This reminds me of the ancient piece on Satire Wire about corporate earnings in the dot com meltdown era:
SUPREME COURT RULES EARNINGS SHOULD BE PROTECTED AS "ART"
"Robert Weidlin, an SEC investigator and avid collector, was among the first to peruse the Enron exhibit, which takes up an entire wing of the museum “You look at these works, and you say ‘Is this a profit, or a loss? Is this firm a subsidiary, or a holding company?'” said Walden. “I have stood in front of this one balance sheet for hours, and each moment I come away with something different.”
"It is much safer, whether in terms of literal self-interest or purely psychologically, to find a close race than to gamble on a clear Harris victory.”
Modern polling in a nutshell. It's a lot easier to make a "prediction" in which either candid could win. Pollsters want to have it both ways
I think the absence of a visible Biden campaign in 2024 - no rallies, no barnstorming, no in person GOTV efforts, due to COVID (and maybe Biden’s own limitations) - was a major factor in the polling “miss” then. In the last weeks of that campaign you’d be forgiven for thinking that only one candidate was actually running. Which I think makes it even more likely that scared pollsters are missing a hidden electorate this year.
"Nate Silver said it was “incredibly gutsy” for Ann Selzer to release a poll showing Kamala Harris up by three in Iowa. That was curious framing, considering that right-wing “red wave” pollsters have consistently dropped pro-Trump junk polls with insupportable assumptions..."
Look no further than Silver's former golden goose, 538, which has been flooded with Trafalgar, Patriot Polling, AtlasIntel and other polls with questionable methodology to say the least. I stopped paying attention to the forecast weeks ago because of it.
I think we should apply the same explanation to political polling that is used to explain computer data bases.
"Garbage in, garbage out".
EVERY poll has used assumptions from a small sample of humans to extrapolate to their conclusion. Choosing from likely voters or registered voters, young or old, previous voting history or not, own their own home or renter, college educated or not, blue collar or white collar. A different weighting is assigned to each of these, and these are just a few of the many options.
If a single pollster happens to accurately predict an outcome, it's an accident. All they do is generate income for someone, and get clicks. They are a waste of time. Ignore them.
The Harris/Walz campaign has been a well oiled machine. Without exception it appears to me that they have been on message with precision, being able to goad Trump into panicking. From prompting him to blurt out that Haitians are eating pets, to his creepy insistence that he’s gonna protect us little ladies OR ELSE.
At this stage his rally attendance has to be people eager to see a car crash like at a NASCAR race and not to hear anything remotely about his “policies”.
I believe that women will move the needle in Harris’s favor. Even at this moment the RWNJ, MAGAt men still refuse to listen and acknowledge what is of paramount importance to us and that is having control over our own bodies. Rape, whether it’s actual penetration or just intimidation is never a winning strategy.
>> What’s encouraging is that Trump isn’t doing much to turn out his supporters. His campaign has zero presence in swing states where the Harris campaign is knocking on doors and talking to voters. Harris wants to win. Trump wants to whine. <<
IANAElections expert, but this seems to me to be key. Obviously people feeling like you're the better candidate does nothing for you if they don't actually show up to vote. GOTV efforts are an integrated part of national campaigns because they do make a difference. The lack of GOTV on the R side is going to hurt them. How much is unclear -- at least to me, an expert like Selzer would probably have a good idea -- but it will hurt them.
One thing that I haven't heard as much is that at least one major reason (and possibly the primary reason) for the lack of a Trumpy GOTV effort is that the GOTV money was handed over to Charlie Kirk with a grin and a wink. I'm not disputing your characterization of Trump being in it to whine and not to win, SER, but while he doesn't care enough to lead a GOTV push himself, he did raise money for one. But Kirk has reportedly spent it all on grift and graft, pocketing some significant sum while ranting a bout a new, 21st century GOTV that somehow involves technology, social media, a brand new Turning Point app with zero privacy controls, and a new Kirk vacation home or three.
$100M isn't a bad slush fund if it went to real GOTV, but instead it's going to the Turning Point app and promotional campaigns for it. Getting people to download an app is harder than getting them to fork over an e-mail address or phone number, but the way the new app is structured allows TPUSA to pull data continuously, then to sell that data not merely for election efforts but also to all the right wing grift machines that make money marketing to MAGAs.
