I don’t like Harris very much. But the fact that half the country is willing to choose a deranged con artist over her is just beyond any rational thought.
Rationality has nothing to do with it.
It’s all fear based. They think the migrants coming across the border are coming to take their job, rape them, break into their home, shop at the same Walmart as them, etc.
I want to commend you for how well you did that. Absolutely beautiful ending with “shop at the same Walmart as them”
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Yeah. Well played there. 👍
I’ve lately been watching some radio shows on the BBC, and it’s wild to see the same things happening over there. I don’t know if it’s just how modern society has become or if it spread from us or them, but take away the British accents and the names and policies, and it’s the same insanity. What the hell is wrong with people?
Russia created a network of wannabe autocrats, and they are pushing each other all across the globe.
That’s it, that’s most of all of it.
No it isn’t. It’s hardly any of it. We exist in the same places they are targeting and it didn’t turn us into complete goddamn idiots, so what’s their excuse?
They have always been racist, but the populists taking advantage of them use Russian tactics and are backed by Russia.
Stuff like Trump and Brexit is not normal, and it’s not just happening spontaneously because all the racists decided to be more overt at the same time around the world.
I’m for all of that happening… to Republicans. ;)
Half the voting population, more specifically
Or I guess in this case, half of those polled
To be fair, it’s not like everyone that doesn’t vote hates him. Some do I’m sure, but there’s also going to be people that think favorably of him but don’t bother voting, just as there are and have been for his opponents
That’s what happen when you fuck your education system for money
Everything is fear based and not rationale.
Trump voters fear immigrants; Fear their guns, religion and identity are somehow being taken away. They fear and refuse to understand the world is constantly changing and that we need to adapt along with it.
Harris voters (rightly) fear trump and all the bigotry, racism, and misogyny he has enabled and emboldened.
Most of the American people don’t have something to vote for, only something to vote against. The ruling class is further detached for the working class by stoking culture wars gaslighting on the socioeconomic disparage
They want Trump in because he represents an amoral outsider. Someone who is disenfranchised by the moralisms of the establishment left.
This is how they see themselves.
They like him because he’s a shithead who doesn’t care to preserve this system. They want change even if it’s bad.
In this way pointing out that he’s a shithead and a risk to democracy - helps him.
Unfortunately it’s the Harris campaigns only option, as the alternative is to say: He’s actually a highly connected establishment figure who will pull the same establishment shit we do. This would have obviously blow back for an establishment figure.
They want Trump BECAUSE he’s a train wreck.
I actually believe it will end up being Harris by a large margin. I believe a lot of Republicans who don’t want Harris to win, still won’t actually go out and bring themselves to vote for Trump. They’ll just stay home.
It boggles the mind that this sack of shit is even in the running.
He has the charisma of a wet sponge (and the appearance of someone you’d think twice before buying a used car from), he can hardly string together a sentence (let alone hold a speech), hi lies, he commits fraud, he’s a convicted felon…
That’s hardly brushing the surface, yet people go “fuck yeah, this guy should run the country”.
Jeebuz fuckin christ… what’s happening?
Unless you got home schooled by Heinrich Himmler, there’s no excuse. You can’t possibly offer your political support to such a scumbag.
I was at a pumpkin patch 25 minutes out of Chicago on Saturday and there was a man proudly wearing a shirt with Trump on it and the shirt said, “I’m voting for the convicted felon”. His voter base does not fucking care, at all.
They are under the assumption that both sides are equally bad and want to see it all burn down I think. They don’t think much further however.
I know a lot of Trump supporters. Without fail their support is based on hate. LGBTQ, immigrants, the belief that Democrats are child molesters, etc. I’ve heard it all. They don’t know what his policies are, nor do they care.
I don’t watch a lot of TV, so I don’t see ads much, but just saw an ad from the turnip who was railing against they/them pronouns…the level of hate from the turnips is insane. It’s like if Hitler was running and railing against jews. How is this shit allowed on tv…next he’s gonna be saying minorities should be hung.
Hanged. Execution by hanging is hanged not hung.
