I don’t know if anyone pays any attention to the soap opera of Nate Silver and 538, but we have now entered proper nerd fight territory. For all the shit Silver got online over the 2016 election, even through 2020 the models 538 published were actually a pretty good reflection of our electoral politics. Something broke in Silver though during the pandemic and he turned into the total contrarian pundit he always criticized. There was a guy at the Economist who started questioning his work, resulting in lots of subtweeting of each other’s takes and several direct arguments. Last year Disney, who had acquired 538 in 2014, let Silver go and replaced him with the guy from the Economist, Elliott Morris.
About 2 weeks ago, Morris released 538’s first post-silver presidential model and it had Biden ahead by a fraction of a point. A real toss up. Today, Silver released his first post-538 model and has Trump WAY ahead and has made a point of positioning it as 538’s take is wrong.
It’ was a fascinating exhibition of what the pandemic did to many people. I suspect it wasnt just covid though and that he went into the pandemic with the angst of about 5 years of near constant dog piling he received from all sides over 2016 and his Mueller investigation takes (which were totally normal…“this new revelation doesnt change anything because he pretty clearly did it and Mueller’s report will almost certainly be really bad, but I doubt in this environment it will mean anything”).
It’s Biden 51-49 in popular vote, but given typical geographical vote distributions a GOP candidate can win the electoral college with as low as a 47% share of the popular vote. So a 1 point Biden win results in a 66% chance Trump gets to 270 n the EC.
I don’t know much about the guy. He has given Trump a +65% chance of winning the required electoral votes. I normally only look at polls that have a decent sampling, and then look at error margin. I don’t however think this is an actual poll (edit: Just realized it is a model)
I cherry picked some poll stats from the NY Times/Siena poll as I keep on reading, specifically, about the change in black votes for Trump, and the gains he has made. (probably one of the most comprehensive polls I have ever seen)
Here are a few stats I found interesting (it only relates to black votes, and these particular stats are not broken down by age and sex (even though there are breakdowns in the actual poll):
80% Actual black vote 2020 - Biden
12% Actual black vote 2020 - Trump
65% - If election held today - Biden
26% - If election held today - Trump
23% NET Favourable - Trump
64% NET Favourable - Biden
72% - The Democratic Party (Identification - Assuming also includes non-registerd)
21% - The Republican Party (Identification - Assuming also includes non-registerd)
The poll in my interpretation, seems to indicate that Trump has gained at least double the amount of potential votes than he actually had last election. This number correlates to the number that find him NET Favourable, while the Biden numbers also correlate.
Not that clued into how significant the “black” vote is, I just see headlines popping up all over the place.
Polls picking up a shift in the black and hispanic vote has been a consistent suggestion of this cycle. If it is true, it is likely lethal to Biden, but we have to tread carefully over interpreting that from the crosstabs of more general polls. The cross tabs are interesting, often hypothesis generating, but a truism in statistics is to not try and answer any question a test (or poll) was not specifically designed to answer. We’ve seen it in enough general polls to be conscious of it, but you’d need quality polls of specifically black people, designed to be representive of that demographic, to be confident in what it said. And we dont have those because they are hard and expensive. So it’s definitely the sort of trend we should be on the look out for, but it’s really difficult to say how real this is and if so how big it is.
Mind you, I might take a look at tonight’s Presidential ‘debate’ - in the sense that traffic going in the opposite direction slows down to look at an accident. I hope Biden doesn’t keel over or freeze too much, or that might tilt it.
Trump will be bombastic, incoherent, and lie out of his arse all night… but he will do it stridently, and that might make enough put their hand on heart and go all misty eyed, whispering ‘God Bless America’ as they see their felon-in-chief.
I would not have taken the debate if I was advising Biden. I will tune in, reluctantly, but don’t expect much.
There was a point in the 2016 cycle where someone on the right who then positioned himself as anti-Trump caught him out by exposing his lack of understanding of the “nuclear triad”, essentially the three pronged system the US military has for launching nuclear weapons. It was a top news story for maybe 4 or 5 days, and was one of the few times there was hope that we might start seeing some sanity creeping back into their process.
I think we all appreciate how badly he would do if presented questions testing even a far more rudimentary understanding of government and yet it just never seems to happen. No one wants to be seen a “Gotchya merchant”, (remember, the Palin team complained that being asked to a single newspaper she reads was an unfair Gotchya question) but I think the most instructive questions the moderators could ask would be shit like “protecting medicare is something you claim you want to do, but please explain to the audience your understanding of the difference between medicare and medicaid?” How about, “once a bill becomes law, can you explain your understanding of the president’s office role in administering that law?”
You can be sure it was discussed. He doesn’t have much to gain, the problem is that he has a fair bit to lose, and likely would have crystallized that by ducking the debate.
Disagree. With focus on his supposed frailty’s refusal to debate would have been seen as confirmation of that. Avoiding them was simply not an option for Biden
That is more or less what I was saying. He just doesn’t have much to gain by attending, so they would have contemplated it. They took the debate because not showing up would get him most of the negative consequences he needs to be concerned with, so they demanded the rules they wanted to set the terrain. His best case is to stay off the ropes and have Trump make a spectacle of himself.
