Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/27/why-does-the-gop-keep-losing-because-polls-are-broken-and-trump-is-electoral-poison-video.html
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I can’t believe so many people still seem to put so much faith in polls, even knowing full well that only a tiny fraction of a percentage of the citizenship ever participates in them… and of that miniscule percentage, those stats can be easily skewed to show a predetermined set of results.
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Nate Silver got the elections right in 2008 and 2012 … and then he didn’t. Even after 2016, he never seemed to acknowledge the problem was with polling itself.
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No, no, the polls never lie. The radical leftist deep state is manipulating the elections!
For some reason, the radical leftist deep state only manipulates elections, never the polls. Which would presumably be far easier to do and, given that polls can actually influence voting behavior, would probably be worth doing.
I can’t believe that the deep state doesn’t think of these things, and we have to keep pointing it out to them.
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Seems like several lifetimes ago, at this point.
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There’s also the fact that Boomers are dying out of the electorate and the majority of Millenials and Gen Zers don’t care about culture wars issues, are less religious, and understand that supply-side economics doesn’t benefit them.
Of course, the myriad of reasons why the GOP continually loses the popular vote won’t matter in the short and medium term as long as the Electoral College and gerrymandering and Citizens United and other cheats exist. In the long term things will change, which is why the Heritage Foundation and related MAGAt enablers are pushing Project 2025 and getting the SCOTUS to take away rights and privileges. Now is the time to stop them.
As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
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The idea that national elections that happen once every four years often under radically different circumstances are as quantifiable and predictable as baseball statistics produced over tens of thousands of games on fields of essentially identical conditions is ludicrous on its face. There will never be a sufficient sample size to prove/disprove anything in their predictive models, which makes their predictions worse than useless.
But Silver et al have done a masterful job of selling their ability to reduce national elections to an algorithmic exercise, and have convinced a lot of people that they’re the smartest people in the room and anyone who disagrees with the utility just doesn’t get the math.
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Silver was tailor-made for a political era where billionaire Libertarian techbros with Engineer’s Disease controlled the economy.
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Serious question - why don’t they do polls over texting? Or texting to a website? You may get more younger voters replying.
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Obviously the votes are the part that ultimately matters but counting votes isn’t “predicting” anything, it’s tabulating the results of an election.
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They do. I’ve received a deluge of them. I ignore them. My civic responsibilities do not include spending time assisting for-profit organizations that do not pay for my time.
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Same problem as calling phones. Who answers a text from an unknown source? And it’s much easier to report spam texts than it is spam calls.
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Not only is Trump toxic, the Roe vs Wade repeal seems to have really gotten people mad at GOP and motivated to vote.
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And even more interesting to me than a Democrat winning this seat in Alabama is…Lands won with 63% of the vote, which means the polls generally accepted as most reliable were off by more than 30 points.
Good summation by the invaluable electoralvote.com:
Of course, yes, it’s ultimately the vote that matters. No complacency, we need to get out the sane majority to vote in all blue states and swing states, and now there is hope for some previously red states too.
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And the further step towards removing IVF makes it absolutely clear what’s going on here. Fetal personhood doesn’t make any sense, and now that it’s getting in the way of couples trying to have children the issue is becoming even more clear.
It’s a shame that’s what it can take to wake people up sometimes. But if that’s what it takes to make the GOP face electoral consequences, so be it.
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Aren’t some of them already talking about going after contraception next?
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He lucked out. Polls are pretty much modern day prophecies, so people are bound to be correct some of the time…
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Wake me up when Utah votes Democrat… 
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Nah, any red-flipped-to-blue is a win, and I will take any win I can get. We don’t have to do a sweep, but we have to contend in every race. Don’t let them take any election for granted, make them worry about every city council, school board, dog catcher. Strip them from every seat of power we can, and where we can’t, make them work for it. They can’t do it. They win based on an illusion of invincibility and strength. They have neither. And we need to prove that.
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The voting demographic is shifting. Poll is tea leaves reading. Refusing to accept reality to follow the demographic but sticking to their racist way expecting gerrymander, electoral college and stolen SC to do their bidding. That’s the hill they’re willing to die on. Let give them the death they deserve. The GQP needs to die. They can just rename the Nazi Party at this point and nothing they represent will change.
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