Maybe he thinks Trump wants immigrants to be hung as in have huge dicks to be eligible for an entry visa?
They can be hung by their own huge dicks as long as it’s not to death.
30 or 40 years ago he would’ve been laughed out of politics the moment he came down his gold escalator.
Idiocracy. We live in Idiocracy… 500 years faster than expected.
President Camacho legitimately wanted to find solutions to the problems his constituents faced, AND he had the wisdom and self-awareness to know he needed someone smarter than himself in order to achieve that. He’s willing to try things and change his mind when he is presented with new information. Furthermore, when he is successful, he shares the credit equitably with the other people involved.
We’re doing much worse than Idiocracy.
Idiocracy was a movie working from the naive assumption that people are greedy and shortsighted, and that these attributes lead to social (and eventually genetic) decay.
Americans have to deal with a much harder truth. That being smart doesn’t make you virtuous and lust for power more than simple hedonistic greed is what cultivates the worst social policies. Our story is a story of pure hubris. Its a story of reasonably intelligent and educated people gaming a system that causes pain in order to pay them a profit.
We’re doing much worse than Idiocracy.
America’s sins aren’t sloth or lust or gluttony nearly so much as they are wrath and pride.
He may have been a tad impatient, but he eventually saw the green
It’s not fair. I at least wanna go get a burger at Buttfuckers.
When a society puts money above all else Donald Trump is what happens. He was a celebrity failed businessman long before he became president, he knows what gets Americans excited.
I was talking with my mom the other day and apparently their neighbors, who up until now had never shown any political affiliation at all, put up a Trump flag. They’ve been neighbors for like 20 years haha, my mom was shocked.
He tells people it’s ok to be angry. That’s all they want to hear.
Guess there was not enough money in the public school system after all.
Running the country again…
I’m willing to believe someone could have voted for Trump the first time in good faith. Voting for him again after seeing the shitshow of his first term, however…
The media wants a race. That’s the only way they get viewers.
Or… it really is THAT close of a race. When we shrug it off as “the media just wants a race” we get complacent.
www.vote.gov make sure you’re registered and double check even if you think you already are. Early voting is happening in some states. Get active
Always vote like your vote will make a difference. It might, especially local races. If we accidentally turn the election into a sweep by everyone voting, oh well.
Who’s shrugging off anything? Did I say that? Nope. I’m just saying that we can have a close race and it still be true that Harris holds a 3-point lead nationally and small leads in the swing states. My point is that the media ALWAYS try making it even closer than what it is. Do you disagree with that?
It could also be true that Trump holds a 3 point lead. It could go both ways.
It can be both things.
There are no definitive data points that should lead anyone to believe that either candidate has a significant advantage.
I’m not sure anyone who is well versed in election projections or polling would say anything other than it’s a toss up. As a heavy consumer of said data and reporting, I haven’t seen anything to the contrary.
You’re not wrong about media incentives, but they’re also not wrong that this is a very close race.
Thank you! That was point. It’s close. Harris holds a steady, yet small lead. The media will always make it seem closer than what it is though for ratings.
Maybe the neoliberals should stop trying to throw the race to suck up to corporate donors.
Again.
Money from donors/SuperPACs > winning against Neo-Mussolini
We’ll see if they still feel that way when Mango Mussolini throws them in a camp.
Obama will spend his final days on Martha’s Vineyard, surrounded by loving grandchildren and giant piles of money.
Meanwhile, its going to be the 1.1M people barred from voting in Florida on Felony Disenfranchisement rules that end up in the camps.
A liberals last thought would be “I wish this labor camp had more female prison guards, that would have made me feel better about executed.”
Hey, say what you will about 2024 Nazis, they’re proud to let white women shoot people in the back of the head.
Very true. Sorry you got downvoted for that.
And you fuckers called me crazy for saying there was a concerted propaganda effort to conflate “neoliberal” with “liberal”
Neoliberals are Republicans.
Liberals are Democrats.
