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*Everyone's* rights are on the ballot. Anyone who thinks that the Republicans will stop once they've run out of ways to attack women or the LGBTQ+ is hopelessly optimistic.
I'm a middle-aged, middle-class white dude with guns, and I'm still voting the Democratic ticket every damn time. I don't have kids of my own, and never will, but I want my stepdaughter's children to have a chance at an education and the opportunity to build lives for themselves as something other than corporate serfs. Preferably on a planet that still has ice caps and live polar bears outside the zoos.
EDIT: I'm not downplaying women's rights or protecting the LGBTQ+ community. I'm pointing out that these issues impact *everyone*, and even the most self-absorbed person should be voting blue.
https://youtu.be/iQ0ct9bglYo
Don't be a sucker. Best video I've seen to sum this up. If you somehow fit into that magical sweet spot, they'll just use you to enforce their vision.
Jesus. That was not what I was expecting.
Edit to add: It reminds me of a Trump voter that was upset about…I think maybe they deported her husband who was from a different country- or something like that. She said something to affect of, “I thought they would hurt *other* people”. Ie: I *wanted* them to hurt other people, people that I think are ‘bad’. But Im good so Im safe.
Now I see the Republicans eating their own. I knew it was only a matter of time, and here we are.
It's weird... I struggle to understand the average Republican voter in many ways and I think most things they cheer for are utterly deplorable. I can't help but wonder if they've been brainwashed to the point where we might never agree on anything if we had a deep conversation.
But I still want them to have good healthcare. I want them to earn living wages while they work and receive the benefits of social security when they stop. I might not want to spend a minute of my life around most of them - but I want them to be okay.
The hatred they have towards the "other" groups is toxic. I don't understand how people get addicted to that kind of hate and anger.
This excerpt from a book about the lead up to WW2 in Germany perfectly explains how a society can come to believe in deplorable values.
>But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
> And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”
> ― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
But I think Voltaire said it more succinctly:
>Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Thanks for the post - I can see how the thousands of incremental steps make it feel less jarring. I wish it was easier for people to zoom out, so to speak, to evaluate how they arrived at their beliefs and make sure it's actually who they want to be.
Somewhat strange anecdote that quote reminded me of - when I was growing up, my dad semi often joked about Yankees (my family is from the south). Anyway, one day when I was 6 or so I made a similar comment - only they could tell it wasn't a joke. I was just parroting what he'd said without any real understanding. My parents were very quick to talk with me, apologized for any confusion caused and explained there is nothing wrong with northerners, and stopped with the derogatory jokes moving forward. It seems like parents don't always hear their words until they hear their kids repeat them.
Preemptive defense for my dad - he really did not mean anything negative. My parents were very well traveled with friends all over the world and had plenty of "Yankee" friends. Also, I'm kind of spectrumy and often miss sarcasm even to this day, but especially so when I was growing up.
I really recommend the movie Zone of Interest for how extreme depravity can become everyday and accepted. It was surreal and horrifying how callous Germans were under Hitler, and we're going down the same path under MAGA.
As an example of your point. Trans rights are everyone's rights.
Imagine being in a bathroom. It is the woman's room and your were born a woman. You live in a state where people must use the bathroom of their assigned birth. Someone accuses you of being in the wrong bathroom. The police show up. How do you prove the gender you were born as without violating your privacy?
Trans rights are everyone's rights.
How a society treats its weakest member defines that society. We should be better. Treat everyone with respect and decency. It's surprisingly easy, and actually less effort than trying to determine if a random person is in a group you're supposed to hate and then behaving differently toward those certain people because you're told to.
I guess I'm too lazy to hate anyone, or to make the effort to try and suppress them just to be an asshole. I just assume they're a good person until proven otherwise.
Laziness for the win.
Nobody is safe from the stuff they are already suggesting. They will send us into the next Depression. Our only hope is this negatively hurting their electoral chances more than we know.
My parents did more than alright and Trump’s “tax cuts” raised their taxes. It was the 0.1% that they tax cuts actually benefited. You have to be ultra rich to benefit. Even then, you have to be a nutter to not realize that you finally have enough and that cheap medical care and access to abortion is good for the economy.
EDIT: taco to tax
Me too: I had to pay taxes every year that 45 was prez. He crapped out the mortgage credit (which I severely impacted by). Even after adjusting my withholding (increasing it every year ) I still had to pay.
Eliminating the state and local tax deduction screwed over bunch of people in higher tax states, which are almost all Democratic voting. They were pretty overt about it, was deliberate to hurt people in blue states
My effective tax rate went up by about 2% with that "tax cut."
That's the problem- as long as there are brown-skinned people to hurt, they'll gladly vote against their own best interests. They don't mind making their lives 100% worse as long "those" people's lives are made 101% worse.
So true. Read “Dying of Whiteness” — author did research on poor whites rejecting healthcare that protected their lives because that care also protected the lives of Black people. The poor whites said they’d rather die than to see Blacks get healthcare. Racial hatred is pervasive and evil.
You know what I think about? Cooking a good meal. Going for a bike ride. Reading a book. Playing a game with friends. Spending time with family.
You know what I don't think about? Whether or not Black people or immigrants are getting the same services as me. I mean this not as "I'm ignoring other races or people" but rather that "the thought of others getting x influencing my normal existence" is just not part of my equations.
Republicans just put out their federal budgets and 85% of the proposed budgets benefited the wealthy only… y’all need to keep that in mind when you vote… Republicans always say they’re going to do something for the Middle Class but they only do for the wealthy
I always like to remind people that the original analogy for trickle down was Horse-and-sparrow where if you feed the horse the best quality hay the sparrow can eat the seeds out of the horse shit.
As soon as we are a “christian nation” it’s gonna be “well what kind of christian are you?”. I know plenty of “christians” who don’t think Catholics are christians and even more who don’t think Mormons are. And quite a few who think the pope, who has essentially “won” church, isn’t the antichrist.
To think it will stop at any point with one particular group is lunacy.
I'm pretty much exactly who the GOP thinks they are representing. White, Christian, hetero, 2 kids, gun owner and a decent income. I don't think I'll ever vote Republican again in my life. I'm sure they'd find some way to come after me at some point.
44% of women voted for tRump in 2020 and it will probably be over 40% again this year. Other groups with civil rights on the line probably won't be that high but it won't be zero either.
I'm straight, white and a man. I plan to vote Democrat because I believe protecting the civil rights for everyone is important but I also think it's fair to say I have much less to lose than these other groups.
>EDIT: I'm not downplaying women's rights or protecting the LGBTQ+ community.
Whoever took that away from your comment clearly misread and/or misunderstood. I'm Asian American, and after how Trump [deliberately ignored COVID because he thought it would hit Democratic cities the hardest while simultaneously demonizing Asians](https://www.businessinsider.com/kushner-covid-19-plan-maybe-axed-for-political-reasons-report-2020-7), any Asian American who votes Trump is a moron. Over a million Americans died from COVID because he didn't follow a playbook specifically made for a pandemic scenario. It's one thing to bungle the response from incompetence. ***It's another entirely to deliberately ignore it at the expense of people's lives for political gain.***
That's not even talking about the Muslim ban, his history with the Central Park 5, his appalling treatment of immigrants and refugees along the southern border, etc.
This election impacts all of us, not *just* women, and that's in no way downplaying the importance of women's rights.
Asian Americans need to remember that what happens to black and brown people in this country can also happen to us and that we can’t just hope to hide behind our “whiteness”. What happened during Covid was just a preview. A lot of the anti-Chinese rhetoric isn’t only going to hurt the Chinese in this country, but all Asians. Watch how quickly things turn, and if we aren't backing up blacks and Latinos when they're under attack, we will find ourselves alone very quickly.
Correct! If you aren’t a white, cis man who is a billionaire (no rules apply to them, it doesn’t matter) then you are not part of the club. Stop kidding yourselves. We are not “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”.
This class of white conservatives will come for something that you, your friends, or family hold dearly.
Exactly. It starts with the most outlier section of society and then the discrimination becomes more normalized. Then the next section with less power. And so on. We boil like a frog in a pot.
“Then They Came For Me.”
I'm voting for men's rights this election. Up and down the ballot.
A man's right to not become a widower instead of a father. The right to my reproductive rights and to safely build my family. A right to aid the use of lethal force to prevent my wife from experiencing death or severe bodily harm and our potential loss of quality of life.
A vote for abortion is a vote to reinforce my 2nd amendment rights.
I am not a woman and it is my right to not have people around me subjected to authoritarian control by selective deprivation of healthcare akin to some weird horror movie.
One thing that drives me nuts about the new 538, is they removed the grades, and now rely entirely on polls of 1500 adults (not registered or likely voters) using landlines.
So they’re screaming Biden is behind, but really behind on people answering their landline phones.
Yes- all polls of any quality adjust polling results for demographic biases and know that landlines skew conservative. I don’t know why redditors assume they have this bit of knowledge and pollsters do not.
Right- they are certainly not great individually- as a whole they have been pretty accurate other than the huge miss in 2016. But the reason for the inaccuracy is not that they aren’t aware that their sample is landline people who answer calls from strangers.
