The 2024 U.S. Presidential race

GoblinCampFollower

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Is it "razor thin," though? Polls generally come with a health warning that they are 95% confident that the results for each candidate are accurate to within 3% either way. So a poll that shows Harris at 50.5% and Trump at 49.5% (or vice versa) could, in fact, mean that Harris is at 53% and Trump at 47% (or vice versa), or anywhere in between. Furthermore, as I understand it, despite this 95% confidence, historically polls reflect the actual vote, within the stated margins of error, only about 60% of the time, not 95%, and that's only counting polls conducted in the last month before polling day.

All we know is that neither candidate is likely to win by a landslide.

Yet again,


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Question: Do people think that Biden's remark will have a greater or a lesser effect on the outcome of the election than wll the weather on election day in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania? If so, why?
Yes, it's razor thin... Trump could win within the margin of error. I consider that razor thin. Hillary was supposed to have almost a 2/3rds chance of winning and still lost. So yes, I say the current polls are showing a very very thin margin...

MY HOPE is that some pollsters are overcorrecting for what went wrong in 2016. Many Trumpers might be very loud when a pollster calls them so they might be slightly over estimating the Trump vote. Meanwhile there are people like me who won't answer polls but are voting Harris.

Question: Do people think that Biden's remark will have a greater or a lesser effect on the outcome of the election than wll the weather on election day in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania? If so, why?
Probably not... but that's not the point. Harris is predicted to win by such a tiny margin that all kinds of things could fuck it up. Every small thing counts.

It's more painful for Democrats to see Biden make an unforced error that makes everyone cringe. Harris has run a flawless campaign and this incident just drives home that Biden could not have done as well. It will not change any minds, it will not throw the election.
I agree. Harris has been great.... but as I said to Innula, the polls are close enough so that I worry about every minor detail.
 
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Beebo Brink

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Yes, it's razor thin... Trump could win within the margin of error.
The republicans have been skewing many of the polls, funding them and/or outright colluding with the pollsters with the aim of 1) just generally promoting Trump's chances and 2) laying the base for refuting the election results if Trump loses. In turn, many of these cooked polls end up skewing the poll aggregate averages.

Another factor which affects the accuracy of the polls is the inflection point of gender, which influences a MUCH bigger part of this election than it ever has before. Polls can only make a guess as to how much weight to give this unique circumstance.

Actual poll numbers are less useful than trend lines, which have favored Harris.

Yes, we're beyond the days when any political party won by a landslide, but I'm not convinced we have a clue what the true picture is until after the votes are counted. Based on what information there is, I'd rather be us than them.
 

Innula Zenovka

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Yes, it's razor thin... Trump could win within the margin of error. I consider that razor thin. Hillary was supposed to have almost a 2/3rds chance of winning and still lost. So yes, I say the current polls are showing a very very thin margin...

MY HOPE is that some pollsters are overcorrecting for what went wrong in 2016. Many Trumpers might be very loud when a pollster calls them so they might be slightly over estimating the Trump vote. Meanwhile there are people like me who won't answer polls but are voting Harris.
To quote Brian Klaas' article again

What if you flipped a coin once every four years? After sixteen years and just four coin flips, how would you know whether the coin was “accurate” or not? But it’s worse than that, because the “coin” is being swapped out every four years, too, and sometimes, the replacement coin (or, in our analogy, new polling method) is biased. But with so few observations, it would be impossible to derive any solid conclusions. So, too, with probabilistic forecasting of rare events that can be swayed based on contingent factors, even down to the last minute on Election Day. Even the weather matters—rain or storms can depress turnout!

Consider this: how could we ever “prove” Nate Silver wrong? It’s a trick question; you can’t. It’s completely impossible. He’s engineered a forecast that is unfalsifiable.
In 2016, for example, Silver’s forecast gave Hillary Clinton a 71.4 percent probability of winning the presidency. That is not the same as saying she will win. After all, events with a probability of 28.6 percent happen all the time—more than one in four times, in fact. But that excuse always exists, unless Silver predicts a one hundred percent chance that Trump or Harris will win. Without that, he can always say “well, I didn’t say 100 percent, so I wasn’t technically wrong!”

