Because the US basically breaks Dem 35 % , Rep 35% and the rest ‘independents’ who , as yet , are still uncommitted.
Check this latest gem from President ShitferBrains from a rally last night ;
During his 90-minute speech in Johnstown, Mr. Trump coined a term for his meandering off-the-cuff remarks — and insisted that they were strategic.
“You know, I do the weave,” he said. “You know what ‘the weave’ is? I’ll talk about like nine different things that they all come back brilliantly together. And it’s like — and friends of mine that are like English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”
That’s why I apostrophised ‘independents’. I suspect the real number to be closer to 10%. You only have to observe so called independents on here and elsewhere to quickly realise they are nothing of the sort.
The shit never ends,it seems,first ivanka has employed millions of people and wind is responsible for people not eating bacon.
The wind emanating from him might be a factor,though.
The Bush years saw a substantial drop off people who were registered as republican, but as @redalways says this didn’t really change the voting behavior of the majority of newly listed “independents”
US Republicans are having fun with the fact ‘Harris Walz’ is almost, but not quite, an anagram of ‘Sharia Law’. Incidentally, ‘Trump Vance’ actually is an anagram of ‘Cunt Revamp’.
What is the point of being registered as an independent? I always thought the idea behind these was like being a member of the Labour Party or whatever, and you got to select candidates.
Yeah, it has little meaningful impact and so it should be seen as the closest thing to a protest these people were willing to do. Mainly it allows them to maintain their self identification as a principled person who doesn’t just blindly follow the party line (while still always voting straight party line ticket once the election comes around)
Interestingly though the Trump years have seen the republicans win back a lot of gains in party registries they lost in the late 00s-early 10s
% of registered voters registered as republican. I think it is largely a reflection of new voter registration, which is probably combination of activating previously low propensity voters and young men who have newly become able to vote but I haven’t seen a detailed breakdown to confirm that
It’s a bit of an academic thing, but does impact how data on polling of independents should be interpreted. It is too often equated to swing voters when for over a decade that is simply not who independents were. They were mostly partisans embarrassed by their preferred party but still with every intention to vote for them, even if they had to put in a theatrical performance to claim the Dems forced them into their position
Don’t know what people were expecting. Harris has managed a fairly drastic turnaround (given how polarised and cemented the electorate seems to be) in a very short time, complete change of narrative, more states are in play again, got a few things very right and hasn’t made any significant mistakes so far. Close to a realistic best case scenario at this point imo. If anything it proves how weak Biden’s position was.
I think people were expecting more of a ‘bounce’ post-convention (I know I was) , but it appears hers came before , and most analysts seem to agree that the new norm for a post-convention uptick is actually less than a percentage point. Following the RCP averages though , the trend is unmistakeable and she’s on course to go ahead in all of the battleground states pretty soon.
Polls from 538 have had a negative bias towards republicans (ranging from a % to 5+) for the past 4-5 elections, except for 1 or 2 states that have had a negative bias towards democrats (less than a % bias). Harris needs to be up a few points and then it will still be a tossup with the bias incorporated. She has a huge amount of work to do now that the convention is over. I believe Walz has done a few pressers, while she has only done “1” with Walz.
538 doesn’t do polls. It does statistical models in which polls conducted by other companies are one source of information.
There is a wide variety of results from the various polls and so you cannot make a blanket statement like “they have a negative bias towards…”. I dont know whether you are trying to reference general polling error (how much did the polling average miss the actual result by) or electoral college bias (how many points does a Dem need to win the national popular vote by to account for the pro Republican bias in the EC) but neither of those is what happening here. As I’ve already said, the model assumes both candidates will get a small temporary bounce from their convention. That means it is viewing Harris narrow lead at the moment not as a marker of an advantage, but as a predicted situation in this immediate post-convention period that it expects to dissipate in a few weeks. With no change in the polling as soon as the model deems the period of being able to see a post-convention bounce is over it will immediately flip back to putting her in the lead.
A relevant point on polling error though is that the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020 both had polling errors that undercounted the Trump vote. In 2016 it was an error within typical limits, but in 2020 it was really big. While covid was surely a part of that, no one is really quite sure why they were so badly off which has made fixing it a challenge, or even if it represented something that is repeatable and so needs to be accounted for in the polling. Potentially relevant though is that the polls were back to being pretty good for the 2022 federal elections. In short, making assessments based on what we think the polling error is going to be is pretty much guess work even for the experts.
No not the polling error, this is over and above that. The 538 has had that bias for at least the past 4 elections, meaning the results skew against Republican’s in most states (ignoring solid dem/rep states as it’s irrelevant), and then also undercount Democrats in about 2 states.