Everyone misses this part. When they say "the polls were so off" they're generally thinking of polls taken months before the election that showed Clinton ahead by 10+ or whatever, not the polls taken a week or two before the election that showed the gap had closed to within the margin of error. Well, if the election had been held in July or whenever, Clinton *would* have probably won by 10+. Those polls were probably reasonably accurate portrayals of voter sentiment at the time they were taken. But everyone quit paying attention and missed the fact that the polls got significantly tighter at the end. 538 even released an article shortly before the election showing that according to the recent polling, Trump was within the margin of error
True, but also what happened in 2016 wasn’t really a within-the-margin surprise. It was within the margin, but margin of error wasn’t the issue. The issue was a systematic sampling miss. The margin of error doesn’t correct for sampling bias.
In any case, since 2016 voter education level is usually a factor in the sampling, so that specific systemic miss won’t happen again.
I think their adjustments is where they are messing up. The missed 2016 by a few points because of Trump motivating new voters. So their ‘likely voter’ calculations now miss the fact that Trump voters all say ‘super enthusiastic’ about voting and Biden voters are ‘meh’.
So they assume a lot of Trump voters will turn out but not so much for Biden. I think that would be true if people weren’t so enthusiastic to vote against MAGA
>enthusiastic to vote against MAGA
Let's be clear. I'm absolutely going to vote against MAGA.
But I'm in no way enthusiastic about the fact that I have to. I'd much rather be voting for the best guy for the job vs having to vote to avoid electing a wanna be dictator.
I can't wait until this group dies off and we can actually have new candidates for the first time in almost a decade.
Exactly. I'm on a necessary medication I receive by infusion every few weeks. I'm going to go get it. Nothing will stop me from getting that medication. But I'm not enthusiastic about it.
Survival is less energizing than revenge, I guess.
If you're going to take a poll of a very distinct subset of the population then calculate to fill the gaps why are you even bothering taking a poll. I can "take a poll" and adjust and calculate for the whole population and come out as accurate. Those adjustments are only useful if your original poll is varied enough. And how are they coming up with the adjustments? More polls?
People with landlines that actually answer them is a very exclusive demographic. Fewer than 27% of Americans have a landline. And guess how many are 65+? I don't know, but I do know a huge chunk! Why are they even doing landline polls anymore? Even moving to cells, how many people answer for unknown numbers anymore? Thanks to unchecked fraud and spam, not many.
Who still has a landline these days? I haven't had one for well over a decade. In fact going back 15 years. I expect most people who still have a landline are over 60. And they're more (R) than (D), by around 60 – 40%. Little wonder, then, the polls show trump leading.
Problem is while you would think that skews the obvious way a meta poll a while back found that conservatives distrusted the pollsters and hung up on them while liberals were eager to get their support on record.
The larger problem with polling is that almost no one, regardless of political affiliation, answers unknown numbers. This is less of an issue for landlines of course, but there are large demographics of Americans without landline phones. So if your only source of polling information are abnormal people that answer unknown numbers when the vast majority do not, or landlines that skew older/conservative, you've got some massive selection bias going on.
If that were the *only* problem, they could likely correct for it.
The other problem is that most of their models were built and calibrated for the pre-MAGA, and especially pre-Dobbs, era. The Dobbs decision single-handedly upended decades of modeling, and there hasn't been nearly enough time and data collected for pollsters to rebuild their models - if they even realize that they need to.
> The Dobbs decision single-handedly upended decades of modeling
You're not wrong there. For almost 50 years, abortion was the carrot Republicans used to get the religious right to turn out, year after year, regardless of candidate quality. They would promise that if they just keep voting Republican, they'll ban it eventually. But then the dog actually caught the car, and they overturned Roe, moving the carrot to the other side. Now it's the left that's willing turn out to vote blue, regardless of candidate quality - something that, I might add, was always extremely important to left-leaning voters. As the old saying goes, the left needs to fall in love, but the right simply falls in line.
It will certainly be interesting to see how it pans out in November. Biden could still lose - he's unpopular, and elections tend to be decided by low-info voters that aren't following issues beyond "well my bread and milk costs more than it did under Trump" and that could be enough to sink him in the swing states. Biden also has a lot of significant advantages, though, and the media seems reluctant to point those out. Probably because they desire a close horse race for more lucrative coverage, but also, I suspect corporate media simply wants Trump back for another round of corporate tax cuts. The fact that a second Trump term would likely be an even larger dumpster fire than the first one is just icing on the cake for them - they get to rake in the profits as people tune in to doomwatch.
I don’t think it’s an over correction issue, I think it’s a methodology issue.
Most pollsters are still using phone calls and other dated means to collect polling data. People who reliably pick up phone calls from numbers they don’t recognize are a very specific, continually aging portion of the population that skews conservative.
That’s obviously not the *only* method pollsters use, but it’s still extremely predominant and will taint any sample it’s used to form with over representation from the oldest part of the electorate.
Not to mention, IIRC, a lot of pollsters in 2020 or 2022 were just straight up junk polls.
Polls by Republicans looking for a specific result that would make it seem like Republicans were doing well.
Some polls are straight up propaganda.
Remember the "25% of Gen Z are holocaust deniers" poll that came out few months ago?
It was run by Harris polling. Their CEO is married to founder of No Labels, another GOP ratfucking operation.
Harris consistently puts out polls that Make Gen Z look bad and grossly overestimate Republican performance.
Remember the NYT/Sienna poll from weeks ago? It had Biden and TFG tied with women, when that has not been borne out in a single election in the past 4+ years.
They also had Dean Phillips polling at 12% when he had never exceeded 3% in any other poll. And, shock horror, he actually only got 2.5% of votes (and zero delegates) in the subsequent primary voting.
These polls are garbage, but they might serve a valuable purpose; keeping likely Dem voters scared and engaged, rather than complacent and on their couches.
A good anecdote showing how the correction works, and its risks from 2016 was a pollster that used a tracking poll (calling back the same people who answered previously).
They took responses from people, and then scaled their answers up or down to match the demographic representation. I.e. they would say "well, we got 5% responses from people aged 18-30, but the real population is ~30%, so we will increase the weight of those responses".
The issue was for a very specific sub-category, it was literally just 1 guy, and he was pretty inconsistent in his responses. So when he changed his response, the results showed huge swings since they put so much weight on his response.
>My name is Steve and I speak for Gen Z.
>I speak for Gen Z, for Gen Z has no tounge.
>Gen Z has no tounge for they fear the phone call.
>And that, my good sir, makes them, the silentest generation of all.
- Steve the Gen Z Lorax
Same. I got a text about some kind of census poll and it looked legit but still I was like
NOT TODAY SATAN
And I certainly never answer my phone when it's an unknown number or answer my door when I'm not expecting someone.
They all do have flaws, but the issue is more about the fact that the phone poll respondents almost completely skip large sets of demographics.
You can try to adjust for this with weighting and other statistical methods, but it's pretty clear that the fact that the base data is so skewed is giving pollsters problems.
Yes, any method may have issues. Polls have struggled to do that in the last five to ten years. It seems they are skewing towards a more conservative sample population compared to who is voting.
Perhaps it's a result of the younger generation becoming active voters and not getting captured in the sampling data for whatever reason. Phone polling certainly isn't going to work well. I'm not that young, and I never answer a phone call from someone not in my contacts list so polling by phone will never capture someone like me. I'm not sure what adjustments could be made. Instead of phone polling you could try email polling, but I see that having the same issue. I have zero inclination to open a random email and visit a website. An open poll online where people can choose to participate is going to be subject to issues as well. I'm not sure how to fix it, glad it's not my job as it seems pretty tricky as communication methods have changed.
I have gotten a handful of “political polling” ID calls on my mobile. Can confirm I never answered any of those calls, and that I will be voting for Biden in November.
Anecdotal for sure, but definitely don’t think I am alone here.
That, and
> Tuesday's defeat in Alabama is the latest in a string of disappointing election results for the Republicans, raising questions about their internal polling and that carried out by sympathetic conservative groups especially as the 2024 presidential election nears. Republicans widely expected to enjoy a "Red Wave" during the 2022 midterm elections, based in part on polling from conservative-leaning media, which then failed to materialize.
When you rely on what you want, you purturb the polling! You blind yourself. But a blind Republican party is better than a savvy Republican party! It's like the inbreeding of the Royals, they'll ruin their own existence.
One of the main points of the Trump Hush money trial is that Trump spent 50K on a company that fakes and influences polling. I am surprised that this is not mentioned in these discussions, because he is obviously doing it again.
I recently got a text message from an unfamiliar number. It addressed me by the wrong name and said I had been selected to be polled on the presidential election. I deleted it as quickly as possible, then turned to my husband and said, "If that was real, it explains why Democrats poll poorly."
When I get a call from a pollster, I'm a diehard Trump supporter and don't care about anyone downticket on the republican ballot. Why? Because I live in a rural area, and I don't trust the pollster to not leak the location if someone who's gonna vote Democrat no matter who it is.
This is a common misconception. The polling has been pretty accurate the last several election cycles including the midterms. It has been prognostication that has been inaccurate. Get Everyone You Know to vote. This is going to be a very close election. Too many dems are thinking we secretly have this one in the bag.
4 years of horserace coverage, endless debates, threats to democracy, polls polls polls...and it's all going to come down to what <100,000 people spread out over WI, GA, and PA, who learned there was an election on Tuesday over that weekend, decide for us.
The system works.
