I dislike doubting polls, but there’s just some odd stuff in here.
- 10% go for RFK Jr, and it’s equal siphoning from both parties? 10%?!
- 20% more people blame Biden for Roe being overturned than Trump?
- They’re TIED with Gen Z voters? TIED?!
- After the absolute thrashing that Republicans have received on abortion, only like 50% of women would break for Biden?
This is a poll of just the 5 key states, but this part of their methodology gives me significant pause as well: "To further ensure that the results reflect the entire voting population, not just those willing to take a poll, we give more weight to respondents from demographic groups underrepresented among survey respondents, like people without a college degree. "
Emphasis mine. There could be a huge skew. And these results don’t make sense. The other NYT poll from several months ago was also incredibly unusual and had very weird findings – to the point that the Guardian wrote something was very fucky with the results.
This isn’t to say this can’t be what’s going on, but we need corroboration from other polling groups. And it isn’t summer yet, which makes polls rather inaccurate too.
TLDR: Something’s fucky, we need more information and to monitor this.
EDIT: I just want to use my bully pulpit here to say that my criticisms by no means disprove the poll results. There’s oddities, but that doesn’t make the results an impossibility. Don’t only give credence to criticism of polls. If someone has reasons they believe the poll is accurate, you should give equal attention to it. At the end of the day, we don’t know what the actual truth is, and we won’t until the election is over. Just remember that we don’t want to just win, we want to dominate. We want massive margins. And that means we need to see wins even in less than accurate polls.
A lot of polls have been putting RFK Jr at 10+ percent. There are a ton of low-information voters who see the name and not much else
I mean that’s pretty dismissive.
The largest cohort of people in this country want neither Biden nor Trump. Some of that cohort are willing to step out on a limb and support a third party.
It’s really hard to support somebody like Kennedy when you know his actual positions, and that they’re driven by the fact that a worm ate part of his brain
I’d vote for the worm before I voted for Kennedy, but whomever you are trying to convince isn’t listening. If you want to convince people of something, you need to understand them and why they do what they do.
Clearly at least 10% of voters see having a complete brain as less of a deal breaker than being either Biden or Trump. We should be curious as to why that is.
If you’ve been following the polling there is nothing different or unique about this one. It’s consistent with pretty much all polling over the past 400 days. Biden is losing. Polling is definitely still broken, but it’s consistent. There is no fuckery.
Biden needs to be up by 4-12 in those states if he wants to win.
See my posts in !data_vizualisations@lemmy.world . I make a map of the offset in polling Biden needs to win a given state based on the fact that polls consistently overestimate how well Biden will do, and underestimate how well Trump will do.
When you see these poll numbers, you should subtract 4 for Biden, and add 8 for Trump. That was the offsets we observed from the 2020 election.
So keeping in mind data you already have about Trump, Biden, polling and it’s departure from real election results, it’s not even a question. Mortgage you house and out all your money on Trump to win. You have a differential polling error of 12 points in a Biden Trump head to head. Biden needs to be in the mid to high fifties across the board to have a chance.
He’s in the low forties.
If you don’t end up clicking the link: Relative polling error for Biden V Trump, 2020.
This is quite interesting, thanks for sharing!
My only critique is that I don’t think 2020 skew is valid anymore. After Dobbs, the landscape seems to have significantly changed. 2022 was predicted to favor Republicans by a strong margin, but it ended up being a tie pretty much. And a lot of special elections have had surprising results too.
My personal opinion is that polling methodology may have overcorrected for 2020, and we’re getting a picture now that’s skewed right, versus left from beforehand.
It’s really hard to say though. There weren’t a lot of great polls to start with in 2022, and special elections don’t have significant polling either. It’s a weird position where the only good data set we have is from 2020, but there have been so many changes in the national environment that we have reason to doubt the skews from 2020 are still valid. But at the same time, what else do we have? Vibes and feelings and anecdotes. And the engineer in me dislikes dismissing data in favor of vibes. It’s important to consider still I think, because none of this is infallible. But I honestly couldn’t tell you what the “right” outlook to have is. Maybe I’m onto something, but maybe I’m just letting optimism bleed into my better judgement.
All I know is that I don’t know.
I mean if we’re stepping off the data into editorialism, Trump out performed all other Republicans in 2020, like he also did in 2016. As well, Trump endorsed candidates struggled in 2018, and 2022, and special elections. My read of this evidence and I’ve seen it suggested elsewhere, is that whatever property it is that causes Trump to consistently over perform isn’t transitive. So evaluating how well Trump will perform against how well Republicans are performing is misguided. You should evaluate candidates individually, and that would agree with their performance.
Also, this is one poll. The aggregate of polling agrees with this one poll. The minor methodological changes they make from year to year are infact extremely minor and they are doing the appropriate statistical accounting afaict. There is nothing weird or wonky about these polls: Biden is just performing very very poorly. I’ve been saying this for months to an onslaught of downvotes from people who simply don’t want to believe this to be the case.
Finally, I’ll argue that the ‘right’ outlook is always the one that aligns most closely with the data. We should believe stories we tell about data less than data itself. There is nothing to suggest that this election will really be anything that different than the 3 previous, and in terms of landscapes, the best proxy appears to be 2016 in terms of contested states. You should believe the data that is telling you that Joe Biden is losing this election. Biden has been setting up to lose the upper Midwest since December. These are the same states Hillary lost.
maybe I’m just letting optimism bleed into my better judgement
I agree. It’s also what the political pundit class did when they completely wiffed on 2016, and it’s what they’re doing right now. 90% of Lemmy also agrees with your sentiment, and in both Lemmy’s and the punditry’s refusal to be critical of Biden, to drag him towards more popular policies, they’re setting Trump up for victory.
