In before "but it’s only one poll!"
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The Race to the Bottom!
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I’m liking that cat.
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It will be . . . interesting to see. He’s already at levels close to the lowest ever seen by any president in the modern polling era. In more normal times, we’d expect that there’d always be a certain percentage who will back the president at any time, and some who would never, at any time. So what does it mean when a president cracks the support of even the folks willing to go along with almost anything he does?
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Looks like someone got to it before I did 
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(wincing in sympathetic pain after watching that GIF)
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Crazy…there are some polls showing a higher approval than disapproval rating.
Shows me that polling is broken. Or people are broken.
Unfortunately, I think it’s both.
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The media companies will likely still want to know how much of the country approves of him after he’s in prison, so *WhyNotBoth.gif *
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Nate Silver talked at length about some of those issues. One of the issues is selection (only people willing to answer a polling call, web poll, or stop for a human pollster get counted), the other is methodology (question choices, geographic and district distribution, fraud or mischief in the case of web polls).
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Not really.
Polling, like the rest of statistics, is [I]hard[/I]. Everyone thinks they’re an expert because they can add a couple of numbers then divide by two to get the average, but everything about polling - from setting and framing the questions, to selecting the sample, to interpreting the results - is tricky and highly prone to inadvertent bias. And then there’s institutional bias which really screws things. I wouldn’t, for example, expect a poll sponsored by Fox News to ever have anything good to say about (D).
The folks at FiveThirtyEight put a lot of effort into trying to figure out those kinds of bias, and weighting the influences that different polling organisations get in their overall model so that, for example, Fox News polls become ‘worth’ a lot less than polls from organisations who actually know what they’re doing ([redact]and haven’t won court cases asserting their right to lie to the public[/redact]).
Edit: sniped by @orenwolf 
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I’ve seen those arguments, and their totally valid. I still think humanity is broken though.
PS - you’re in Canadia and you’re better informed than so much of our population. Sadface
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Nah, Nixon did 24%, Bush2 25% and Carter hit 28%.
He does have Obama beat, since Obama never got below 38%. So much winning!
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Sadly, during the discussion before we passed the anti-islamophobia resolution (yay!) our vile underbelly crawled out of the woodwork and vomited all over twitter we have those folks too, the difference is, IMHO, that there’s no political party devoted to those people or social “conservatism” (really, xenophobic bigotry). That group has little to no political voice here.
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FALSE
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I like to think of Trump that he’s the Babs Johnson (of “Pink Flamingos”) of politics.
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Web links at 20 paces? Sure!
(although I accept your point about my specific claim above, I reject the implication that Fox News is at all reliable.)
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Oh, darn, now you’ve spoiled Babs for me.
Maybe Connie Marble.
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4.8
5.0
5.0
4.7
4.7
1st place!
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“that poor dog!” – Mathesar
Actually an elderly cat of ours did that once, stood up unharmed at the bottom of the stairs, and said, “What just happened?”
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That’s a disturbing thought - that there are that many people willing to totally overlook reality in their support of this fascist cheeto, and that this number probably can’t get any lower, despite continued corruption and failure to make good on election promises on Trump’s part. I hope it’s not true.
Change that to “six months” (after which he’s impeached and thrown out of office, ideally into jail), and I’m right there with you. Although it’ll probably take longer than that…
I worry about what will happen when/if Trump manufacturers a crisis, a Reichstag fire, to drive up his support. I have to hope that even that would backfire, given his situation.
Like the fact that it’s blatantly illegal, even if they aren’t getting paid. You’d think there would be more of a fuss about it.
I think, by his nature, that’s going to always be true. He’s always going to do or say something, or have something revealed.
If he loses another 10 points, he’ll be in Nixon territory, but I’m not sure what - if anything - would get his supporters to face any bit of reality. Nixon didn’t have the same kind of niche reactionary media backing him up and creating fake news to bolster his supporters. On the other hand, Trump’s best approval rating is lower than some presidents’ worst.
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