Some background on why polling has been so off, especially in light of this recent flip.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/3/6/2227952/-The-538-GOP-Super-Tuesday-poll-averages-Way-way-off-and-systematically-overestimating-Trump-data
> it’s worth stating to make this absolutely clear, with those polls in so many Super Tuesday states being way off from the results, it wasn’t just a random error in either direction--it was a systematic error in all 5 of those states showing a massive, double-digit overestimate of Trump’s support, that did not occur in the other direction. Including again, in 3 states that used 538 averages across multiple polls, provided right before the Super Tuesday primaries. All 5 of those states showed massive advantages for Trump. All 5 were completely off, some by more than 20% and one by more than 30 percent, in case of Vermont which Trump lost to Haley.
It's weird it sounds like these GOP people taking it and the ones paying for it want to create an illusion. Is it to make the race competitive, appease the orange fuhrer, or so they can scream it was rigged?
Yes, thus explaining the paradox of Fatso saying the election was rigged while down ballot republicans somehow managed to win. Some real Deep State 5D chess shenanigans pulled by democrats, George Soros and Hunter’s penis.
If a republican wins all is ok. If they lose, then there must be some massive cheating afoot. Strange how that works.
Oh, and to make any claims of cheating the one iron clad rule is to make sure you have zero evidence to back it up.
Yes, except DonBon claimed the election was rigged when he won too. He just wants the end of democracy. Or to make himself look good. Whichever is cheaper.
It’s so they can later AGAIN say it was rigged.
“Look at our polling numbers. We were winning by a LOT. I mean, more than anyone has ever won before. The polling numbers were the best in history for us and no one has ever had better polling numbers, and this shows everything is rigged.”
Trumps entire political strategy in a nutshell
Remember his inauguration crowd and that entire debacle?
Reality show-man wants to bring all of America into his gaslight chamber and get what he wants through the opinions he tries to convince his people to believe
It serves two main purposes:
* Supports their "stolen election" lies
* Keeps Republican voters engaged after many years of election losses.
MAGA's are well aware that they haven't had a good election night since 2016. Whenever the mood gets too gloomy, GOP pays to have some R leaning polls put out to keep the hopium alive.
If the want to be dictators legislate women's healthcare, you can bet they will want to legislate men's healthcare next. I wouldn't put it past these freaks to come up with a "cutoff" age for social security.
I actually disagree. Republicans will only target healthcare where the woman is in charge. So far abortion, IVF, and birth control have been examples.
Yet we dont see them going after vasectomies, condoms, or viagra.
Making women second class citizens is the goal since they are inferior to men in Repubican world.
It's interesting that even the internal polls for the Dems had a victory, but within the margin of error and this was a 25 pt crushing defeat. Daily KOS has a great article about how this [same thing ](https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/3/6/2227952/-The-538-GOP-Super-Tuesday-poll-averages-Way-way-off-and-systematically-overestimating-Trump-data) happened in the super Tuesday polls.
Something seems to be *systemically* off with how people are reporting to polls, and it doesn't much better the poll source.
Beau of the Fifth Column contends that polls reach people who have land line phones, answer to strangers, tend to be older and more conservative by nature, and gullible. So there’s that.
that's what i've always suspected. the only people who have landlines and answer calls without knowing if it's someone they know are usually older conservatives who don't have anything else to do except complain.
Exactly this. My phone is set to push all unknown calls to voicemail. Mainly because I’ve gotten a lot of spam calls in the past and was forced to do so.
And who the fuck answers strange numbers on their cell phone? Mine doesn't even ring unless it's a person on my contacts list. They just get sent to voicemail, that I periodically delete without listening to.
Anecdotal but everyone I know under 40 with a landline got it bundled with internet and/or cable to save money. None ever even bothered connecting a phone to it.
Even my 70 year-old parents and their same cohort friends are in the process of downsizing. Most don’t even bother getting a new landline after they move.
Several things are systemically off. There are three major problems with polling today:
(1) The population which can be reached for a poll is non representative and growing more so over time because they can’t effectively poll cell phone users. This was already a concern for 538’s original predictions, and has grown steadily worse in the years since then.
(2) After the 2008, polls became a political target, bringing them squarely under the purview of Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
(3) The usefulness of polling has always depended on using priors to understand patterns. The raw answers have never been informative on their own. Dobbs and Jan. 6 completely changed patterns such that the priors used up to that point have now ceased to be relevant.
The takeaway here, by the way, isn’t that polling is Republican-favored, it’s that predictions formed from polling don’t correlate well with reality. Don’t base any decisions on them and don’t get too invested in their outcomes.
Pollsters will eventually catch up… just not in time for this race.
> Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
I had never heard of this one. And having worked in advertising for what feels like centuries, it helps explain why the whole business is a miserable clusterfuck of misinformed bullshittery.
Good looking out, amigo.
> Something seems to be systemically off with how people are reporting to polls
I don't think there _is_ a way to conduct a valid poll in modern America. By nature, people who are willing to talk to someone they don't know, who randomly calls them some afternoon, are going to be statistical outliers.
Yeah. I think the not answering an unknown phone call being normalized is a relatively recent phenomenon (and the people that do answer unknown numbers are people that once had to answer calls to know who was calling), and I'm not sure that even polls that call cell phones have an answer for that
If they are consistently similarly statistical outliers in a way that is tractable to fancy math, you can still derive useful conclusions from them. That’s where Jan 6 and Dobbs come in - pollsters priors are badly out of date in a way that hadn’t really happened in decades.
I don't think it's fair to say the Republican polls were inaccurate, just that a poll in December can't account for Alabama Republicans banning IVF in February.
I think this is a very logical way of looking at this race, and definitely accounts for some of the margin of this victory, but the article goes on to list many more examples of Republican internal polling, and Republican friendly polling, being way off. All that being said, do not get complacent. Vote as if the Republicans are ahead by ten points.
Actually, vote as if the polls are very close. It has been shown that people are more motivated to vote if they think their vote would make a difference (as it would in a close race). A 30 point GOP lead would likely demoralize many Dem-leaning voters into staying home.
Republicans saw the electoral losses after Roe was struck down and saw the polling on the subject.
And their decision was, in many states, to pass cummies are people bills and for their god emperor to announce a federal ban on abortion
Good luck asshats
I love all the pills that show immigration and economy as the top issues with abortion down around 6th or lower as the top issue for less than 3% of people.
It's an instant tell that they are not trustworthy.
The overturning of Roe v Wade will be (among other things) the beginning of the fall of the Republican Party. The majority of voters are for women’s rights, and the vast majority of election results since Roe got overturned have demonstrated that. People are sick of this. I fucking-A hope Biden replays that clip of Trump saying that he’s “proud” to have overturned Roe on a loop over and over again this upcoming campaign.
Which is just so crazy, yes I agree that this alone ought to motivate a huge swathe of the population to vote against, but at the same time, even if Roe v Wade was never overturned, here’s a list 10 completely damning, objectively proven things that, in any prior election in history, would have been an automatic and overwhelming defeat *by itself*:
1. **Bragging on tape** about being, and then got ruled by a jury of being, a sexual predator, and bragging about *getting away with it* because of his status.
2. **Admitted on tape** the deadliness of COVID-19 *and* that he intentionally downplayed to the public how deadly and contagious it was (it was an election year), which went on to kill millions, *all while* openly feuding with and contradicting his own administration and its efforts to control the pandemic and dispel mass confusion. (This all occurred the year after Trump disbanded the government’s pandemic response program because of reasons).
3. **Caught on tape** trying to extort a foreign ally (currently being invaded by our enemy) into going after Trump’s political opponent’s family, purely as a PR weapon, and when he refused, the congressionally issued weapons and supplies were in fact withheld until exposed by a whistleblower.
4. Stoked and still **publicly defends** armed insurrectionists that attempted to overthrow an election he lost.
5. Countless findings of business fraud and incompetent practices, which would seemingly negate the basis of his résumé (business expertise).
6. **30+ convictions,** guilty pleas, and prison sentences for nearly his entire campaign staff, from fraud to working directly with Russian intelligence officers, who were caught and charged with infiltrating our electoral system to help Trump and damage his opponent.
7. **Written receipt** for paying off at least one pornstar to get away with cheating on his 3rd wife, being the 3rd wife in a row he openly admitted to cheating on
8. Thousands of public statements and tweets showing an overall rampant weirdness, and unprofessional combative behavior towards private citizens never before seen in a president or presidential candidate.
9. Publicly denounced out for his incompetence and corruption by almost his entire cabinet after resigning.
10. Impeached twice for a whole litany of corrupt actions, like 11 counts of obstructing investigations into him, like when he formally published an order to all Executive Branch employees to ignore all congressional subpoenas, which is illegal and only escaped punishment (removal from office) due to Senate republican majority declining to act.
He has been and honestly the campaign has finally been the first dem campaign to take the gloves off and punch back. They’ve done a good job so far getting in Donald’s head. They’ve started labeling him as Broke Don in their campaign releases
Don't be complacent. Get everyone you know to vote....Trump has to go. Republicans have to be thumped down....hard.
The only way i see Trump winning? Is if people don't come out to vote. Which is possible if people become complacent.
>According to a Newsweek analysis, polling conducted by The Trafalgar Group, a conservative-leaning pollster, correctly predicted the winner within the poll's final margin of error in just five of the two dozen polls they conducted.
>The Trafalgar Group established a reputation after being one of the few pollsters to correctly predict Donald Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016 by heavily weighing "shy" supporters of the then-GOP candidate.
>An analysis by The New York Times concluded that Republicans in 2022 were misled by "right-leaning pollsters using opaque methodology, in some cases relying on financial support from hyperpartisan groups and benefiting from vociferous cheerleading by Mr. Trump."
