Originally published at: Trump is loser of new poll against Biden, even if 3rd party jumps in | Boing Boing
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Remember waaaay back when in 2016 when nobody thought he had a chance?
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TBF, the bugaboo in 2016 was soooo many were convinced and just stayed home, assuming it wasn’t worth the time to go vote. Based on turnout for 2020, I think this will not be an issue. God, I hope that is true!
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Also the best available polling at the time of the election suggested that Trump had a 30% chance of victory. When the weather forecast calls for a 30% chance of rain you can’t say you weren’t warned that there was a good chance you might get wet.
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But… but… but… Trump says at every rally that he’s leading in EVERY poll! The Dear Leader would never lie and has never made a mistake! SATIRE
Honestly who would be at all surprised if tomorrow Trump had a rally and declared himself the winner of the 2024 election? This could very well happen. He’s getting DESPERATE to find a way to claim that he has pardoned himself.
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Looks like No Labels might be a waste of all that billionaire money after all.
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Bummer dude. Anyway…
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To be fair Nate Silver was very clear about Trump having a 17% chance, about the same as losing a single round of Russian roulette.
Which is absolutely high enough that it shouldn’t have been ignored.
Of corse I remember reading that the day before the election, and thinking about how awful it could be (narrator’s voice: no, it was more awful than that). I clearly remember watching the results start coming in as I was eating dinner the next day and the whole restaurant getting quieter and quieter, and I thought about how as a country we may have shot ourselves in the head (narrator’s voice: now he is getting it!)
Hopefully though whatever we did wrong that time (and I agree it could have been misinterpreting “way less then 50% chance” as “we don’t need to worry about it”) we make a very different choice this time around.
Plus we are a good long time from the actual election. Nobody has been beating the campaign drums much, and the economy then may look different enough from today’s to make a difference, or any one of a million other things.
So I’m all for not getting depressed about the results, but yeah, let’s really not get complacent either!
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I’m sure the No Labels crowd is already planning on rolling out the red carpet for him to run on their ticket once he loses the Dem nomination. I also wouldn’t be surprised to find that the same donors have given money to both his primary campaign and to No Labels.
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Anything to keep progressives out, although Biden is only progressive by comparison to the fascist wing of their party.
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On the eve of the election 538 gave him a much higher chance than that. It fluctuated but their final forecast was 28.6%. And there was not sufficient time to update polling to account for the last moment James Comey thing sabotaging Hillary.
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Yup. I remember Beschizza chiding me after I made that very point a few days before the election, since everyone but Silver was convinced Trump had no chance. No, I won’t let him live it down. 
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Amen. This is my greatest fear. What I want to see is Trumpism and American Fascism utterly and completely repudiated. I want a blowout so thorough and crushing that his supporters will shred their red hats and Trump flags and deny ever having supported the flim-flam con-artist wannabe dictator.
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Never underestimate the Democrat’s ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
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Although I agree to an extent about the Dem establishment’s chronically bumbling performance, 2020 showed they could get their act together enough to help elect a rather uninspiring candidate with his own history of self-sabotaging gaffes. There’s still a lot of room for improvement and no-one should get complacent about 2024, but they do seem to have cleared the low bar of learning the lessons of the 2016 debacle.
Clinton and the Dem establishment didn’t think he had a chance in 2016 because they were arrogant and complacent and campaigned that way. Things were different in 2020.
For most of us who saw Biff as the cartoonish grifter he is, the prospect of him becoming President was absurd in 2016. However, that’s not the same thing as thinking he didn’t have a chance.
And as others have pointed out, the polls gave him a significant non-zero chance of winning. Enough not to have assumed he’d lose, especially given the broken-by-design Electoral College system.
Whatever the case, then and now, liberals and progressives and the Third Way Dem establishment all have to fight hard on the expectation that he has a good chance of winning in 2024. If we don’t, we’re doing our part to help the fascists who do support him and vote for him destroy what remains of liberal democracy in America.
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Surely we’ve learned by this point that polls of nationwide popular vote are meaningless, though? All that really matters is the polls of maybe half a dozen individual states, tops, right? Not sure how good a proxy this particular poll is for that.
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40% is still a fuck of a lot.
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Let’s not feed the narrative that Democrats are the only ones with agency. The Democrats absolutely need to fight tooth and nail but if Trump wins and burns the country down the responsibility will belong to the people who supported him, not the people who tried to stop him.
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I honestly don’t remember that. I remember the polls saying that he had a path all the way up to the final day, and people looking at Nate Silver’s site and taking that 17-28% chance of him winning as if it was a certainty he would lose. The polling, though, was highly accurate.
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