538 has Trump’s support at his 2016 final levels. This is relevant to note because, in both prior elections, the polls were extremely good at predicting the baseline margins from diehards and registered, and the error came from badly guessing the undecideds wrong.
Unless this is the first election in a long long time to actually get the baseline wrong or literally 100% of the undecideds go to Harris, Trump’s got above 2016 in raw percentage totals basically locked in(in 2016 a ton of people went third party so neither he or Hillary actually crossed 50 percent, Hillary was 48.2 and Trump 46.1). In 2020 it was 46.8 for Trump and 51.3% for Biden. If things continue to trend that way Trump will be close to his 2020 total percentage locked in and thus will almost certainly be higher in the final count. The people genuinely leaving Trump will mostly be former undecideds, not the people locked in, so this number isn’t being shifted as much. That does suggest that, even with his general ceiling region not shifting a ton, he’s probably set to break 47% in the final number if not more (Trump was polling sub-45 in both 2016 and 2020 so 48 is also plausible).
This matters mostly because not every undecided is going to break for Harris or Trump, there will be people sticking third party who most polls lump in with them or at least contribute to the ‘Not Harris or Trump’ number, and this is one of the few areas where the general trend is not in Harris’s favor. Just broadly speaking this is the most left-wing Third Party batch we’ve had since 2000.
As much as people love to say voting third party helps Republicans, that hasn’t been the case in a while, the Libertarians have been the strongest for a long while and they usually siphon off more Republicans, especially Anti-Trump Ron Paul types. They probably cost Trump Georgia in 2020. But the Libertarian party has been in a state of collapse since 2022, there was an attempted takeover by a hard right clique, which lead to a nasty party schism that left the party not cooperating, then a ton of Hardliners defected to Trump when the Moderates got control of the primaries, and then to make matters worse RFK joined in around that time taking most of the right wing moderates and leaving the Left Libertarians to put Chase Oliver on the ticket. So a ton of Libertarian voters either left with the hardliners for Trump a year ago or left for RFK who in turn endorsed Trump likely redirecting some more of them to him, and what’s left is the most Left-Wing Libertarian the party has run since the 1970s.
Then there’s the fact the Constitution Party has been steadily weakening for years, they lost their status as the Number 3 Third Party in 2020 to the PSL, and this year they had a schism between the Mormon and Protestant factions. They also mostly take Republican Votes. Or the fact the usual coalition of small right wing parties all working together to back one candidate(Rocky De Le Fuente last time) are all gone. Why? They all hitched to RFK Jr, and he dropped out too late for any of them to pick new guys. (That I honestly suspect was the real goal of his candiacy. Wipe out the small right wing third parties and weaken the Libertarians).
On the other foot, the Greens are proportionally stronger as Jill Stein has better name recognition than Howie, the Party for Socialism and Liberation is surging with youth support and is set to break their all time record again, and Cornel West…exists.
It could be far worse, lawsuits kept most of them off of most Swing States, Nevada kept the Green Party off and has the Constitution Party, and Pennsylvania and Arizona only have the Greens and Libertarians. Wisconsin and Michigan also still have RFK Jr on them despite Cornel West and Claudia being there. But it’s still way more left leaning than normal just from the Libertarian crisis and lack of small right parties even without those new guys.
Let’s say around 1.5% of the undecideds go Third Party. Lower than 2020, way way lower than 2016, about on parr with previous years. It’s going to be mostly people who would otherwise vote democrat. The Popular Vote to Electoral College margin is supposed to be quite a bit less this year, but sub-Hillary margins nationally are probably a loss. So Harris wants a 2 point lead and there’s around 98.5% available. It’s gonna be tight.
TL:DR The lower number of undecideds also means that less of them need to break for Trump to give a win, even with the gap between Popular Vote and Electoral College predicted to shrink significantly. Polls have been very accurate at predicting the baseline support, it’s the undecideds they suck at guessing.
Trump’s baseline just hit 46.1%, 2016 final levels(not 2016 baseline that was barely 40%, big difference) and at the rate it’s slowly creeping up could be at or close to 2020 final levels, 46.8%. Harris has been stuck at 48 and a half points for a bit. Assuming this trend holds another 4 weeks we’re looking at something like 48.8 to 46.8 baseline nationally or in that general area. Some of those undecideds are going for third parties, likely more left leaning ones.