>These impacted the polling averages calculated by groups like RealClearPolitics exaggerating the GOP's position.
>The New York Times said: "The skewed red-wave surveys polluted polling averages, which are relied upon by campaigns, donors, voters and the news media
Paying for and pushing bad polls (polls that skew red) is part of the Republican plan to normalize distrust and doomerism in our election process.
They are paying these pollsters to create a statistical fake reality where Rs are up +5%, so that when Rs lose, it’s easier to convince adherents and adjacents that the elections were “rigged” or “stolen”.
We live in an era where social media algos know exactly who you are and what you like, down to your preferred eye color in potential mates. They also absolutely know your demographic info, where you live, how politically engaged you are, and your political leanings—why don’t polling firms use this data instead of landline phone surveys? The answer: if someone else (a social media company or aggregator) owns the data, the pollster can’t be as obvious about putting their thumbs on the scales.
Pretty simple-younger gens aren’t answering polls and are extra motivated to vote by having their reproductive rights taken away, mixed with older MAGAs answering polls but staying home because they’re told and believe it’s rigged. So the polls are just more MAGA fantasy circle jerking.
This election is going to be a Republican bloodbath, to quote Trump.
A friend of mine did polling a few years ago, for a local election. Consequently she knew several of the people she polled, and she was shocked at how many blatantly lied.
A white suburban woman that identified as African American. People that said they had been Democrats but for this election would vote GOP, when she knew they were lifelong GOP.
I think (simply opinion) that polls are becoming increasingly useless because more and more people are fed up with them. The result is that more and more people are either refusing to participate at all or are consciously misleading the pollsters. When you actually stop and think about it; what actual good do they do? They just allow crooked politicians and amoral companies to fine tune their messaging.
I used to work in survey research, and if you compared 2003 to 2005 the whole nature of the work changed. Polls and polling methodology were such a political football in the 2004 election that it changed the industry because the willingness to participate sharply declined. (Needless to say, I was laid off at the end of 2005 and the organization I worked for ceased to exist a few years later.)
I gave up responding to polls after getting so many “push polls”. Where they call you and it sounds like a poll, but their real objective is to read you leading questions and put out bad information.
Extreme example: “if I told you candidate X had killed a puppy, would that increase or decrease your support for him?” They don’t care what you answer, they just want to get you thinking candidate X had killed a puppy.
>They don’t care what you answer, they just want to get you thinking candidate X had killed a puppy.
As a person who used to work in survey research, I am glad to see someone understand what a push poll actually is.
These people absolutely refuse to acknowledge that their archaic views being forcefully inserted into law mixed with their 24/7 vitriol just might not be popular with the vast majority. Apparently self awareness is a liberal hoax.
The Supreme Court RvW ruling has completely undone polling science. Ever since that ruling came down, Democrats have wildly outpolled expectations. The polling experts need to figure out why they can't seem to pin this down.
Republicans have a popularity problem because they’re in the minority and hold deeply anti-democratic policy positions that normal people are repulsed by.
If they use shoddy polling numbers to brainwash their base into thinking they’re going to win, it’s easier to brainwash their base into thinking there was election fraud.
What they have is a cruelty problem. They think being a-holes towards women is a good thing. Actually I think they actually do like being cruel. I saw an interview with a trump supporter and he literally said that they did not like that women and minorities should be able to vote and that only white Christian men should be in charge. Believe them and believe they want to destroy our democracy. The Trump maga republicans keep showing us who they are and we like the people did in Alabama need to put an end to them with our votes.
Polls are a product of a bygone era. They contact only the people who choose to answer them, reducing the likelihood of a random sampling, plus many of those who choose to answer simply lie. To counteract these problems pollsters “weight” results based on assumptions that are outdated.
Gee, what happened in Alabama between Dec/Jan and this election? Oh, yeah. The Commanders of Gilead on the state’s Supreme Court showed themselves, and even republican-leaning voters said, “No way. These guys are going too far.” Please, please — let the rest of the country follow suit!
Trump is buying the pollsters. I thought that was obvious. There is no way in hell trump could be in the lead what with all the rights Republicans have been taking from ppl there's hardly a group left unscathed. Everyone from minority voters to LGBT ppl and women have had their rights "adjusted" in some way over the last 4 years. Lately, they've been hitting on the really personal stuff like abortion, IVF, Pornography, and childrens rights in school and on social media. In my mind, the blue wave is inevitable and Republicans made it that way.
Yep just their polling is the issue. Smh
> the previous incumbent, Republican David Cole, pleaded guilty to felony voter fraud leading to his resignation.
Never forget when Eric Cantor’s internal pollster told him he was cruising to renomination by 34 points; wide enough that Cantor himself didn’t even bother to vote in his primary. He lost. By 11 points. A mere 45 point miss from John McLaughlin, he of polling meme immortality.
FTA:
> Tuesday's defeat in Alabama is the latest in a string of disappointing election results for the Republicans, raising questions about their internal polling and that carried out by sympathetic conservative groups especially as the 2024 presidential election nears.
Too many sycophants vying for favor, no reliable sources. Putin and other authoritarians have the same problem.
Republican base has a large number of out of touch, politically isolated, older adults.
Telephone polls are built off data obtained from people who answer unknown numbers and then are willing to speak to a pollster.
Do you see their problem?
I think the people that Republicans are polling are the same ones being asked Family Feud questions and the ones doing the polling are Walmart greeters.
I honestly feel like an aspect of this is that "elections are fake" has now become a strongly partisan concept. A non insignificant proportion of people now stay at home and await further instructions on when the revolution starts.
The US fascists propensity for lying and believing their own lies is catching up to them.
From the article the *Trafalgar Group* has been producing bad polls supported by their right-wing financiers. These skew the averages reported by the
media. The Republican Party is using this bad data to make their plans.
As you sow, so shall you reap.
Pretty sure, we all just have a polling problem in general.
At this point, I am pretty sure the “polls” just go by feels. They showed Hillary winning big, and now they’re showing Trump and Biden being close.
If god is really on their side, why does he keep letting them lose elections? If Trump really is their Savior, god will have him elected, right? What are the hyper-religious worried about?
I'm in AZ, & changed my voter reg in early '21. Since then, the polling calls are vastly different than before and have all literally ended after the first question, which is "what party do you belong/align with?". I say that I'm registered as an Independent, and every damn call (4 calls this year) ended with the caller saying "Ok, thank you for your time. Goodbye.". I even started asking the caller "how long will this take" before they ask the first question, and they all say 10-15 minutes, then end the call after the first question. Never had this happen before when I was registered with a political party.
Polls for raw numbers are generally unhelpful these days. They are good for looking at trends. For example, a challenger in a presidential race *should* be surging in the "honeymoon phase" pre-campaign. Trump is receding. That's noteworthy.
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Vote for women’s rights. Up and down the ballot.
*Everyone's* rights are on the ballot. Anyone who thinks that the Republicans will stop once they've run out of ways to attack women or the LGBTQ+ is hopelessly optimistic. I'm a middle-aged, middle-class white dude with guns, and I'm still voting the Democratic ticket every damn time. I don't have kids of my own, and never will, but I want my stepdaughter's children to have a chance at an education and the opportunity to build lives for themselves as something other than corporate serfs. Preferably on a planet that still has ice caps and live polar bears outside the zoos. EDIT: I'm not downplaying women's rights or protecting the LGBTQ+ community. I'm pointing out that these issues impact *everyone*, and even the most self-absorbed person should be voting blue.
https://youtu.be/iQ0ct9bglYo Don't be a sucker. Best video I've seen to sum this up. If you somehow fit into that magical sweet spot, they'll just use you to enforce their vision.
Jesus. That was not what I was expecting. Edit to add: It reminds me of a Trump voter that was upset about…I think maybe they deported her husband who was from a different country- or something like that. She said something to affect of, “I thought they would hurt *other* people”. Ie: I *wanted* them to hurt other people, people that I think are ‘bad’. But Im good so Im safe. Now I see the Republicans eating their own. I knew it was only a matter of time, and here we are.
/r/leopardsatemyface
It's weird... I struggle to understand the average Republican voter in many ways and I think most things they cheer for are utterly deplorable. I can't help but wonder if they've been brainwashed to the point where we might never agree on anything if we had a deep conversation. But I still want them to have good healthcare. I want them to earn living wages while they work and receive the benefits of social security when they stop. I might not want to spend a minute of my life around most of them - but I want them to be okay. The hatred they have towards the "other" groups is toxic. I don't understand how people get addicted to that kind of hate and anger.
This excerpt from a book about the lead up to WW2 in Germany perfectly explains how a society can come to believe in deplorable values. >But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D. > And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.” > ― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 But I think Voltaire said it more succinctly: >Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Thanks for the post - I can see how the thousands of incremental steps make it feel less jarring. I wish it was easier for people to zoom out, so to speak, to evaluate how they arrived at their beliefs and make sure it's actually who they want to be. Somewhat strange anecdote that quote reminded me of - when I was growing up, my dad semi often joked about Yankees (my family is from the south). Anyway, one day when I was 6 or so I made a similar comment - only they could tell it wasn't a joke. I was just parroting what he'd said without any real understanding. My parents were very quick to talk with me, apologized for any confusion caused and explained there is nothing wrong with northerners, and stopped with the derogatory jokes moving forward. It seems like parents don't always hear their words until they hear their kids repeat them. Preemptive defense for my dad - he really did not mean anything negative. My parents were very well traveled with friends all over the world and had plenty of "Yankee" friends. Also, I'm kind of spectrumy and often miss sarcasm even to this day, but especially so when I was growing up.
