuring that a Florida Latino may be more likely to be Cuban than of Mexican heritage and thus respond very differently to accusations of socialism etc.) All that to say, you could very easily put the exact same polls into different models and you ought to see somewhat different projections.
Again, I really appreciate you diving into the piece and coming back with solid evidence, you are exactly the type of person making Lemmy a place I want to hang out.
Thanks, it’s been a great discussion. I missed that on the VoteHub polls but I see it now, and you’re absolutely right - they’ve gone from Harris 270 when I first commented to the GOP having 297 now in the EC. Meanwhile, if my memory serves correct, Nate’s model is holding steady at a 54% chance of a GOP win, suggesting that VoteHub was just delayed in getting this shift factored in. Shoot.
(But apparently Harris had a good afternoon on the 29th, yesterday, if one ignores AtlasIntel.)
Something new though - it seems like the Harris campaign is feeling optimistic as of the day before yesterday -
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/28/us/politics/kamala-harris-donald-trump-2024-election.html / https://archive.is/EwIkC - I wonder if they have internal polling showing different results.So I take solace in this quote:
Polling averages show that all seven battleground states are within the margin of error, meaning the difference between a half-point up and a half-point down — essentially a rounding error — could win or lose the White House.
So I think I have to concede my original point that the polling aggregators are being polluted - seems like they’re reflecting a real red shift after all. But in the end I can still hope that the red shift maybe wasn’t enough, as currently it’s still a toss-up (even Nate Silver says so).
Lol at people downvoting what they don’t want to hear.
Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: High
On a positive note, Harris is still leading 4/7 swing states in the WaPo averages: https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2024/presidential-polling-averages/
Down outing because anyone watching polls has seen floods of bullshit polls flood the arena in the past few weeks. They’re totally made up and inaccurate, and in cahoots with the Trump campaign to try and give credence to another attempt and overthrowing the government by crying about the election results.
I’ve seen the reports. I highly doubt any of the arm chair statisticians (who have never taken a day of mathematical or proof-level stats) have a clue what they are talking about. The polls’ histories and lean are factored into 538’s averages. They are not new to this.
And how many polls are left leaning? The graph posted a couple of days ago on midwest claims 35% are right leaning, and a correlation with the drop in support for Harris. What it doesn’t say is the proportion of democratic polls, and there really isn’t a correlation over the length of history shown.
Hard to make informed decisions when half the information is hidden. (But arm chair statisticians don’t recognize the issue do they?)
Left or right leaning isn’t the problem. Deliberately skewing the averages is. I don’t care for Nate Silver, but in his own words: https://www.natesilver.net/p/are-republican-pollsters-flooding
A .5% shift in bullshit data explains all of this right here. Polling is useless anymore anyway, but when you are in Trump’s little circus of assclowns who want to form a pretext of something like a stolen election, it sure as fuck serves a purpose.
Edit: and then you have shit like this: https://www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-2669441230/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/large-bets-election-prediction-market-are-overseas-source-says-2024-10-18/
Not suspicious or coordinated at all.
I’ll give you your references. Will have to read later.
All polls are useless:
This article is pure silliness but extrapolating from it.to say all polls are useless is to miss even the point of the article!
Yes, national polls aren’t particularly helpful because of the electoral college. Which means state level polling is what matters. And polls 6 months out, are not helpful. This is why no polling aggregator is still including them.
Meanwhile, in reality, the polling aggregators pretty much called every 2022 midterm race. In 2020, 538 “correctly identified the winners of the presidency (Joe Biden), the U.S. Senate (Democrats, after the Georgia runoffs) and the U.S. House (Democrats, although by a narrower-than-expected margin). They were also largely accurate in identifying the winners in individual states and races, identifying the outcome correctly in 48 of 50 presidential states (we also missed the 2nd Congressional District in Maine), 32 of 35 Senate races1 and 417 of 435 House races.”
Meanwhile, factually and statistically, out of all the presidential polls ever conducted, they’re only 60% correct.
All polls are useless.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding the difference between polling aggregators, like 538 and a poll.
Though, if you really believe what you’re saying, how crazy lucky do you think, 538 must have been to get 32/35 senate races right, 417/435 house races and the presidential rave. Seeing as they repeated the performance in 2022, those lucky jerks should be going to Vegas, not working! /s
Yeah, it’s kind of amazing.
If there’s a good poll for Kamala, it’s upvotes to the moon. If it’s a good one from trump, voted to the underworld.
That sort of hive mind, shut out anything I dislike attitude is the same attitude that makes half the country ignore any and all criticism of trump.
I think you’ll find the same number of people saying that polls are meaningless and to just vote in any of these “poll says” threads.
Absolutely but polls one way get huge upvotes and polls the other get huge downvotes.
Harris reacted by doubling down that “Nothing would change between a Biden and a Harris white house”.
“If you are hurting, in trouble, demanding that something - anything - should change about any aspect of life in America … vote for Trump, cause I want to keep everything the same.”
Harris’s advisors reportedly were bashing their heads against the wall screaming “don’t say that out loud!”