Is it fair to say that Trump doesn't have a ground game? Maybe, but no presidential candidate gets too in the weeds with GOTV. Handing it off to an outside group doesn't automatically indicate a lack of emphasis, especially when $108M goes with the assignment. To say that there's no GOTV based on Trump's lack of care about doing the work is only fair in the sense that he didn't care if he hired someone with a credible track record. (And that is fair.)
Hiring Kirk was lazy and based far more on who flatters Trump rather than who is going to make effective use of the money -- which is how he ran both his business and his presidency, so no surprise there. Trump never cared about any of this. It's just that in 2016 he had more people supporting him who were part of traditional Republican electoral machinery. As time has gone on and he has collected grievances against people that in his first campaign were to new to him to hate, he's progressively pushed away all the credible, effective people.
Now even if he recognized the importance of GOTV efforts and even if he wanted to hire someone competent, I doubt he could.
Also a lot of the RNC dosh is going to President Klan Robe's legal fees. It's grifters all the way down!
That's why he's hawking shoddy marketed tchotchkes to the MAGA cult with all the production values of late night public access. And all the right wing media human centipede channels have the same crap, as well as the "buy gold/sell gold" crap.
C.Dyke you’re right about hiring Kirk for the ground game. He did as little as he possibly could just to look like he was doing something for the campaign while probably shopping for another expensive dwelling or nice boat. If his campaign did an audit I’d bet you’d find a tranche of embezzlement from a lot of people working for this. No doubt Lara has filtered a shit ton of cash into the family pockets.
When I was in high school, I read "A Prayer for Owen Meany." The title charachter was described as having an unusual voice, which the author kept front and center in the reader's mind by using all-caps for any time Owen was speaking. I miss associating all-caps with Owen. It may be time for me to re-read it, it takes place where I grew up and I could use a little nostalgia in my psyche right now.
I'll do my best to not-stress. Deep breaths everyone. I'm going to take a walk and enjoy the cool air.
In the words of Wyld Stallyns, "Be excellent to each other."
“While senior voters overall prefer Harris, senior women support her by a two-to-one margin, 63 percent to 28 percent.”
“Women are rightly pissed, especially older women who remember what life was like for them before Roe v Wade. You don’t want to piss off older women because they reliably vote.”
“It’s … repulsive that women would need a permission slip from their rapist before they can have a medical procedure performed on their own body.”
“Women have DIED because of the Supreme Court Dobbs decision.”
I just wanted to repeat these solid statements from Stephen. This is it, right here. As the current paraphrase of James Carville’s classic line goes: “It’s Abortion, Stupid.”
Women have been harangued all election season to “Vote like your life depends on it!” and “White women need to get out and vote for Kamala, otherwise we’ll lose!” As if WE DIDN’T KNOW THAT. As if it’s totally upon the shoulders of America’s women to save the country. As if somehow women vote stronger and harder than men, so if the unspeakable happens, once again, it will be women’s fault, somehow.
What would have been useful would have been MEN showing up at pro-choice rallies, or saying out loud that abortion rights is their No. 1 issue rather than mumbling generic platitudes about the economy or climate change. It doesn’t need excuse-framing like “I want a better world for my daughter/sister/granddaughter.” It’s okay to frame women’s rights simply as human rights, because we are human beings.
It's interesting that pollsters aren't concerned that they will lose credibility by undercounting Harris support because they are afraid of undercounting trump support for a third time. If it's close, they may have a point, but if it isn't close, and Harris wins in a landslide, they are toast. The pollsters claimed that their numbers were close in 2016 and 2020, but NOW, they are claiming that they undercounted trump support. Well, which is it, pollsters? The info from the Nates tells us that we can ignore the pollsters, except Selzer, and maybe some other pollsters that concentrate on one state.
Agree completely--if they're afraid they underestimated Trump twice before, all the more reason to make sure they get it RIGHT, not that they underestimate Harris to make it even!
They should be asking themselves what assumptions about the model they got wrong last time, what they could be getting wrong this time, and correct for that. Otherwise, they're useless if they just figure "well, a few points the other way and maybe we'll land at the right spot." That's not polling, that's guesswork!