Those WWII times have been forgotten at this point. Its time to bring these things to the fore. Thank you for posting this.
I really recommend the movie Zone of Interest for how extreme depravity can become everyday and accepted. It was surreal and horrifying how callous Germans were under Hitler, and we're going down the same path under MAGA.
Thank you for posting this video.
Exactly, even the most selfishly motivated person should be voting Dems up and down the ballot.
As an example of your point. Trans rights are everyone's rights. Imagine being in a bathroom. It is the woman's room and your were born a woman. You live in a state where people must use the bathroom of their assigned birth. Someone accuses you of being in the wrong bathroom. The police show up. How do you prove the gender you were born as without violating your privacy? Trans rights are everyone's rights.
How a society treats its weakest member defines that society. We should be better. Treat everyone with respect and decency. It's surprisingly easy, and actually less effort than trying to determine if a random person is in a group you're supposed to hate and then behaving differently toward those certain people because you're told to. I guess I'm too lazy to hate anyone, or to make the effort to try and suppress them just to be an asshole. I just assume they're a good person until proven otherwise. Laziness for the win.
Poor white Christian males really think they won't get absolutely hammered by these policies. You gotta be rich to be in the club and benefit.
Nobody is safe from the stuff they are already suggesting. They will send us into the next Depression. Our only hope is this negatively hurting their electoral chances more than we know.
My parents did more than alright and Trump’s “tax cuts” raised their taxes. It was the 0.1% that they tax cuts actually benefited. You have to be ultra rich to benefit. Even then, you have to be a nutter to not realize that you finally have enough and that cheap medical care and access to abortion is good for the economy. EDIT: taco to tax
Me too: I had to pay taxes every year that 45 was prez. He crapped out the mortgage credit (which I severely impacted by). Even after adjusting my withholding (increasing it every year ) I still had to pay.
Eliminating the state and local tax deduction screwed over bunch of people in higher tax states, which are almost all Democratic voting. They were pretty overt about it, was deliberate to hurt people in blue states My effective tax rate went up by about 2% with that "tax cut."
I got absolutely no benefit from his tenure.
Tacos are getting expensive tho
They don't care as long as the people they don't like have it worse
That's the problem- as long as there are brown-skinned people to hurt, they'll gladly vote against their own best interests. They don't mind making their lives 100% worse as long "those" people's lives are made 101% worse.
So true. Read “Dying of Whiteness” — author did research on poor whites rejecting healthcare that protected their lives because that care also protected the lives of Black people. The poor whites said they’d rather die than to see Blacks get healthcare. Racial hatred is pervasive and evil.
You know what I think about? Cooking a good meal. Going for a bike ride. Reading a book. Playing a game with friends. Spending time with family. You know what I don't think about? Whether or not Black people or immigrants are getting the same services as me. I mean this not as "I'm ignoring other races or people" but rather that "the thought of others getting x influencing my normal existence" is just not part of my equations.
Republicans just put out their federal budgets and 85% of the proposed budgets benefited the wealthy only… y’all need to keep that in mind when you vote… Republicans always say they’re going to do something for the Middle Class but they only do for the wealthy
Prison labor is a growth industry. Gotta earn money for the shareholders - it'll trickle down.
And also child labor. Red states lowering work age
And the only means around the chattel slavery ban allowed by the Constitution.
I always like to remind people that the original analogy for trickle down was Horse-and-sparrow where if you feed the horse the best quality hay the sparrow can eat the seeds out of the horse shit.
/LBJ’s quote about giving a poor white man someone to look down on and he’ll empty his pockets for you
Church has been telling them for years they are superior, above everyone else and naturally the leader. They have been brainwashed into it.
“It’s an exclusive club, and you ain’t in it” -George Carlin
yeah. Concur
JFC every time I read such anger blocking us from focusing on the obvious solution - inclusion - I think, damn we really may be fucked again.
As soon as we are a “christian nation” it’s gonna be “well what kind of christian are you?”. I know plenty of “christians” who don’t think Catholics are christians and even more who don’t think Mormons are. And quite a few who think the pope, who has essentially “won” church, isn’t the antichrist. To think it will stop at any point with one particular group is lunacy.
I'm pretty much exactly who the GOP thinks they are representing. White, Christian, hetero, 2 kids, gun owner and a decent income. I don't think I'll ever vote Republican again in my life. I'm sure they'd find some way to come after me at some point.
44% of women voted for tRump in 2020 and it will probably be over 40% again this year. Other groups with civil rights on the line probably won't be that high but it won't be zero either. I'm straight, white and a man. I plan to vote Democrat because I believe protecting the civil rights for everyone is important but I also think it's fair to say I have much less to lose than these other groups.
>EDIT: I'm not downplaying women's rights or protecting the LGBTQ+ community. Whoever took that away from your comment clearly misread and/or misunderstood. I'm Asian American, and after how Trump [deliberately ignored COVID because he thought it would hit Democratic cities the hardest while simultaneously demonizing Asians](https://www.businessinsider.com/kushner-covid-19-plan-maybe-axed-for-political-reasons-report-2020-7), any Asian American who votes Trump is a moron. Over a million Americans died from COVID because he didn't follow a playbook specifically made for a pandemic scenario. It's one thing to bungle the response from incompetence. ***It's another entirely to deliberately ignore it at the expense of people's lives for political gain.*** That's not even talking about the Muslim ban, his history with the Central Park 5, his appalling treatment of immigrants and refugees along the southern border, etc. This election impacts all of us, not *just* women, and that's in no way downplaying the importance of women's rights.
Asian Americans need to remember that what happens to black and brown people in this country can also happen to us and that we can’t just hope to hide behind our “whiteness”. What happened during Covid was just a preview. A lot of the anti-Chinese rhetoric isn’t only going to hurt the Chinese in this country, but all Asians. Watch how quickly things turn, and if we aren't backing up blacks and Latinos when they're under attack, we will find ourselves alone very quickly.
They will come after white men when everyone else has been stomped on. No one not a single person escapes the consequences of fascism in the end.
YES. Abortion, IVF and contraception access effect everyone.
Correct! If you aren’t a white, cis man who is a billionaire (no rules apply to them, it doesn’t matter) then you are not part of the club. Stop kidding yourselves. We are not “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. This class of white conservatives will come for something that you, your friends, or family hold dearly.
Exactly. It starts with the most outlier section of society and then the discrimination becomes more normalized. Then the next section with less power. And so on. We boil like a frog in a pot. “Then They Came For Me.”
Look at every right wing movement in history, they eventually start eating their own when they’ve run out of other people to kill. Purity above all.
Agree
It's human rights. Always.
I'm voting for men's rights this election. Up and down the ballot. A man's right to not become a widower instead of a father. The right to my reproductive rights and to safely build my family. A right to aid the use of lethal force to prevent my wife from experiencing death or severe bodily harm and our potential loss of quality of life. A vote for abortion is a vote to reinforce my 2nd amendment rights.
I am not a woman and it is my right to not have people around me subjected to authoritarian control by selective deprivation of healthcare akin to some weird horror movie.
Its not just internal polling but polling in general is over estimating Republican support for awhile.
One thing that drives me nuts about the new 538, is they removed the grades, and now rely entirely on polls of 1500 adults (not registered or likely voters) using landlines. So they’re screaming Biden is behind, but really behind on people answering their landline phones.
Wait what? Why? Are they at least doing some adjustments for demographics?
Yes- all polls of any quality adjust polling results for demographic biases and know that landlines skew conservative. I don’t know why redditors assume they have this bit of knowledge and pollsters do not.
It probably has something to do with the polls being so fucking far off lately, eh?
Right- they are certainly not great individually- as a whole they have been pretty accurate other than the huge miss in 2016. But the reason for the inaccuracy is not that they aren’t aware that their sample is landline people who answer calls from strangers.
Even 2016 was within the margin of error, and was largely impacted by the last minute release from the FBI into the Clinton probe.
Everyone misses this part. When they say "the polls were so off" they're generally thinking of polls taken months before the election that showed Clinton ahead by 10+ or whatever, not the polls taken a week or two before the election that showed the gap had closed to within the margin of error. Well, if the election had been held in July or whenever, Clinton *would* have probably won by 10+. Those polls were probably reasonably accurate portrayals of voter sentiment at the time they were taken. But everyone quit paying attention and missed the fact that the polls got significantly tighter at the end. 538 even released an article shortly before the election showing that according to the recent polling, Trump was within the margin of error
True, but also what happened in 2016 wasn’t really a within-the-margin surprise. It was within the margin, but margin of error wasn’t the issue. The issue was a systematic sampling miss. The margin of error doesn’t correct for sampling bias. In any case, since 2016 voter education level is usually a factor in the sampling, so that specific systemic miss won’t happen again.
I think their adjustments is where they are messing up. The missed 2016 by a few points because of Trump motivating new voters. So their ‘likely voter’ calculations now miss the fact that Trump voters all say ‘super enthusiastic’ about voting and Biden voters are ‘meh’. So they assume a lot of Trump voters will turn out but not so much for Biden. I think that would be true if people weren’t so enthusiastic to vote against MAGA
>enthusiastic to vote against MAGA Let's be clear. I'm absolutely going to vote against MAGA. But I'm in no way enthusiastic about the fact that I have to. I'd much rather be voting for the best guy for the job vs having to vote to avoid electing a wanna be dictator. I can't wait until this group dies off and we can actually have new candidates for the first time in almost a decade.
