Nate Silver said you say? I quit reading right there. He is officially one of the people who is wrong more than he’s right. He was just really right once.
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I read his book years ago, the one he wrote after he was really, really right that one time, and it’s clear in hindsight that he didn’t even learn the lesson he claimed to have learned in the book from his days playing poker. Back when online poker first got big, in the early 2000s, and it hadn’t been made illegal yet, Silver really got into it for awhile. And he had some early success, and thought his statistical knowledge was the reason, and massively over evaluated his skill. He literally talks about this in the book, that he did this, and then started losing, and realized he had overestimated his abilities. And then he fucking does the same thing with polling. He had some big early success, especially in the 2008 election, and thought he had it all figured out. The difference is that, unlike with his poker playing experience, he has yet to acknowledge that he’s not as good as he thought.
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Polls are Propaganda.
Put it on T-shirts. And baseball caps - red ones, maybe.
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I’d like to see Trump battle, hand to tentacle, for the Presidential title against a blue ringed octopus in a tank of seawater.
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They just can’t be obvious propaganda. Otherwise the pollster ends up like Rasmussen.
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I personally would not choose Biden and polls are often dubious, but we could look at the 2020 Democratic primary results to see the advantage Biden has…
Biden beat Elizabeth Warren handily in her own state… Biden beat Bernie in states that Biden didn’t even show up to (financially and physically). It only took a few endorsements for the wind to be taken out of the sails of every other candidate.
There seems to be a fairly wide gap between the people who regularly talk about politics on either side of the spectrum, and how the average american actually votes. Given how the last 10 years have gone it seems hard to imagine who else could possibly have a chance at beating Trump right now (which feels like a failing of the Democratic party, but it doesn’t make it any less scary).
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Maybe not astonishing. But extremely fucking sad.
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It’s not the size of the poll, which I trust is statistically sound. It’s the methodology. Who takes unsolicited calls from unknown numbers? Selecting for people who do is the polling equivalent to a poorly-written scam email. It selects for the un-tech-savvy and credulous.
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I think a lot of Americans are more concerned with regular day-to-day BS, and because Biden and Trump are the names on the wind that’s who they “prefer”, but they’re not really thinking about it. If these other DEM names were on everyone’s lips regularly then they’d be fine with picking Harris over Trump.
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most people
No. Just a vocal minority.
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That’s a bit harsh.
In a former life, I was one of those poll-takers, and I learned to take poll results with a grain of salt, especially if the questions & methodology aren’t available.
Ultimately, the only poll results that matter are the voting results.
True, that. Back when I was doing them, cell phones weren’t ubiquitous, and most people still had landlines without caller i.d… So, yeah, nowadays, the results are going to be a bit skewed.
Either way, you have to trust that the respondents aren’t lying…
The wording of the questions, as well as the questions themselves matter.
We did quite a few push-polls for Republican candidates; they don’t have any qualms about eating their own. This was a surprise to me at the time.
Now, it’s a given.
Well, as @euansmith points out:
While I wouldn’t put all my trust in polls, they are better than nothing at all.
Because no state is a monolith.
Just because Texas is run by fascist fuckwits doesn’t mean everybody in Texas agrees with them.
Yep. And Ann Richards… and Bill Hicks…
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Nicely put 
It would be great if the whole thing is rendered moot, by Trump getting taken out of the running, legally, or medically.
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I have no doubt they are cooking up all kinds of fuckery to make sure he is put back in the Oval Office, so if he can’t assume power, it would save a lot of heartburn.
Timing is everything, though; it would be best after he is nominated, but before the election, since I can’t think of anyone he could/would choose as Veep that would have the voter turnout that Lord Dampnut has.
At that point, the Veep candidate would become the POTUS candidate, and a new Veep candidate would need to be chosen. That would be interesting…
So, maybe his legal issues will compound his mental issues to the point where his babbling can’t be ignored… or maybe his Last Hamberder is lurking about, waiting to be fried.
We shall see.
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Apparently some are suggesting Biden drop out and they have a brokered convention???
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The “some” referred to in this article seemingly means “Columnist Ezra Klein,” not serious strategists within party leadership.
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