Everything can always get worse. Always.
Of course, everything can also be better, always, but we are not at all on that trajectory now:
OAN is a pure dark ethnic nationalist fantasy channel. Will not comment on the dying bit, someone would not like it.
Not buying his point 1. It is not just American political scientists that are saying that and polls are not just judged on them getting the winner right. He knows this. Seems to me a bit like “I am protecting myself and my line of work from criticism”:
Very correct on 2.
3. Most polls being 3-4 percent wrong, while within statistic 5% rule, still suggests an under-appreciation of Trump support. He knows that better than most people.
4. Yes, Nate, it is. Thanks for saying that.
5. Sure.
Here is a an article from the Norwegian division of Ipsos called “The USA election-it went all wrong again”-referring to polls being wrong. https://www.dagbladet.no/meninger/det-gikk-helt-galt---igjen/73046357
So it is not just something journalists say. Nate Silver is an incredibly intelligent man with great polling expertise, but it doesn’t mean that others don’t have a point. Incidentally, the Norwegian article mentions Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight having Biden at a 8.4 % lead right before the election.
Interesting read though, so thanks a lot for posting.
Must hurt Trump’s feelings seeing this, if he indeed sees it, which I kind of doubt since OAN would not show this:
Hmm:
My God, this is worse than usual stuff from him.
This propaganda reel is something you expect out of the worst of banana republics:
I think the more important thing here is the way Trump has managed to make pollsters somehow part of ‘the enemy’, and construct a narrative that what they were saying was wholly false and deliberately so. We have seen for a over a decade that all pollsters struggle to get accurate samples from the Tea Party/Trump population. BEing off by 3-4 points is not problematic, the fact that that bias systematically underreports Republicans is. But the critical element is for Trump, polls that showed a decisive margin for Biden being off by 3-4 points is not good enough. He needs to construct a narrative that they were wholly disconnected from reality, which of course he won.
Nate Silver doesn’t even do polls himself, he is not really protecting himself at all. If anything, he is becoming more and more prominent. I think in another post he said something like the pollsters collectively rate a B- or something like that. What Silver is calling out is the narrative work that attacking polls is doing for Trump - it is essential that ‘the polls were totally wrong’.
Also worth noting that with California votes still being counted, the popular will probably end up somewhere just under 6%.
I think the crux may be that many of those voting for extremes, lie due to shame, making polling them very hard. It makes polling extremely high emotions elections, probably very hard.
And yes, it is systemic and methodical under-appreciation of Trump voters, last election, and this election, and it is a problem if one is to rely on polls at all.
As for Congress elections, the polling numbers are even worse off there, again, systemically.
But I don’t know the answer, I just know that there is systemic under-appreciation.
I think John Curtice, who is one of the go to guys in the UK for a steer on polling elections would agree with Nate’s first point here. I’ve posted his interview in the Independant where he explained how the results were predicted by identifying the likely key (swing) states and determining who would win more than half of them, and therefore the election. Calling the overall winner, the EC votes and the results in 48 out 50 states I think can be genuinely considered a win.
Had the postal votes been countable in the swing states, at the same time as everywhere else, then i don’t think the argument gets anywhere near the oxygen it did, which is where most of the angst over the polls has come from.
From the article I posted, after being sent through Google Translate:
In this year’s election, Trump won early in Florida and North Carolina, while Biden passed him at the finish line in Georgia and Pennsylvania. Apart from the latter, the measurements here were fairly even. For example, Biden led Florida with +2.5, which is by no means certain for us who work with opinion polls.
On the other hand, it was worse in the states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio. It was here that Trump surprisingly won in 2016, which became the subject of all explanations as to why he could be elected.
This is where we should again turn our attention; here it went completely wrong again. Biden’s lead in Wisconsin was +8.4, but he looks to win by less than one percentage point. In Michigan, the lead was +7.9, he ends up at around +3. In Ohio, Trump had the lead with +0.8, but ended up with over +8.
These are many numbers and details, but the overall picture is quite clear: Trump was underestimated in opinion polls in almost all of the so-called tipping states and also in many secure states.