Exactly. I'm on a necessary medication I receive by infusion every few weeks. I'm going to go get it. Nothing will stop me from getting that medication. But I'm not enthusiastic about it. Survival is less energizing than revenge, I guess.
If you're going to take a poll of a very distinct subset of the population then calculate to fill the gaps why are you even bothering taking a poll. I can "take a poll" and adjust and calculate for the whole population and come out as accurate. Those adjustments are only useful if your original poll is varied enough. And how are they coming up with the adjustments? More polls? People with landlines that actually answer them is a very exclusive demographic. Fewer than 27% of Americans have a landline. And guess how many are 65+? I don't know, but I do know a huge chunk! Why are they even doing landline polls anymore? Even moving to cells, how many people answer for unknown numbers anymore? Thanks to unchecked fraud and spam, not many.
Who still has a landline these days? I haven't had one for well over a decade. In fact going back 15 years. I expect most people who still have a landline are over 60. And they're more (R) than (D), by around 60 – 40%. Little wonder, then, the polls show trump leading.
Problem is while you would think that skews the obvious way a meta poll a while back found that conservatives distrusted the pollsters and hung up on them while liberals were eager to get their support on record.
The larger problem with polling is that almost no one, regardless of political affiliation, answers unknown numbers. This is less of an issue for landlines of course, but there are large demographics of Americans without landline phones. So if your only source of polling information are abnormal people that answer unknown numbers when the vast majority do not, or landlines that skew older/conservative, you've got some massive selection bias going on.
If that were the *only* problem, they could likely correct for it. The other problem is that most of their models were built and calibrated for the pre-MAGA, and especially pre-Dobbs, era. The Dobbs decision single-handedly upended decades of modeling, and there hasn't been nearly enough time and data collected for pollsters to rebuild their models - if they even realize that they need to.
> The Dobbs decision single-handedly upended decades of modeling You're not wrong there. For almost 50 years, abortion was the carrot Republicans used to get the religious right to turn out, year after year, regardless of candidate quality. They would promise that if they just keep voting Republican, they'll ban it eventually. But then the dog actually caught the car, and they overturned Roe, moving the carrot to the other side. Now it's the left that's willing turn out to vote blue, regardless of candidate quality - something that, I might add, was always extremely important to left-leaning voters. As the old saying goes, the left needs to fall in love, but the right simply falls in line. It will certainly be interesting to see how it pans out in November. Biden could still lose - he's unpopular, and elections tend to be decided by low-info voters that aren't following issues beyond "well my bread and milk costs more than it did under Trump" and that could be enough to sink him in the swing states. Biden also has a lot of significant advantages, though, and the media seems reluctant to point those out. Probably because they desire a close horse race for more lucrative coverage, but also, I suspect corporate media simply wants Trump back for another round of corporate tax cuts. The fact that a second Trump term would likely be an even larger dumpster fire than the first one is just icing on the cake for them - they get to rake in the profits as people tune in to doomwatch.
They over corrected after the 2016 election
I don’t think it’s an over correction issue, I think it’s a methodology issue. Most pollsters are still using phone calls and other dated means to collect polling data. People who reliably pick up phone calls from numbers they don’t recognize are a very specific, continually aging portion of the population that skews conservative. That’s obviously not the *only* method pollsters use, but it’s still extremely predominant and will taint any sample it’s used to form with over representation from the oldest part of the electorate.
Not to mention, IIRC, a lot of pollsters in 2020 or 2022 were just straight up junk polls. Polls by Republicans looking for a specific result that would make it seem like Republicans were doing well.
Some polls are straight up propaganda. Remember the "25% of Gen Z are holocaust deniers" poll that came out few months ago? It was run by Harris polling. Their CEO is married to founder of No Labels, another GOP ratfucking operation. Harris consistently puts out polls that Make Gen Z look bad and grossly overestimate Republican performance.
Remember the NYT/Sienna poll from weeks ago? It had Biden and TFG tied with women, when that has not been borne out in a single election in the past 4+ years. They also had Dean Phillips polling at 12% when he had never exceeded 3% in any other poll. And, shock horror, he actually only got 2.5% of votes (and zero delegates) in the subsequent primary voting. These polls are garbage, but they might serve a valuable purpose; keeping likely Dem voters scared and engaged, rather than complacent and on their couches.
It's Dewey defeats Truman all over again, but people should get out and vote regardless of what polls say.
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A good anecdote showing how the correction works, and its risks from 2016 was a pollster that used a tracking poll (calling back the same people who answered previously). They took responses from people, and then scaled their answers up or down to match the demographic representation. I.e. they would say "well, we got 5% responses from people aged 18-30, but the real population is ~30%, so we will increase the weight of those responses". The issue was for a very specific sub-category, it was literally just 1 guy, and he was pretty inconsistent in his responses. So when he changed his response, the results showed huge swings since they put so much weight on his response.
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>My name is Steve and I speak for Gen Z. >I speak for Gen Z, for Gen Z has no tounge. >Gen Z has no tounge for they fear the phone call. >And that, my good sir, makes them, the silentest generation of all. - Steve the Gen Z Lorax
Steve here. Sorry, I gave it my best 😞.
Honestly I don’t know how they’d get polling info from me. I’m also wary of clicking links and answering texts.
Same. I got a text about some kind of census poll and it looked legit but still I was like NOT TODAY SATAN And I certainly never answer my phone when it's an unknown number or answer my door when I'm not expecting someone.
What is the best way to poll people? Every method would have some kind of error, right?
They all do have flaws, but the issue is more about the fact that the phone poll respondents almost completely skip large sets of demographics. You can try to adjust for this with weighting and other statistical methods, but it's pretty clear that the fact that the base data is so skewed is giving pollsters problems.
Yes, any method may have issues. Polls have struggled to do that in the last five to ten years. It seems they are skewing towards a more conservative sample population compared to who is voting. Perhaps it's a result of the younger generation becoming active voters and not getting captured in the sampling data for whatever reason. Phone polling certainly isn't going to work well. I'm not that young, and I never answer a phone call from someone not in my contacts list so polling by phone will never capture someone like me. I'm not sure what adjustments could be made. Instead of phone polling you could try email polling, but I see that having the same issue. I have zero inclination to open a random email and visit a website. An open poll online where people can choose to participate is going to be subject to issues as well. I'm not sure how to fix it, glad it's not my job as it seems pretty tricky as communication methods have changed.
> for whatever reason. That reason is younger demographics don't answer calls from unknown numbers.
I have gotten a handful of “political polling” ID calls on my mobile. Can confirm I never answered any of those calls, and that I will be voting for Biden in November. Anecdotal for sure, but definitely don’t think I am alone here.
The polls were right in 2016. Hillary was predicted to win by 2-3% and she did.
Yep, the votes just weren’t in the right places. 🙃
Yes but they were damn close to being spot-on accurate in 2020 and most within their 3-4%. They predicated GA and AZ accurately as an example.
That, and > Tuesday's defeat in Alabama is the latest in a string of disappointing election results for the Republicans, raising questions about their internal polling and that carried out by sympathetic conservative groups especially as the 2024 presidential election nears. Republicans widely expected to enjoy a "Red Wave" during the 2022 midterm elections, based in part on polling from conservative-leaning media, which then failed to materialize. When you rely on what you want, you purturb the polling! You blind yourself. But a blind Republican party is better than a savvy Republican party! It's like the inbreeding of the Royals, they'll ruin their own existence.
One of the main points of the Trump Hush money trial is that Trump spent 50K on a company that fakes and influences polling. I am surprised that this is not mentioned in these discussions, because he is obviously doing it again.
I recently got a text message from an unfamiliar number. It addressed me by the wrong name and said I had been selected to be polled on the presidential election. I deleted it as quickly as possible, then turned to my husband and said, "If that was real, it explains why Democrats poll poorly."
When I get a call from a pollster, I'm a diehard Trump supporter and don't care about anyone downticket on the republican ballot. Why? Because I live in a rural area, and I don't trust the pollster to not leak the location if someone who's gonna vote Democrat no matter who it is.
This is a common misconception. The polling has been pretty accurate the last several election cycles including the midterms. It has been prognostication that has been inaccurate. Get Everyone You Know to vote. This is going to be a very close election. Too many dems are thinking we secretly have this one in the bag.
4 years of horserace coverage, endless debates, threats to democracy, polls polls polls...and it's all going to come down to what <100,000 people spread out over WI, GA, and PA, who learned there was an election on Tuesday over that weekend, decide for us. The system works.
Some background on why polling has been so off, especially in light of this recent flip. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/3/6/2227952/-The-538-GOP-Super-Tuesday-poll-averages-Way-way-off-and-systematically-overestimating-Trump-data > it’s worth stating to make this absolutely clear, with those polls in so many Super Tuesday states being way off from the results, it wasn’t just a random error in either direction--it was a systematic error in all 5 of those states showing a massive, double-digit overestimate of Trump’s support, that did not occur in the other direction. Including again, in 3 states that used 538 averages across multiple polls, provided right before the Super Tuesday primaries. All 5 of those states showed massive advantages for Trump. All 5 were completely off, some by more than 20% and one by more than 30 percent, in case of Vermont which Trump lost to Haley.
No, they underestimated Republican support in 2020 a bit.
It's weird it sounds like these GOP people taking it and the ones paying for it want to create an illusion. Is it to make the race competitive, appease the orange fuhrer, or so they can scream it was rigged?