All that accounting for if Trump wins just half the undecideds the final result gap would be around 2 points, similar to 2016 if not slightly smaller, which is probably a Trump win. He’s converted enough to diehards he’s gone from needing 2/3+ to just half. And Trump won with the undecideds both prior elections. Harris is improving, absolutely, but the changing third party situation is a braking factor absorbing and neutralizing it to a degree(in 2020 and especially 2016 Trump was bleeding more votes to guys like Gary Johnson, Jo Jorgenson, Rocky De Le Fuente, and Evan McMullin. This year the third party composition has shifted left thanks to the rise of the PSL, strengthing of the Greens, RFK Jr killing the small right wing bloc, and Libertarian infighting.). So this change was a net negative and Harris’s growth has been somewhat absorbed in neutralizing this. That’s also probably why Trump’s raw base total is up, among other things a lot of hardliner Hoppean or Rothbardian LIbertarians jumped ship to him when Chase Oliver and the moderates won the party.
Take a swing state for example. Less accurate overall, but just a hypothetical, and it’s a clean “get the most votes and it’s yours” so no need to guess ratios. According to 538, There’s 4 and a half points not locked in, Harris is leading by 0.4-0.7 and it’s fluctuating day to day. Pennsylvania isn’t a super 3rd party happy state compared to some of the sunbelt, and PSL and Cornel didn’t get on, so that’s a bit more favorable. Let’s say 1 point goes to third party, a bit more Harris thanks to the internal shifts, but not by much. Of of the remaining 3.5, if 63% were to go to Trump, that’s it, even with the best case 0.8 point base lead Harris loses. If it’s more like 0.4 Trump just needs around 55% of the undecideds. That’s it. And this state is better in the third party spread than some others. Trump won more than those numbers from them the last two elections.
The only thing I can see really shifting it, is people saying they’ll support trump to stay in with their communities, then making excuses why they stayed home on election day.
And if I’m honest, that’s a hell of a hail mary pass.
Great analysis, thank you
So yeah, when people ask how Trump could be doing this well despite stuff like COVID deaths or Harris’s gains, that’s my reasoning.
- Significant gains in Libertarians who usually vote for the Libertarian Party
- Notable gains with young men.
- Marginal gains with Hispanic men
- Democrat losses among older white men attached to Biden.
A dead heat in polling is not an even race. We know Democrats need a significant lead to be break even on election day.
The Electoral College gives Republicans a significant advantage.
Its not just the EC. That exists, yes, but its not the biggest stumbling block for team D’, this is:
Trump historically outperforms his polling. In 2020, even though he lost, he over performed his polling by 8 points. As in, he lost 2020, but he should have lost way worse based on what polling indicates. This is most-likely an issue with “likely voter” demographics models, in that Trump voters are regularly under surveyed as the don’t look like likely voters on paper.
Don’t you think the pollsters have compensated for that by now? This has been known for years and years.
Yeah thats a great question. Short answer, no, I don’t. Long answer, is that its complicated and too hard to know. Safe answer is, just assume the above as the best guess for what biases will look like on election day.
The problem with being able to compensate for what the above data show is that you have to have extremely good demographic models, specifically for demographics you didn’t capture in your original sample. I think part of the reason why stochastic modeling misses these things is that its not really a forwards-in-time facing type of analysis. You can’t compensate for a future state if that state is unknown, you can only go backwards to account for your prior (but even that is still facing backwards).
However, I don’t agree that stochastic models are where we should stop with trying to understand these kinds of things. There are plenty of phenomena where we engage with a range of classes of models to try to get an idea of where things should be. Some examples of these are things like process based models, which are a kind of simulation to estimate based on some parameterization, how things came to be. You’ll often do a kind of bayesian filtering on these kinds of models to get down to results that match your data, then use the priors to hopefully understand something about the system. So in the context of electoral politics, it would be trying to understand why someone gets off the couch to vote, or join a movement, or whatever.
