The problem, though, is not that Biden is being voted in as a whip smart, perfect candidate, but that Trump has proven, to many of us, that we will literally take anyone over him. Literally. Any. One.
2020 Trump and Biden campaigns: “Vote for me, I’m not the other guy.”
These are great times lol
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Seriously, this is how you’re re-framing “the problem”?
And you don’t see the real problem here?
I generally share this sentiment.
Somehow a proven methodology failed in 2016. What is more likely?
5/3/1 doesn’t work anymore?
Or…
5/3/1 was not applied properly with a good faith effort from the practitioner?
I’m opting for the latter. I don’t think undecided voters or Trump voters trolling/lying to pollsters explains it all.
In light of the now brazen abandonment of methodical journalism in favor of activism, is a methodical polling failure in the name of activism also a possibility?
I think it probably is.
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This, to me will be the most relevant issue to be resolved by the election results. Not the usual blah blah BS spouted by both sides.
Can we trust anything we read/see at all anymore?
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Yep. I’m not going to pretend I’ll be jumping up and down to see a really old Biden elected President. But having a disaster like Trump out? Absolutely.
Sucks that our system is so often a binary choice when it comes to likelihood of victory but it is what it is at this point.
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I don’t think anyone has any illusions about Joe Biden’s mental facilities. He’s clearly lost a step and maybe worse. It says a lot that Americans are more comfortable with that than they are with four more years of Trump. Joe is going to win the popular vote by multiple millions and has better than even odds of winning the electoral collage.
I don’t follow. What problem is being “re-framed”?
Do you think these polls wanted to be super wrong or something? District level polling down the stretch showed that Clinton was caving hard before the election. You couple that with MOE and the really tight margins of victory in some of those states and “explaining” it isn’t that difficult. National polling was more accurate than it was in 2012. He outperformed polls in battlegrounds if I remember by 2-3 percentage points. Again coupled with margin of error and slight victories it isn’t exactly nuts.
It feels like those who just default to “all polls were so wrong” don’t quite understand statistics? The other more convoluted explanation is that all these polls deliberately were false to do what exactly? Evidence exists that voter turnout is less when a party thinks they are sure of a victory. So they were accurate in previous years, accurate in 2018, but falsified in 2016 and 2020? Do people think a 2 point lead in a state for a D that goes R means “all the polls were off!” It said 2 point lead and the R won by 1.
I’m not sure what people think. Do they really think the polling averages coming into the day of election means that it’s going to be that way for sure?
This is a good read in targeting the uncertainty with some of the polls down the stretch.
“In some ways, our fundamental hypothesis about this campaign is that uncertainty is high, with both a narrow Trump win and a more robust Clinton win — in the mid-to-high single digits — remaining entirely plausible outcomes. The polls-plus model, which gives Trump a 36 percent chance, is basically the same one that gave Mitt Romney just a 9 percent chance on the eve of the 2012 election, so it isn’t inherently so cautious. But the still-high number of voters not committed to either Trump or Clinton — about 13 percent of the electorate says it’s undecided or will vote for a third-party candidate, as compared with just 3 percent in the final 2012 polling average — contributes substantially to uncertainty.
So does the unusually broad swing-state map, with the outcome in at least a dozen states still in some doubt. And it’s important to remember that the outcomes in each state are correlated with one another, so that if Clinton underperforms her polls in Wisconsin (for instance), she’ll probably also do so in Minnesota. Forecasts that don’t account for these correlations are liable to be overconfident about the outcome. It isn’t hard to find examples of candidates who systematically beat their polls in almost every competitive state, as President Obama did in 2012 and as Republican candidates for governor and senator did in 2014.”
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I believe Buttigieg deserves a lot of credit for recognizing this (assuming Trump loses). Many democrat contenders were polling well enough to stay in the race a bit longer, but he was the first to concede and realize the need to coalesce around an imperfect (but perfectly acceptable) candidate in order to win.
The problem is I see a man with early onset dementia (yep, monday morning doctor here) who needs his wife to prompt him before he remembers who he’s running against.
But youse don’t care, because you’re embracing hatred of an entitled fat man who tweets too much. Because hatred is good, because all lives suck.
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Sure.
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Here’s a good explanation of what went “wrong” in 2016. My two takeaways.
- The polls weren’t really that wrong at all. The outcomes at the state level were largely within the margins of error.
- Pollsters didn’t explicitly weight for education, which wound up being more predictive of someone’s support for Trump than expected. It’ll be interesting to see if the pollsters have properly corrected for this.
I’d be careful comparing Biden’s position a week out to Hillary’s. For one, Hillary’s support collapsed in the final week going into the election. There’s no reason to expect that will happen with Biden, though anything is possible. Second, half the electorate has already voted.
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Before the pandemic, a Gallup poll showed 56% of respondents said they were better off today than 4 years ago. The TDSers told us that was fake news.
It’s “accepted” that people will in general vote with their pocketbooks (see George Sr’s famous gaffe wrt read my lips no new taxes). The polls currently tell us Biden will win by more than the polling margin of error.
To my uneducated, boorish Trump voting mind, there is an obvious disconnect. And why I am really, seriously interested in the results of this election.
Hatred isn’t good. I don’t hate Trump. I am not on twitter so that doesn’t bother me. The worst type of person is the one who is thoroughly unqualified for a position/task but who doesn’t possess the minimum bar of understanding to see it. As a scientist, it’s like someone who says “quantum mechanics makes sense”, but of course it’s only because their understanding is so incomplete as to not realize the subtlety of what it implies.
Like I said, I’ll take dementia over forceful ineptitude.
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You’re upset because Trump promised Americans a wall paid for by Mexico and failed to deliver?
I’m a huge Buttigieg fan for this and many other reasons. I’m very interested to see what’s next for him, whether it’s a position in a Biden administration (if there is one) or high higher profile elected position in Indiana. The later seems challenging given the state’s Republican lean, but you never know.
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No, because he literally believed that such an outcome was a possibility (let alone if it was a good idea or not).
Not only unqualified and unwilling to recognize it. Thinking that they are so intelligent that the numerous experts in fields that a President has access to do not need to be listened to. I think the more intelligent someone is the less certainty about topics they have. Trump isn’t just convinced he’s the smartest person in the room. He’s the smartest person to have ever lived in the vast majority of fields.
I did not. And I am neither a scientist nor a PhD.
add: and I do not believe Trump believed it either