If you take the last four election cycles, from 2020 back to 2008, the FiveThirtyEight forecast—which Silver ran during that period—had the eventual winner ahead in its model for three of the four races. However, most people would have guessed the 2008 and 2020 winners correctly even without any fancy forecasting model, because most polls showed clear leads for both Obama and Biden. And in 2012, though there was more apparent uncertainty, most would have bet on Obama, as he opened a clear polling lead heading into Election Day.
Heck, if you were to forecast the winners to those four presidential contests using a literal coin flip, the probability is pretty strong that you’d get one, two, or three of them correct, too. If you were lucky, the coin would predict all four correctly! If that happened, one could mistakenly assume that The Coin Knows All!3
That is, the 2016 forecast that Clinton had a 71.4 probability of winning gave Trump a slightly better chance of winning than the probability of red coming up twice in succession in roulette.

All I'm saying is that, without access to the sort of detailed ward-by-ward returns that the two campaigns will have, and will be keeping strictly confidential, we don't really know what's likely to happen, and there's no point in obsessing about the polls.
 
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Monica Dream

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I took a day to let the dust settle, but it turned out the dust was actually Bezos. His "clarification" was nothing more than one big gaslight.

Canceled.


Hmm.

But then there's no capitalism in space. Not really. Meanwhile, Bezos is aging just like the rest of us, and getting older every day.
 

GoblinCampFollower

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The republicans have been skewing many of the polls, funding them and/or outright colluding with the pollsters with the aim of 1) just generally promoting Trump's chances and 2) laying the base for refuting the election results if Trump loses. In turn, many of these cooked polls end up skewing the poll aggregate averages.

Another factor which affects the accuracy of the polls is the inflection point of gender, which influences a MUCH bigger part of this election than it ever has before. Polls can only make a guess as to how much weight to give this unique circumstance.

Actual poll numbers are less useful than trend lines, which have favored Harris.

Yes, we're beyond the days when any political party won by a landslide, but I'm not convinced we have a clue what the true picture is until after the votes are counted. Based on what information there is, I'd rather be us than them.
I agree with everything you're saying. I WANT to believe Harris will win by a bigger margin than expected. But I'm still worried. I'd rather not see any more fuck ups by any prominent democrats in any case.

To quote Brian Klaas' article again




That is, the 2016 forecast that Clinton had a 71.4 probability of winning gave Trump a slightly better chance of winning than the probability of red coming up twice in succession in roulette.

All I'm saying is that, without access to the sort of detailed ward-by-ward returns that the two campaigns will have, and will be keeping strictly confidential, we don't really know what's likely to happen, and there's no point in obsessing about the polls.
The greater point is, without strong evidence that Harris will win by a large margin, I'll continue to worry about little things going wrong.... I'll keep worrying until the election is over and Harris is confirmed as the winner.

I'm venting my concerns and worry much more so than trying to make a point about who I think will win and why.
 

Cindy Claveau

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I agree. Harris has been great.... but as I said to Innula, the polls are close enough so that I worry about every minor detail.
Take this as a measuring stick, then: What party in American history has had this many top-level members reject their candidate and support the opposition?

They even have their own party: "Republicans for Harris".

In my view, this is less about "how good Harris will be for us" and more "how bad Trump would be" for everybody. Harris will be great, we just have to convince more people it's ok to vote for an evil Democrat.

I don't usually go on something just based on my feelings. I probably shouldn't this time, either. But the strongest feeling I'm getting as I digest my daily news overdose is that the polls haven't been close to reality at all, not since the end of the 2020 campaigns.

They're missing a big key somewhere. Youth? Female vote? Abortion? Democracy? I live in the red state of Kansas, and my regressive fellow state voters actually gave the abortion ban a giant middle finger, shocking "media experts". My conservative neighbor lady even put up a yard sign "VOTE DEMOCRAT". This is apocalyptic stuff, here. (My worst fear, unrealized: her sign has been undisturbed for 2 weeks now).