So I think that the data in these stochastic samples are good, but the problem is that voting really isn’t a random effect. I think the results are likely good, but they are only going to be as good as the last time the voter demographics were sampled (if they were even updated for that), and then as relevant as those demographics are to the actually electorate who shows up when November 5th rolls around.
A great example of this phenomena in play was the Bernie/ Hillary primary race in 2016. Hillary had the support of basically every mainstream media outlet on the left, all of the DNC, all of Washington. Yet, she was on-track to lose until the DNC stepped in and put their thumbs on the scales. Why? How was that possible? How was Bernie out-performing all of his polls?
Bernie was outperforming his polls because he wasn’t drawing on the same distribution of voters for whom polls are focused. He was turning disengaged, non-voters, into engaged participants in a process. And you can’t measure that with your last demographic sample, because according to your best most recent measurement: those people don’t vote.
Trump does something very similar. He is gathering disenfranchised, disengaged, non-voters and turning them into voters. And you’ll never capture that with a polling model based on last elections voter demographics, when the strategy is to fundamentally shift the demographics.
If pollsters were to massively weight their numbers as I’m describing, Democrats would be getting thunked right now. Its why having a >5% polling advantage going into election day is so important for Democrats.
Thank you for a good write-up. Much appreciated.
I still think Trump is such a well-known commodity now and all of this is nothing new. We’ve been talking about his “hidden voters” so much for so long that I actually think polls may be overcompensating a bit for that. Or at least they could be pretty well calibrated for it at this point. Guess we’ll see in less than a month.
I still think Trump is such a well-known commodity now and all of this is nothing new. We’ve been talking about his “hidden voters” so much for so long that I actually think polls may be overcompensating a bit for that.
I would be ecstatic for that to be the case. Unfortunately, both the 2016, and 2020 polling disagree. But right now, the data we have at our disposal do not support that case.
I’m curious what you think pollsters are doing when you say:
Or at least they could be pretty well calibrated for it at this point.
Like, in stochastic modeling, you have to do things like having a truly random sample to develop your statistics on. Pollsters hands are kind-of tied in this regards and the data is mostly available for download. I’m curious if you think there is some kind of demographic weighting that you think pollsters are doing on the back end?
Yes, I definitely think pollsters are compensating for Trump’s hidden voters by now. Like you say, they’ve had both 2016 and 2020 to get it worked into the polling. It’s rare to get three tries to work it out. I’d be very surprised if they undercount it again.
Honestly, you can’t trust the tv news polls. They want people to watch and Trump gets them numbers.
quick we must go even further right! - dnc strategists
Democrats keep conceding right-leaning policies as if Republicans actually just want those policies
Republicans are reactionary - they don’t just want tougher immigration policies. They want to hurt immigrants. If democrats push right, Republicans will just go further.
There is no moderate right-wing position that can win over moderate Republicans that they can’t beat by going further right.
I’ve seen some of Blue MAGA begging for George W Bush to endorse Harris. wtf.
Blue MAGA? Wtf are you talking about?
WTF is “Blue MAGA”?
I don’t see people on the left holding onto what was and getting stuck on reverting to times of old. Preventing the forward march of changing times.
Blue Maga: we need to talk about the cult-like turn of the Democratic party https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/15/democrats-joe-biden-maga
That’s a laughable bad take.
The left, known for picking apart their candidates and platforms and fucking themselves by letting perfect the enemy of good repeatedly being called out as “cult-like”.
I’m voting for Harris. But lemme tell you, I’ve got issues with her. Especially her history as “pro cop”.
The thing is, many people on the left vote for “harm reduction”. We know there’s better candidates out there, but we’re stuck with what we’ve got in the FPTP voting we have.
Objectively, voting for Harris will cause the least harm in this election.
Especially if our alternative is a ratfucking tyrant that wants to be a “dictator”, wants to “ban protests”, revoke the broadcast licenses of media outlets critical of him & his party, would authorize Israel to wipe out Gaza with our direct support of our troops, would consolidate wealth to the top, and is openly working with the deranged likes of a man that dreams of making his workers indentured servants and would push the USA to reflect apartheid South Africa to relive the glory his father did.