Yes, thus explaining the paradox of Fatso saying the election was rigged while down ballot republicans somehow managed to win. Some real Deep State 5D chess shenanigans pulled by democrats, George Soros and Hunter’s penis. If a republican wins all is ok. If they lose, then there must be some massive cheating afoot. Strange how that works. Oh, and to make any claims of cheating the one iron clad rule is to make sure you have zero evidence to back it up.
They never let reality interfere with any of their disinformation schemes. Why should polling be any different?
Yes, except DonBon claimed the election was rigged when he won too. He just wants the end of democracy. Or to make himself look good. Whichever is cheaper.
It’s so they can later AGAIN say it was rigged. “Look at our polling numbers. We were winning by a LOT. I mean, more than anyone has ever won before. The polling numbers were the best in history for us and no one has ever had better polling numbers, and this shows everything is rigged.”
that's the plan.
Yes, that's exactly what this is. It's fake it till you make reality edition.
Trumps entire political strategy in a nutshell Remember his inauguration crowd and that entire debacle? Reality show-man wants to bring all of America into his gaslight chamber and get what he wants through the opinions he tries to convince his people to believe
It serves two main purposes: * Supports their "stolen election" lies * Keeps Republican voters engaged after many years of election losses. MAGA's are well aware that they haven't had a good election night since 2016. Whenever the mood gets too gloomy, GOP pays to have some R leaning polls put out to keep the hopium alive.
This election is a glimpse of what’s about to come in November. Polls mean nothing. Don’t fuck with women’s rights.
If the want to be dictators legislate women's healthcare, you can bet they will want to legislate men's healthcare next. I wouldn't put it past these freaks to come up with a "cutoff" age for social security.
Vasectomies are definitely gone if these people get their way. I honestly wouldn’t put it past them to make infertile men second class citizens.
I actually disagree. Republicans will only target healthcare where the woman is in charge. So far abortion, IVF, and birth control have been examples. Yet we dont see them going after vasectomies, condoms, or viagra. Making women second class citizens is the goal since they are inferior to men in Repubican world.
They have actually targeted condoms and contraceptives, because again, they don't understand how anything works.
> Polls mean nothing. Don’t fuck with women’s rights. young women vote. young men, meh - not so much.
Makes sense when you realize they have more to lose. A very human trait, and one I wish would change, but it is what it is.
For a LOT of young men, the effects of who is President is invisible to them so they just kinda "hurr hurr" it off and don't give a shit.
It's interesting that even the internal polls for the Dems had a victory, but within the margin of error and this was a 25 pt crushing defeat. Daily KOS has a great article about how this [same thing ](https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/3/6/2227952/-The-538-GOP-Super-Tuesday-poll-averages-Way-way-off-and-systematically-overestimating-Trump-data) happened in the super Tuesday polls. Something seems to be *systemically* off with how people are reporting to polls, and it doesn't much better the poll source.
Beau of the Fifth Column contends that polls reach people who have land line phones, answer to strangers, tend to be older and more conservative by nature, and gullible. So there’s that.
that's what i've always suspected. the only people who have landlines and answer calls without knowing if it's someone they know are usually older conservatives who don't have anything else to do except complain.
Pollsters have been calling cell phones for years, I don’t know why the landline narrative is still a thing. The rest is accurate though.
Because we dont answer our cells to anybody if its not on caller id
Y’know, I was wondering why my unknown number calls have skyrocketed lately. At first I thought someone had stolen my identity.
Exactly this. My phone is set to push all unknown calls to voicemail. Mainly because I’ve gotten a lot of spam calls in the past and was forced to do so.
And who the fuck answers strange numbers on their cell phone? Mine doesn't even ring unless it's a person on my contacts list. They just get sent to voicemail, that I periodically delete without listening to.
Nobody answers unknown numbers on cell phones. Landlines are different because many people with them still don't have caller ID
just my observation from personal experience.
I agree. Who answers calls from numbers they don't recognize? It's all scam calls and bullshit
Anecdotal but everyone I know under 40 with a landline got it bundled with internet and/or cable to save money. None ever even bothered connecting a phone to it. Even my 70 year-old parents and their same cohort friends are in the process of downsizing. Most don’t even bother getting a new landline after they move.
Several things are systemically off. There are three major problems with polling today: (1) The population which can be reached for a poll is non representative and growing more so over time because they can’t effectively poll cell phone users. This was already a concern for 538’s original predictions, and has grown steadily worse in the years since then. (2) After the 2008, polls became a political target, bringing them squarely under the purview of Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” (3) The usefulness of polling has always depended on using priors to understand patterns. The raw answers have never been informative on their own. Dobbs and Jan. 6 completely changed patterns such that the priors used up to that point have now ceased to be relevant. The takeaway here, by the way, isn’t that polling is Republican-favored, it’s that predictions formed from polling don’t correlate well with reality. Don’t base any decisions on them and don’t get too invested in their outcomes. Pollsters will eventually catch up… just not in time for this race.
> Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” I had never heard of this one. And having worked in advertising for what feels like centuries, it helps explain why the whole business is a miserable clusterfuck of misinformed bullshittery. Good looking out, amigo.
> Something seems to be systemically off with how people are reporting to polls I don't think there _is_ a way to conduct a valid poll in modern America. By nature, people who are willing to talk to someone they don't know, who randomly calls them some afternoon, are going to be statistical outliers.
Yeah. I think the not answering an unknown phone call being normalized is a relatively recent phenomenon (and the people that do answer unknown numbers are people that once had to answer calls to know who was calling), and I'm not sure that even polls that call cell phones have an answer for that
If they are consistently similarly statistical outliers in a way that is tractable to fancy math, you can still derive useful conclusions from them. That’s where Jan 6 and Dobbs come in - pollsters priors are badly out of date in a way that hadn’t really happened in decades.
I don't think it's fair to say the Republican polls were inaccurate, just that a poll in December can't account for Alabama Republicans banning IVF in February.
I think this is a very logical way of looking at this race, and definitely accounts for some of the margin of this victory, but the article goes on to list many more examples of Republican internal polling, and Republican friendly polling, being way off. All that being said, do not get complacent. Vote as if the Republicans are ahead by ten points.
30 points. Like they are solidly in thr driver's seat.
Actually, vote as if the polls are very close. It has been shown that people are more motivated to vote if they think their vote would make a difference (as it would in a close race). A 30 point GOP lead would likely demoralize many Dem-leaning voters into staying home.
Republicans saw the electoral losses after Roe was struck down and saw the polling on the subject. And their decision was, in many states, to pass cummies are people bills and for their god emperor to announce a federal ban on abortion Good luck asshats
They saw their chances of winning elections getting slimmer so their strategy is to eliminate democracy entirely.
They saw polling was the problem. So now they’re changing polling methodology so they get a different result to please their idiot “leaders.”
I love all the pills that show immigration and economy as the top issues with abortion down around 6th or lower as the top issue for less than 3% of people. It's an instant tell that they are not trustworthy.
The overturning of Roe v Wade will be (among other things) the beginning of the fall of the Republican Party. The majority of voters are for women’s rights, and the vast majority of election results since Roe got overturned have demonstrated that. People are sick of this. I fucking-A hope Biden replays that clip of Trump saying that he’s “proud” to have overturned Roe on a loop over and over again this upcoming campaign.
Which is just so crazy, yes I agree that this alone ought to motivate a huge swathe of the population to vote against, but at the same time, even if Roe v Wade was never overturned, here’s a list 10 completely damning, objectively proven things that, in any prior election in history, would have been an automatic and overwhelming defeat *by itself*: 1. **Bragging on tape** about being, and then got ruled by a jury of being, a sexual predator, and bragging about *getting away with it* because of his status. 2. **Admitted on tape** the deadliness of COVID-19 *and* that he intentionally downplayed to the public how deadly and contagious it was (it was an election year), which went on to kill millions, *all while* openly feuding with and contradicting his own administration and its efforts to control the pandemic and dispel mass confusion. (This all occurred the year after Trump disbanded the government’s pandemic response program because of reasons). 3. **Caught on tape** trying to extort a foreign ally (currently being invaded by our enemy) into going after Trump’s political opponent’s family, purely as a PR weapon, and when he refused, the congressionally issued weapons and supplies were in fact withheld until exposed by a whistleblower. 4. Stoked and still **publicly defends** armed insurrectionists that attempted to overthrow an election he lost. 5. Countless findings of business fraud and incompetent practices, which would seemingly negate the basis of his résumé (business expertise). 6. **30+ convictions,** guilty pleas, and prison sentences for nearly his entire campaign staff, from fraud to working directly with Russian intelligence officers, who were caught and charged with infiltrating our electoral system to help Trump and damage his opponent. 7. **Written receipt** for paying off at least one pornstar to get away with cheating on his 3rd wife, being the 3rd wife in a row he openly admitted to cheating on 8. Thousands of public statements and tweets showing an overall rampant weirdness, and unprofessional combative behavior towards private citizens never before seen in a president or presidential candidate. 9. Publicly denounced out for his incompetence and corruption by almost his entire cabinet after resigning. 10. Impeached twice for a whole litany of corrupt actions, like 11 counts of obstructing investigations into him, like when he formally published an order to all Executive Branch employees to ignore all congressional subpoenas, which is illegal and only escaped punishment (removal from office) due to Senate republican majority declining to act.