The president has little say on the laws that Congress passes. Vote for your local senators and representatives! The only way to realize change is to vote in your local elections!
It is local and state government that is important to making changes! Republicans have figured this out decades ago and have been gerrymandering and packing courts for decades.
The president can’t waive a magic wand and make any change he wants.
The president has little say on the laws that Congress passes.
Vetoes
Executive Orders
Judicial Appointments
Fundraising for Congressional Candidates
An Attorney General that can argue against legislation in federal courts
An enormous administrative bureaucracy that authors internal policy under broader federal mandates
A Vice President who breaks ties in a Senate split 48(D)/3(I)/49®
But other than that…
I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it again and again; of course you don’t like the Democrat candidate; but you’ve got to swallow your damned medicine or the outcome will be exponentially worse.
Yeah, I voted for Hillary. I hate her so goddamn much. But you know who I hate more? The orange asshole. So I did what I had to do, I swallowed my anger and voted for the bitch. No protest vote, no skipping out on it, just sucking it up and doing what had to be done. If more people had followed my example, and the example of many others, we wouldn’t be rapidly watersliding dowe the lubed-up slope to outright, unapologetic fascism.
of course you don’t like the Democrat candidate; but you’ve got to swallow your damned medicine
Tincture of Mercury and a regular bloodletting will give us the strength we need to fight off the Trump Virus.
So I did what I had to do
You did, but when the Dem Party regained office in 2020 they didn’t.
Dems had an opportunity to give DC statehood in 2021. Two free senators, a house seat, and an easy 3 EC votes. This legislation was queued up and ready to go and the Dem majority just… didn’t do it. So now 660k Americans are once again going into 2024 fully disenfranchised, in an election when every vote counts.
This isn’t the only way in which the Dems sabotage their own success. But it can’t be ignored how a party that zealously backed guys like Henry Cuellar and Bob Menendez during primaries, long after they’d been outed as crooks and frauds, are the biggest threats to their own success. Never even mind the horrifying genocide in Palestine or the slavish devotion to fossil fuel subsidies or the shameless pandering to crypto-bros.
If more people had followed my example, and the example of many others, we wouldn’t be rapidly watersliding dowe the lubed-up slope to outright, unapologetic fascism.
Every election gives the fascist party larger voter turnout. This isn’t an issue of apathy, but of escalating tensions. Election turnout over the last six years has been reaching century-long highs but its a two-edged sword. Republican activists have been very successful in building up their own local majorities.
More people are following your example. Even in the face of gerrymandering. Even in the face of voter caging. Even in the face of shameless criminal-but-unprosecuted efforts at disenfranchisement.
But that includes conservatives. More and more of them, every year, as Trump drives an enthusiasm for the GOP I haven’t seen since Reagan.
If Biden and Trump really are tied among Gen Z voters, I’m afraid Gen Z voters just don’t understand the American election system. If we don’t get Biden, we get Trump, which would be infinitely worse for most of the causes they are angry with Biden on.
I’m afraid Gen Z voters just don’t understand the American election system
Maybe they’re fucking tired of pretending they can influence anything in this rigged bullshit of a world? Trump looses and still doesn’t get any justice in court, there is still no healthcare and minimum wage remains at 1856 levels because FoReFatHeRs of some bullshit, while jeff bezos fucks them in the ass along with their boss and landlord. Tiktok gets banned because the government doesn’t want them to laugh at „israel bad” memes and the climate still falls apart after 10-20 years.
Sure, trump wins and everything gets even worse but stop criticizing people who don’t want to vote when their promised „democracy” is terrible and even worse. They simply don’t believe in their freedom anymore and it’s the fault of their country which viscously takes everything from them. Letting it go to shit might just be their form of a protest. First boomers fucked everything up for them and now they’re screaming „save us”.
The joke of 2020 was people screaming about how Trump was very obviously guilty of very real crimes and we needed to get him out to prosecute him.
Then we… didn’t. Ninety-one indictments and the bulk of them have been deferred or dropped. The single remaining case in SDNY isn’t stopping him from campaigning and isn’t meaningfully threatening his ability to assume office.
Sure, trump wins and everything gets even worse but stop criticizing people who don’t want to vote when their promised „democracy” is terrible and even worse.
I’m living in a city where the school district was simply taken over by the Governor. All the HISD school board elections are rendered meaningless. The superintendent is just a charter school flak who exists to dismantle public education. No democratic accountability. Outright looting of the ISD’s budget. The Feds have expressed no interest in interceding in interstate embezzlement.
And we’re told the only way to stop this is to vote. Vote for what? Nobody currently running wants to stop this dismantling of a foundational element of modern civilization. Hell, even the Dem-endorsed new Houston Mayor is just along for the ride on this shit.
40% of voters are Gen Z or Millenial…
Throw in Gen X and it’s the majority
I wish the DNC started treated them as the main chunk of Dem voters and not a bunch of spoiled children for wanting politicians that represent them instead of their grandparents
It should be comically easy to beat trump, but people just don’t like elderly neoliberals, because of their policies, actions, and often lack of actions.
Gen X does not vote with Gen Z and millennials. They tend to vote alongside the boomers. Therefore, we get Biden.
That is completely unbelievable and I would be very surprised to see a source instead of just an opinion that Genx are Biend supporters with boomers.
Hell, boomers don’t even vote for Biden, most of them go trump.
The Democratic party’s main base has always been the youth, but the party fucking hates them because their more liberal than someone 60 years older.
If the party embraced them, we’d never have another Republican president.
I looked at that article and it doesn’t seem at all related to your claim…
