Polls are for pundits.
Vote in November.
Swings in polls are notable, and there’s reason to believe Trump’s conviction hurt his approval among independents.
Will this last? Idk. Hillary was up by 10-pts in October and crashed to a dead-heat on election day. But it should be worth considering what current events have a positive or negative impact on a candidate’s approval.
What does that information ultimately do for a citizen who is not in the field?
Assuming you’re actively participating in GOTV, its useful to know what talking points engage people and what don’t.
Assuming you’ve got some vested socio-economic interest in the winner of the next presidential race, it might inform personal financial or business decisions.
Fox News NEVER lies and also this poll is RIGGED and FAKE!
The Biden campaign has been running polls and focus groups for weeks, and the message has been clear: a felony conviction is a turn-off and a dealbreaker for some meaningful number of voters
In the moment, sure. We’ll see how much people care about his conviction when its four months in the rear view mirror and “Hunter Biden Newest Dick Picks” bombard the latest media cycle.
But maybe - just maybe - the Dems will see prosecuting high ranking conservative crooks as a boon rather than a hazard as they run into the next election cycle. Maybe someone will have the bright idea to bring federal charges against Ken Paxton or Ron DeSantis or even Elon Musk.
Or maybe not. Maybe we’ll just scratch Trump off as “Uniquely Prosecutable” and never do this again.
Polls don’t predict the future. They are a photo of the time they were taken.
Polls illustrate popular sentiment in the moment and give a picture of changing ideological trends over time. This informs people about likely possible futures and assists in long-term decision making.
Remember that it’s not the popular vote that counts, it’s the electoral college, and current polling gives Trump a 2-in-3 chance of winning the college:
https://www.economist.com/interactive/us-2024-election/prediction-model/president
Democracy, fuck yeah!
Americans desperately need to believe they’re a shining city on a hill, even when we’re all living hip-deep in the muck alongside everyone else.
Me reading this link getting 2016 flashbacks
I’d say Biden is in an even worse position, his push to the far right on immigration, economics, genocide etc. because he thinks he has voters over a barrel has alienated and demoralized a lot of voters. He’s quite literally to the right of Ronald Reagan at this point on so many issues, it’s a tall order to ask non-conservatives to vote for him when he’s literally just a Republican.
His inability to change course very well might cost him the election, and even if he does squeak out a win it guaruntees that the Democratic party will continue to see moving right and supporting genocide as the way to win elections.
US democracy is kind of a walking corpse at this point I think. People just don’t want to acknowledge what the problems are and think kicking the can down the road some more will help.
538 has it much closer https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/
538 has been unreliable for several election cycles, though…
I think people need to stop thinking that “most likely outcome” = prediction. They gave Trump a 1/4 chance of winning in 2016, which is far from impossible and better than most were saying. Their latest trackers have really emphasized the probability aspect of things, rather than the expected vote share.
They actually did a project about this. Here’s how close they were with US House predictions: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/checking-our-work/us-house-elections/ (you can look up other elections but since there are so many to work with here I thought it was a good place to start)
They gave Trump a 1/4 chance of winning in 2016
They gave him a 1/4, with a bunch of caveats like “If we see these midwest states start trending red, that’s a good sign for Biden”. And then Hillary lost Pennsylvania, and 538 basically called it for Trump on the spot.
But polling in 2016 was generally stronger, because we had more professional pollsters and fewer partisan polling operations. Modern polling is increasingly polluted by unreliable narrators, push polls, and polling-as-propaganda for partisan news sites. The problem with 538, structurally speaking, was that it got people to stop doing their own polls and fixate on aggregates to the exclusive of internal research. This, combined with the ongoing consolidation of domestic media markets, means we have fewer and fewer people doing professional polling research.
So the data firms like 538 use has degraded. The interest in their results has faded, as a consequence. And the trend towards eye-polling click-bait headlines has resulted in pollers being defunded in favor of automated screen scrappers and headline generator scripts.
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That sort of lead sounds irrational
Nah, that’s a natural number. An irrational lead would be if he lead by π or something like that.
A few orders of magnitude off, but that’s the first 10 digits of pi.
My dumb brain was too busy trying to make a joke about irrational numbers to not even notice one had been made for me.
It’s all good. My brain’s pretty idiotic most of the time, so I can relate.