I don’t think one can say that Trump support was not under-appreciated. But maybe I misunderstood you.
It would, because the polls being wrong was a baked in part of the story even before the election and so it was always going to be something that people ran with afterwards regardless.
Nate’s point is that polls are not supposed to be able to tell you who will win, otherwise why go through with having the actual election? But far too many people then think the alternative to polls being deterministic is that they are useless and give us no valuable information. The fact Nate built his model based entirely on polls by the final day that made what we’re living through now the most likely outcome speaks to the stupidity of that argument.
Anyway, polls being right or wrong isn’t super important and I don’t want to spend the rest of the evening debating this particular matter, too much else that is important that is going on. But when I talk about polls being wrong, it is the systemic under-appreciation of Trump support that I am talking about, just to be clear.
As for now, I want to bid you a fine evening as I am off to see an episode of Dark.
I hardly said this nor meant it. They certainly give valuable information, but there is a problematic factor in Trump being under appreciated.
I’ve seen this and reported it immediately. I guess the twitter employees are working overtime atm. This is unbelievable really, but the longer he does this, the more annoyed everyone reacts. And slowly, even his followers are starting to find it embarrassing, he looks so tearful and weak. That doesn’t go down well with them. Maybe not the hardcore cult people yet. But you can see from the comments that many are now on the way to accept it.
Who knew WHO, Nato, WTO and the Paris Climate accord were all bad things and to the detriment of the US. 
Understood. That was in reference to Nate having to, predictable, defend himself on twitter from the “polls were wrong” crew.
But, yes you are correct. This is now several cycles in a row where even if the mean error has been reasonable, the fact it has consistently been in the same direction is something that needs to be solved. They thought they had gone a long way to doing that after 2016 by better weighing for education, but there appears to be more to solve. If I had to guess, it would be the incorrect treatment of the latin demo.
At least, they got one thing right on Fox
Hi Magnus, he sounds thoughtless. Surely a ‘really nice guy’ wouldn’t want to impose his crack pot ideas for over an hour on someone he knows has thoughtfully come to diametrically opposed positions? It sounds like he’s just trying to recruit/reach out to the unbeliever to sooth his own ego/conscience. Don’t waste time reading his shit; has he undertaken to read and understand some Habermas (for eg)?
Human relations can be complex. Old friendships can be as well. We had good times together at that boarding school (incidentally a christian boarding school), I fondly remember being 17 years old, he was 18, we were on a school trip to Greece, me sneaking a couple of beers down while he kept guard so the teachers wouldn’t notice me. He never touched alcohol of course, Evangelicals don’t touch that, it is sin along with smoking and so much else.
Still, he was a hardcore evangelist then as well, walked around in a t-shirt proclaiming “Worship the Best or Die like the Rest”. I usually walked around in an Iron Maiden t-shirt back then. I was a secular protestant, he came from a closed sect. We usually didn’t discuss God or things like that back then (though sometimes of course), it is just now, that we so seldom talk, that he wants to save my soul and etc. He means it well. I blame those evangelist leaders, those money-milking bastards, not the individual members of the cult. At least not to a very high degree do I blame them, most lack the ability to filter and think critical, they can be intelligent enough, but when the faith is so strong, reason dies.
Also, he has no higher education. No college or University. That helps with filtering info.
Also, the evangelical churches in Norway are different now than they used to be, previously they were Evangelical and all of that, but the conspiracy theory stuff, that is new to our culture, imported from the US.
I know I am making excuses for crazy, but when you lived together on a boarding school as friends for a year, you get close. I know he has some very good sides and that he is kind. As for Habermas, he wouldn’t know who Jürgen Habermas nor Gadamer are, nor what hermeneutics is. He would know of the biblical hermenautics, but only because they are used by Evangelists talking about Christianity.
But I am no longer a Christian (I used to consider myself a “normal” secular protestant, until I became an agnostic around when I was 19-20) and he is deep in his Evangelist cult. We can still talk, I just wish we could talk about something different than religion. Still, I will never bear him ill will, I just pity him and feel a sense of sadness when I think of him. I can’t help him, he is not receptive to logic, because his world is based on faith.