Yet they (media) are all screaming "The Race is In the Margins!" "Tied!" - in some places, no doubt it will be. I guess I'm allergic to alarmism, as tempting as it may be.

I don't want to sound like the GOP supporters years ago who could not believe that Obama won. "I didn't know a single person who voted for him" just says you don't associate with Democrats :) Also, I have never trusted "predictions" of any sort - things that have not yet happened can never be predicted with 100% accuracy precisely because they haven't happened yet. It says right here.

With that caveat, I've talked myself into believing that (a) The media - all of them - are using polls to advance their own agenda. MSNBC has been flooding their programming with cite after cite about how CLOSE THE POLLS ARE!!!!!!!111;

(b) Trump is over. His sycophants are making all the noise, now, while he's napping. That's why I actually believe him when he claimed he didn't know about Hinchcliffe's racist garbage. The problem is, he wanted total control over his operation and that comes with accepting responsibility. For that, you just lost the PR vote along with the women's vote, the youth vote, the retiree vote, and the military vote.

Uneducated white men love you, Don, so there's that.
 

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Hmm.

But then there's no capitalism in space. Not really. Meanwhile, Bezos is aging just like the rest of us, and getting older every day.


We need a guillotine reaction btw.
 
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detrius

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To be fair, Bezos is a fan of James S. A. Corey's "Expanse" novels.

He's probably dreaming about turning the Kuiper belt into a few million fusion-powered O'Neill cylinders.
 

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On members of the Idiot Cult being garbage.

He isn't wrong, especially at this point. And its just a variation of the stupid Nazi rheroric claiming they are being "repressed" by the "hypocritical left" because they can't freely call people f**** and n****.

No, you are not being repressed, you are being a garbage asshole. You can fuck off with that noise.

The core difference bouls down to calling someone out/insulting them over something they are va something they choose to be. Because Puerto ricans, and LGBT+ and etc etc ARE these things. Its who they are. That is not intended as any negative, but its simply something that is not going to change.

Being a garbage Nazi asshole, is a fucking choice. And people are going to ridicule you and call you out for it.
 

Casey Pelous

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So I thought that Maye Musk calling Elon developmentally challenged on Twitter was my favorite moment of the election, but Dark Brandon "accidentally" calling Trump supporters garbage is the winner. It is the October surprise I am here for.
I always thought the kerfuffle over "deplorables" was just one more excuse to do the wrong thing -- along the lines of "well, she's been investigated so much, there must be something there." In other words, "I gotta go with the one without a vagina."
 

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To be fair, Bezos is a fan of James S. A. Corey's "Expanse" novels.

He's probably dreaming about turning the Kuiper belt into a few million fusion-powered O'Neill cylinders.
Or, he's hoping to be the first to dig up the protomolecule on Phoebe, and then strategize how to sell it on Amazon.
 
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Grey Mars

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Essay, not too long of a read.

I split my time between San Fransisco, Massachusetts, and rural Indiana. There are VERY MUCH red areas, and blue areas, with radically different thinking on even basic issues. It does however break down more to urban verses rural than any arbitrary boundary. The literally isolated and insolated rural areas are where the Repugs thrive.
 

WolfEyes

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Question: Do people think that Biden's remark will have a greater or a lesser effect on the outcome of the election than wll the weather on election day in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania? If so, why?
I don't think it will have any real effect because people in general aren't that intelligent.
 

Noodles

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I split my time between San Fransisco, Massachusetts, and rural Indiana. There are VERY MUCH red areas, and blue areas, with radically different thinking on even basic issues. It does however break down more to urban verses rural than any arbitrary boundary. The literally isolated and insolated rural areas are where the Repugs thrive.
It's definitely more just Rural vs Urban". Even here in "safely blu4e Illinois", the downstate is red as hell.