Not sure that is correct is it, I might be misremembering but I thought Nate Silver was one of the first voices in the 2016 election cycle to say that the polls underrepresented Trump votes?
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Nateâs argument was more that people were under appreciating how unsurprising it would be for an outcome with a 30% chance actually happening and so people shouldnât be treating a supposed 70-30 race as certain (was actually closer to 60-40 by Election Day I think)
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I might not be explaining myself correctly, so for exampleâŚ.
538 predictions vs reality.
Georgia, Biden by +1.2, actual, +0.23.
So that âerrorâ for all states against reps (different numbers per state), and opposite for approximately 2 states against dems.
I wish I had bookmarked the article. It went back as far as BO election. I spot checked a few of the numbers, and they were correct, so I have no reason not to think the analysis was done in good faith.
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Presumably, they will adjust their future prediction model based on the reality vs their previous prediction?
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Itâs probably self-evident to most everybody , apart from ShitferBrains himself , that racist attacks are probably not such a great idea. This piece digs into why exactly that is so ;
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Theyâre a good idea if your target audience is racist. Same goes with the misogyny.
It doesnât seem to matter how vile and repugnant Trump and his puppy are, his support remains at 44/45%.
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Thereâs a link at the end of that piece to a study done in 2020 that suggests that by then Trump had already exhausted the most racist part of his base in 2016 ;
âUsing racist appeals and racialized wedge issues won him support most clearly in the 2016 GOP primary. But there are key differences between that contest and the 2020 general election â differences that may make racial appeals less impactful this year.â
Considering he only lost by a whisker in 2020 , it makes it all the more surprising that he would still be trying to scrape that barrel with all the associated downside. Youâd have to conclude that he just canât help himself.
Yeah, maybe heâs just a racist, sexist, homophobic asshole after all.
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lol ⌠whoâd have known ?
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538 nor the other popular models do not directly account for past polling error. Polling error is largely random (in a statistical sense) and so not accountable for other than in your interpretation of the data, but they can and do make adjustments for elements of the data that can produce systemic error. The polling average they all use is not a pure arithmetical average, but a weighted average that adjusts each data point used for âhouse effectsâ (e.g. the fact Rasmussen is always 3-4 points for favourable for Republicans than any other quality poll), and weighs each result according to polling quality - a measure of not just how historically close they have been, but how robust and well disclosed their methods are (a small improvement from an A grade pollster will have more of an effect on the average than a big improvement for a C class pollster).
But you cannot just take a past cycleâs polling error and impute it into the interpretation of the current results because as said above the vast majority of polling error is statistically random. 2020 was unusual in that there appears to have been a systemic error across the board that undercounted Trump, and the pollsters themselves have put a lot of effort in trying to understand what happened, but as Iâve already said, no one has great answers. There was surely a unique covid element that can probably be ignored in terms of things that need to be fixed, but the big debate is in how much was due to what they call negative response bias. Pollsters have never believed the press fascination with the so called âquiet Trump voterâ, the idea that people hide their preference for him to avoid being socially condemned by polite society, because, well, have you ever met or spoken to a Trump voter? They are not shy about telling you about it. The concern today is more over the system breakdown of trust and unwillingness to participate in society in general of a set of MAGA voters making them harder to reach. If you believe this there are adjustments to your data that can be made, but there is not agreement among pollsters on whether it is real and if so what the appropriate degree of adjustment is.
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And Pence will probably not disagree.
Weirdos.
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Iâm surprised they arenât attacking him more on senility. If Biden had to step aside, Trump is, if anything, less coherent.
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Senility is an acceptable inconvenience for Project 2025.
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Maybe they are letting it slide for the public to pick up, and if not, the dr doing his check in the chance that Trump does win the election. I could think of anything less embarressing for him personally, to be told that he is mentally not fit to be president. And also how embarressing would it be for the GOP to find out that they have all been hoodwinked by someone that has lost their mind?
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Well, thatâs plain to see.
For normal people it is. But for Trump and his cronies - itâll come as a shock and would be an embaressing affair that they wouldnât be able to sweep under the rug
They have spent 8 years already trumpsplainingâŚlistening to what ever racist, ugly shit heâs said or just his plain incoherence, and then criticizing the rest of us for âmisunderstandingâ and âmisquotingâ him and explaining what he really meant. He is stupider now, and should be held to a higher standard than in 2016 having actually already been in office, but there isnât much difference to the silly dance his enablers do today than they have ever done in the interest of pretending he isnât as manifestly unqualified and unfit as we all see with our own eyes
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Makes sense thatâs what Trump would do. He lost the last one, and then dozens of lawsuits to boot. He tried to bring a case but the problem is that in a courtroom you need some actual evidence, whereas in the news media you can just say what you like. Mind you, to a point, as Fox were sued for almost $800M and Tucker Carlson lost his job for lying.
If Trump loses the election, and I think he will, his play will be to mobilize lower down electors to stop the count from being ratified, and then to have a friendly Supreme Court install him as President.
Hopefully Harris has counter measures all mapped out.
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