Why I’m skeptical of some puzzling polls
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.
“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.
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.
deleted by creator
Genuine question, what’s wrong with it? Isn’t it basically just a blog/self publishing platform?
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.
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.
And a table. A Nazi table.
