A foreign policy blunder, badly handling the coronavirus outbreak, the over-extended recovery finally deflating, Bolton’s book . . . anything could reverse this trend.
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Oh right. Sorry. Yeah, that’s a good and interesting question on a weird artefact. I think that there was some discussion on it over at 538, with the consensus being “shit’s more partisan now, yo.”
Edit: it could also be an artefact of over-surveying. If you look at the comparisons with past presidents at 538 (scroll down^), one of the things that struck me is how ‘chunky’ the polling was for the likes of Truman and Eisenhower, and even as late as Ford, and - to a degree - Carter. But now there are new surveys on essentially the same topic being released every day, and often more than one per day.
Unlike rocks and trees and starfish, people notice when they’re being looked at, and it affects their responses. Coupled with a tidal wave of tidal wave of survey results being released and reported every day it wouldn’t surprise me much if there was some kind of ‘reversion to the mean’ effect, where collectively survey respondents are reflecting the previous days’ results, rather than reporting their own current opinions.
^ and, of course, those graphs show exactly what you’re talking about with large swings in short periods of time.^^
^^ although, arguably, Obama’s graph shows a fairly similar stasis. Overall his shifted more than Trumps has, but there are none of the rapid spikes or falls that were normal up till Carter.
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Good points. The 538 article is interesting. Thanks.
“We” gave him no such thing, the GOP-controlled Senate did.
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I think it’s largely because everyone who decided they liked him prior to the 2016 election had already resolved to support him in spite of his horrible, horrible flaws and everyone who decided he was unfit for the Presidency has had precious little reason to change their minds.
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“We” gave him no such thing, the GOP-controlled Senate did."’
You are indeed correct. It was a nice democracy while it lasted…
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I think one party manipulates idiots and the other party makes fun of the idiots.
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For better of for worse, the American economy is doing pretty well, and Americans (at least from the polling) are moderately happy with it (which is about as good as happy as they get).
If Trump were actually not the living horror that he is, his approval rating (which is almost always a proxy for “how do you feel about the economy”) would be through the roof. With the current unemployment and inflation numbers, it would take a truly stupid, massively incompetent, narcissistic sociopath incumbent to lose this election.
Luckily (?), Trump might just be that man.
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In other words, a few hundred individuals who hold jobs in Washington are more important than the millions upon millions who do care about science, truth or anything rational? That actual people are irrelevant in comparison to these few individuals?
As many people have said, politics is important. But if it has become your life and its killing you, you’ve got a real problem.
It sounds like you given what you can, but you’re now on empty. Time for you to pull back and invest in family, friends and perhaps a few of the literally millions of decent people who have always been there, and will continue to be there, no matter who gets elected in November.
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It’s absolutely crazy, but we said that last election and he won.
Who are these people that thinks he’s doing a good job? Has he done anything worthy of approval at all? I’d like to hear one thing.
russian hacking
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You’d hope that they weighted the results accordingly.
That’s not really a good interpretation of statistics. If you took two random samples of two sacks of black and red balls such that you had a 95% confidence of a 3% margin of error and found that bag one had 49% red balls and bag two had 47% red balls then the odds that bag one has more red balls than bag two are considerably more than 50%. It’s not “the same”. It’s just not different in the way that most pundits act like it is.
But another issue is that when you conduct 1 poll every week and you are working with 95% confidence intervals, you expect 2.6 polls outside of that confidence interval a year. Given that the media picks up polls with interesting results, I think the odds that a poll in a headline is actually showing an aberrant result are probably pretty good.
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I hate to say it but I’m mentally preparing myself for another Trump victory. It drives me crazy because he is such a horrible human being. The fact remains, however, that the economy is strong and the Democrats lack a powerful candidate. There is nobody in the current group of candidates that has the kind of charisma that Obama carried.
I agree with most of what you’re saying, except this… there is the perception that the economy is strong, based entirely on how wall street is doing. There was a boost in pay for the average worker, but that is primarily from the long term growth after the 2008 crash and the turn around the the Obama administration engineered. We’re still seeing net benefits from that, but the economy is starting to slow, and the tariffs aren’t helping. I think we should also question the reality of the employment numbers, especially with regards to the kinds of jobs that people have (it’s not the good, solid union jobs of old, but it’s service work that pays far less).
As for charisma… I didn’t see trump as charismatic, but as a loud mouth bully who doesn’t know nearly as much as he thinks he does. I’m not looking for a charismatic “dear leader”, though, but someone who has some practical solutions to our problems rather than someone who is an entrancing speaker…
I think much of this is perception, filtered through the media, and none of us really watch the same media any more… what they means for the election, I don’t know, and I’m not sure anyone does.
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That’s a good point thanks 
IIRC, though, it’s also correct to say that - because of the overlap - the two are statistically indistinguishable. I.e., you can say one is more likely to be larger than the other, but you can’t say one is larger than the other? That’s sorta the point I was aiming at.
It’s all degrees of sureness. If they polled 1,000 people and 40% said they support Trump the only thing we know for sure is that 400 people said they supported Trump (and in reality, we don’t even know that, it could easily have been 398 with two data entry mistakes).
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