I come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him?
You’ve just noted the importance of enthusiasm in elections and then direct almost all your efforts towards dampening enthusiasm not to Trump - but to the the candidate you say you want to not lose.
That’s stategery!
with Biden in office, a hot civil war in the US feels like about a 50/50 coin toss. If Trump is reinstalled for another 4 years, the odds approach unity.
I’m not trying to relitigate or dwell on the last election. But this conversation is specifically about polling, and apparently some of the commentators on this thread seem to believe that polls and forecasts are useless because of the results of the last election. I don’t share the view that polls and well-formulated models are meaningless, and was trying to express why. Obviously you’re correct that we need to focus on this election, and making use of all the tools available (including polls) may help us to win.
Well gosh we’d better keep saying it then, cuz it can only do a whole lotta good right?!?!
I realize you were responding to other comments and hoping to correct them, but it’s really off-topic, I’d argue. Maybe just flag such comments as such?
You are, of course, free to express whatever lack of enthusiasm you want. But other are also free to point out the myopia of such expressions.
Hmmm, I’m not entirely sure I consider addressing and/or planning for climate change to be a holding action of secondary importance.
Friend, I’m not sure what Democrats are telling you that’s the case, but you don’t have to choose to listen to those folks. There are alternatives.
I wasn’t reading FiveThirtyEight at the time, but while the polls were quite accurate, even at the state level (adjusting for margins), the coverage was generally poor, especially when it came to handicapping.
For months leading up to the election, the NYT had a beautiful, fantabulously Web 3.0 widget that would show you in real time how there were 23,148,991 discrete paths to an electoral college majority, based on the widest possible definition of “swing state.” And if you plugged in the latest polls from each of those states, Hillary Clinton was winning in 23,148,989 of them. I’m a reasonably smart and politically savvy person, and I was hoovering up state and national polls like every other junkie, and I still fell for it. It wasn’t the only reason I was surprised by the result, but it was a factor.
I’m not mad—I bet they were surprised too—but I am a lot less trusting of handicappers now, including myself.
You can make that argument, but here’s how I read it:
Linked article: “evidence points to this outcome being likely”
Commenters: “I don’t believe this evidence is useful due to past experience”
Me: “I believe the evidence is still useful because…”
We’ll just have to agree to disagree whether it’s on topic or not. And that concludes my comments on this subject, I promise,
Focus on the NOW.
Fighting last year’s battle is the surest way to lose this year’s battle.
But it’s difficult for people because their identities are built around that previous opposition and change is difficult.
Time travel is NOT a fucking option.
You are correct. It’s not a poll, it’s a projection. A projection derived from polls.
The point I was trying (and failing) to make is that everyone in 2016 had Trump losing by a large margin. I think Michael Moore was the only one that predicted he’d win, and even listed the states that would do it.
So I’m gonna take things with a big grain of salt, and not get complacent.
That’s great. What are you going to do to win?
In other words, you have a much greater chance of surviving a game of Russian Roulette than Hillary Clinton did of winning the election according to 538’s election day predictions. In fact, your odds are closer with two in the chamber.
A huge difference is Trump is an incumbent this time, he should be doing way better. Arguably, Biden is also a kinda-sorta incumbent, so maybe that’s a thing.
My biggest dispute with the OP analysis is that this downturn for Trump has much to do with racism or COVID-19. The economy is in the shitter, and that’s all the “swing” sociopaths on the fence about Trump care about. If he were being horribly racist and ignorant about scientifcally exostential threats but it wasn’t affecting the economy, we’d be seeing a different picture (I mean he was, for 3 years, and we were…) The October surprise need be nothing more than an upswing in stocks. If we get a “baby boom” of post-COVID consumption in time for November, his fortunes will turn.
In this timeline, the “silver lining” is that he continues to fuck up two crises simultaneously in the relative short term so that the long run exists at all. That lining has a gnarly-ass patina.
EtA:
___<
Narrator; We won’t.
And that’s the problem with your post and its follow-ups. That was never the case. Mathematically, very few polls were predicting Trump losing by a large margin. Whether you aggregate them into a national picture or break it out state-by-state to add up electoral votes, even the projections that showed him losing the Electoral College by a large margin of electoral votes showed those swing states as being within the margin of error.
In an attempt to bring this post back around to the topic and relevance in today’s picture, if you look at current polls of Biden v Trump, many of those swing states are currently outside of the margin of error in favor of Biden, while states that weren’t swing states in 2016 are within the margin of error for 2020 (see Arizona, Texas, Georgia).
Which is to say, the electoral picture is very different this time around. So let’s focus on that, mmm?
Post COVID by November? That’s an example of hope over experience if ever I’ve heard one.
I’m gonna not consider this stuff until November. But one thing seems to be true is that Trump wants to debate which is probably what will get his base out to vote, but if Biden can play this game of keep away smartly it might deflate those numbers.