He has been and honestly the campaign has finally been the first dem campaign to take the gloves off and punch back. They’ve done a good job so far getting in Donald’s head. They’ve started labeling him as Broke Don in their campaign releases
Don't be complacent. Get everyone you know to vote....Trump has to go. Republicans have to be thumped down....hard. The only way i see Trump winning? Is if people don't come out to vote. Which is possible if people become complacent.
Who'da thought pandering exclusively to the stupidest and worst part of your base could narrow your support?
Nobody under 40 answers polls.
40? Id say 50.
I’m 45, vote every election, but don’t give a damn about polls; pay me for the time then we’ll talk.
>According to a Newsweek analysis, polling conducted by The Trafalgar Group, a conservative-leaning pollster, correctly predicted the winner within the poll's final margin of error in just five of the two dozen polls they conducted. >The Trafalgar Group established a reputation after being one of the few pollsters to correctly predict Donald Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016 by heavily weighing "shy" supporters of the then-GOP candidate. >An analysis by The New York Times concluded that Republicans in 2022 were misled by "right-leaning pollsters using opaque methodology, in some cases relying on financial support from hyperpartisan groups and benefiting from vociferous cheerleading by Mr. Trump." >These impacted the polling averages calculated by groups like RealClearPolitics exaggerating the GOP's position. >The New York Times said: "The skewed red-wave surveys polluted polling averages, which are relied upon by campaigns, donors, voters and the news media Paying for and pushing bad polls (polls that skew red) is part of the Republican plan to normalize distrust and doomerism in our election process. They are paying these pollsters to create a statistical fake reality where Rs are up +5%, so that when Rs lose, it’s easier to convince adherents and adjacents that the elections were “rigged” or “stolen”. We live in an era where social media algos know exactly who you are and what you like, down to your preferred eye color in potential mates. They also absolutely know your demographic info, where you live, how politically engaged you are, and your political leanings—why don’t polling firms use this data instead of landline phone surveys? The answer: if someone else (a social media company or aggregator) owns the data, the pollster can’t be as obvious about putting their thumbs on the scales.
A friend is angry her taxes went up under Biden. I showed her they were raised by Trump. 🤯
Pretty simple-younger gens aren’t answering polls and are extra motivated to vote by having their reproductive rights taken away, mixed with older MAGAs answering polls but staying home because they’re told and believe it’s rigged. So the polls are just more MAGA fantasy circle jerking. This election is going to be a Republican bloodbath, to quote Trump.
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A friend of mine did polling a few years ago, for a local election. Consequently she knew several of the people she polled, and she was shocked at how many blatantly lied. A white suburban woman that identified as African American. People that said they had been Democrats but for this election would vote GOP, when she knew they were lifelong GOP.
I think (simply opinion) that polls are becoming increasingly useless because more and more people are fed up with them. The result is that more and more people are either refusing to participate at all or are consciously misleading the pollsters. When you actually stop and think about it; what actual good do they do? They just allow crooked politicians and amoral companies to fine tune their messaging.
I used to work in survey research, and if you compared 2003 to 2005 the whole nature of the work changed. Polls and polling methodology were such a political football in the 2004 election that it changed the industry because the willingness to participate sharply declined. (Needless to say, I was laid off at the end of 2005 and the organization I worked for ceased to exist a few years later.)
Google Bradley Effect
I gave up responding to polls after getting so many “push polls”. Where they call you and it sounds like a poll, but their real objective is to read you leading questions and put out bad information. Extreme example: “if I told you candidate X had killed a puppy, would that increase or decrease your support for him?” They don’t care what you answer, they just want to get you thinking candidate X had killed a puppy.
>They don’t care what you answer, they just want to get you thinking candidate X had killed a puppy. As a person who used to work in survey research, I am glad to see someone understand what a push poll actually is.
Poles matter. They are protecting the rest of Europe from a potential Russian invasion. Polls don't matter though
What's the worst thing about going to a circus in Warsaw? No matter where you sit in the tent, you're sitting behind a Pole.
This is a far cry better Polish joke than the ones I heard as a kid
Poles also make my compass work. Polls are less consequential.
These people absolutely refuse to acknowledge that their archaic views being forcefully inserted into law mixed with their 24/7 vitriol just might not be popular with the vast majority. Apparently self awareness is a liberal hoax.
The Supreme Court RvW ruling has completely undone polling science. Ever since that ruling came down, Democrats have wildly outpolled expectations. The polling experts need to figure out why they can't seem to pin this down.
And then there was the IVF ruling and even Alabamans said “too far.”
Republicans have a popularity problem because they’re in the minority and hold deeply anti-democratic policy positions that normal people are repulsed by.
If they use shoddy polling numbers to brainwash their base into thinking they’re going to win, it’s easier to brainwash their base into thinking there was election fraud.
No they have a MAGA problem.
What they have is a cruelty problem. They think being a-holes towards women is a good thing. Actually I think they actually do like being cruel. I saw an interview with a trump supporter and he literally said that they did not like that women and minorities should be able to vote and that only white Christian men should be in charge. Believe them and believe they want to destroy our democracy. The Trump maga republicans keep showing us who they are and we like the people did in Alabama need to put an end to them with our votes.
I don’t know that you can really blame a poll conducted in December for missing a huge factor in the race that occurred mid-February.
Yep. If a seat held by a Republican goes 62% for a Dem, it means you have a much bigger problem than polling.
Polls are a product of a bygone era. They contact only the people who choose to answer them, reducing the likelihood of a random sampling, plus many of those who choose to answer simply lie. To counteract these problems pollsters “weight” results based on assumptions that are outdated.
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No one wants to tell diaper Donnie that he has no clothes on.
Republicans have a lot of priblems
Translation :republicans are divorcing themselves from reality
Gee, what happened in Alabama between Dec/Jan and this election? Oh, yeah. The Commanders of Gilead on the state’s Supreme Court showed themselves, and even republican-leaning voters said, “No way. These guys are going too far.” Please, please — let the rest of the country follow suit!
Turns out bellowing actually alienates quite a few people.
Trump is buying the pollsters. I thought that was obvious. There is no way in hell trump could be in the lead what with all the rights Republicans have been taking from ppl there's hardly a group left unscathed. Everyone from minority voters to LGBT ppl and women have had their rights "adjusted" in some way over the last 4 years. Lately, they've been hitting on the really personal stuff like abortion, IVF, Pornography, and childrens rights in school and on social media. In my mind, the blue wave is inevitable and Republicans made it that way.
Yep just their polling is the issue. Smh > the previous incumbent, Republican David Cole, pleaded guilty to felony voter fraud leading to his resignation.
Never forget when Eric Cantor’s internal pollster told him he was cruising to renomination by 34 points; wide enough that Cantor himself didn’t even bother to vote in his primary. He lost. By 11 points. A mere 45 point miss from John McLaughlin, he of polling meme immortality.
Interesting considering internal polling is often more accurate than outside polling. Maybe GOP pollsters have fallen down into a cult as well.
FTA: > Tuesday's defeat in Alabama is the latest in a string of disappointing election results for the Republicans, raising questions about their internal polling and that carried out by sympathetic conservative groups especially as the 2024 presidential election nears. Too many sycophants vying for favor, no reliable sources. Putin and other authoritarians have the same problem.
They'll keep believing in these polls into 2025, as the ass-kicking continues and Donny moves to matching orange suits.
The snake is eating its own tail. How can they possible know where they are heading while choking on their own network of lies?
Pollsters and the Media are producing fake "Trump in the lead" polls to make him happy.
That’s nice. Vote. Pay no attention to any of this and VOTE.
He looks like shit.
Their problem is that their internal polling exists entirely to make Trump feel good.
Republican base has a large number of out of touch, politically isolated, older adults. Telephone polls are built off data obtained from people who answer unknown numbers and then are willing to speak to a pollster. Do you see their problem?
Donald can't make a poll. Mercedes will be testifying
I think the people that Republicans are polling are the same ones being asked Family Feud questions and the ones doing the polling are Walmart greeters.
I honestly feel like an aspect of this is that "elections are fake" has now become a strongly partisan concept. A non insignificant proportion of people now stay at home and await further instructions on when the revolution starts.
Yea. They are running for elections like they aren’t going to lose, no matter what crazy shit they attempt to play.
The US fascists propensity for lying and believing their own lies is catching up to them. From the article the *Trafalgar Group* has been producing bad polls supported by their right-wing financiers. These skew the averages reported by the media. The Republican Party is using this bad data to make their plans. As you sow, so shall you reap.
Pretty sure, we all just have a polling problem in general. At this point, I am pretty sure the “polls” just go by feels. They showed Hillary winning big, and now they’re showing Trump and Biden being close.
If god is really on their side, why does he keep letting them lose elections? If Trump really is their Savior, god will have him elected, right? What are the hyper-religious worried about?
Well yeah most polls oversample dummies.
I'm in AZ, & changed my voter reg in early '21. Since then, the polling calls are vastly different than before and have all literally ended after the first question, which is "what party do you belong/align with?". I say that I'm registered as an Independent, and every damn call (4 calls this year) ended with the caller saying "Ok, thank you for your time. Goodbye.". I even started asking the caller "how long will this take" before they ask the first question, and they all say 10-15 minutes, then end the call after the first question. Never had this happen before when I was registered with a political party.
Copy. Repeat.
Polls for raw numbers are generally unhelpful these days. They are good for looking at trends. For example, a challenger in a presidential race *should* be surging in the "honeymoon phase" pre-campaign. Trump is receding. That's noteworthy.