So you are one of those.
I remember how mad they got when Romney didn’t endorse like they felt entitled to.
Fucking HOW?
A) Has Biden markedly improved your day to day life or indicated a massive amount of progressive changes to the system?
B) Is the system likely to radically change away from corporate control/lobbying and towards a strong government agenda any time soon?
If you answered no to both these questions, you should understand why people want Trump in. He represents radical change, a concentration of government power in the executive branch. Sweeping changes under the guise of helping “real Americans” and harming the usual scapegoats (immigrants, gangs, socialists).
That’s the thing; Harris has played towards a center that is greatly weakened/absent in times of political division (she’s not selling herself as being a progressive change, like for instance Obama did with his HOPE campaign).
Where as Trump has played to the far-right, which is actually present and there in divided times like this.
You have to play to the side that’s there if you want enthusiasm.
Harris didn’t play towards progressives who want change (Bernie Sanders crowd). So they’re only voting to prevent Trump’s fascism, not because they actively expect sweeping progress from Harris (who champions establishment causes like border control and Israel).
She hasn’t escaped Biden and the status-quo corporate grind. Trump has escaped his conscience about appearing centrist. Division serves him, counts against her, because she’s playing to the absent center, where he’s not.
He represents radical change, a concentration of government power in the executive branch. Sweeping changes under the guise of helping “real Americans” and harming the usual scapegoats (immigrants, gangs, socialists).
While we know Trump is a conman, I would understand this as a rationale for those that didn’t believe he was a conman, except we’ve already HAD 4 years of a Trump Presidency. If he was promising these great reforms for the little guy, why didn’t he do any of them in the 4 years he was in office? Why do people think this time will be different?
It’s not rational, it’s based on feelings.
You’re not dealing with rational fact based thinkers. You’re dealing with people who see him as a proven common type person who shoots from the hip.
… and they don’t mean he’s common in that he’s poor. They see him as honest/common/like them BECAUSE he shoots off hit takes and says things other politicians wouldn’t.
That’s why they love it qhen he says hlw crappy Detroit is IN Detroit. He’s done similar in several cities now, and they see this as proof he’s like them. They’re down, he’s down. They want to MAGA, he wants to MAGA.
The thing that stopped him last time was all these deep state lawsuits.
Again, these are not rational people.
All that said, maybe it is a rational response to that Black Mirror episode about social credits.
These are all good points, but it’s really not that complicated. Imagine if there were only two NFL football teams. The right are simply die-hard fans of their team and nothing will sway them to change their allegiance to the other side. Nothing.
Policy doesn’t mean shit to them.
Integrity doesn’t mean shit to them.
The Constitution doesn’t mean shit to them.
Upholding a democracy doesn’t mean shit to them.
As long as “their team” wins, that’s all that matters. That’s are not smart people we’re dealing with here.
If that is the case, it’s still a better ratio in the US than in Israel. Israel has a solid majority of far right supporters, the left have no possibility of winning over there.
Hope my society goes the European route of having multi party democracies such as the Open List Proportional representation systems in like, Germany, or wven further afield like in Japan.
Polling is broken.
nbc had the race tied at this point in 2012. how’d that election turn out?
all gas, no brakes.
They had Hillary with a ten point lead at this point in 2016.
Please note the momentum shift that started just around the DNC convention. Ask yourself what changed in the Harris campaign at that time.
No, it started after the debate. The DNC told her to abandon her working rhetoric of “not going back.” And they told Walz to stop using the weird moniker, which was the first negative connotation that ever really stuck to Trump. It’s like they not only don’t want to support actual progressive ideas that people actually want, but they also don’t want to win.
I got worried at first, but upon further inspection this is a return2ozma post.
Nothing here is truthful or holds any merit.
Good day
Not even giving them the click. I know who I’m voting for.
Why is the generation born because we fought the Nazis so into this shit?