This theory puzzles me, as liberal academics aren't running for president, and I've not heard Harris or Walz use the term. Maybe it is just wishful thinking on the part of the pollsters, yet they ignore all of the insults that trump hurls at various Latino groups, before and since MSG.
And he knows it. He's facing prison, or more likely, house arrest, with an ankle monitor. Or, he could flee the country, and be someone else's problem.
Before winemakers understood how the bubbles were forming in their champagne, the workers in the cellars wore iron masks to keep from being blinded or killed from bottles exploding.
I assume the staffer charged with showing interal polling eother does it on zoom or wears a head to toe smock to keep the ketchup off their suit.
Living here has been a real treat, let me tell you. This morning I was seeing the same anti -Harris and literally on loop, just running 4 times back to back during commercial breaks on HGTV in the train station waiting room.
The final line of this amazing post is actually a great bumper sticker for the campaign.
Ultimately, the backing of a lot of these pollsters is McCain's Law...there cannot be good news for Democrats. It also is a big help from Murc's Law, because well you just can't do anything about Republicans wilding out and ripping you to shreds if you provide coverage they don't like. Democrats just sit and take it. And if that isn't emblematic of the shambolic state of mainstream media I don't know what is!
In the end let's get past the useless concern-trolling of Republican-owned mass media, scaredy-cat pollsters, and the unreconstructed party's voter suppression and bring it home.
If you are voting on Election Day and encounter long lines, remember that is a deliberate policy choice. It's how unreconstructed states remain unreconstructed. Look for mutual aid...sometimes you can befriend people in line and get them to hold your place if you have need (for example, the long lines are ableist as they disenfranchise those with health and/or mobility issues).
THANK YOU for being one of the few men who actually put the Iowa poll in the context of the abortion ban.
This reminds me of the ancient piece on Satire Wire about corporate earnings in the dot com meltdown era:
SUPREME COURT RULES EARNINGS SHOULD BE PROTECTED AS "ART"
"Robert Weidlin, an SEC investigator and avid collector, was among the first to peruse the Enron exhibit, which takes up an entire wing of the museum “You look at these works, and you say ‘Is this a profit, or a loss? Is this firm a subsidiary, or a holding company?'” said Walden. “I have stood in front of this one balance sheet for hours, and each moment I come away with something different.”
https://www.satirewire.com/supreme-court-rules-earnings-should-be-protected-as-art/
"It is much safer, whether in terms of literal self-interest or purely psychologically, to find a close race than to gamble on a clear Harris victory.”
Modern polling in a nutshell. It's a lot easier to make a "prediction" in which either candid could win. Pollsters want to have it both ways
I think the absence of a visible Biden campaign in 2024 - no rallies, no barnstorming, no in person GOTV efforts, due to COVID (and maybe Biden’s own limitations) - was a major factor in the polling “miss” then. In the last weeks of that campaign you’d be forgiven for thinking that only one candidate was actually running. Which I think makes it even more likely that scared pollsters are missing a hidden electorate this year.
Typo? Shouldn't 2024 be 2020?
Indeed!
"Nate Silver said it was “incredibly gutsy” for Ann Selzer to release a poll showing Kamala Harris up by three in Iowa. That was curious framing, considering that right-wing “red wave” pollsters have consistently dropped pro-Trump junk polls with insupportable assumptions..."
Look no further than Silver's former golden goose, 538, which has been flooded with Trafalgar, Patriot Polling, AtlasIntel and other polls with questionable methodology to say the least. I stopped paying attention to the forecast weeks ago because of it.
"save democracy from Elon Musk"
Either through Trump or Vance, Musk, Thiel and other plutocrats will run the shadow presidency Soros is supposedly running.
I think we should apply the same explanation to political polling that is used to explain computer data bases.
"Garbage in, garbage out".
EVERY poll has used assumptions from a small sample of humans to extrapolate to their conclusion. Choosing from likely voters or registered voters, young or old, previous voting history or not, own their own home or renter, college educated or not, blue collar or white collar. A different weighting is assigned to each of these, and these are just a few of the many options.
If a single pollster happens to accurately predict an outcome, it's an accident. All they do is generate income for someone, and get clicks. They are a waste of time. Ignore them.
this^^^^^^^^
The Harris/Walz campaign has been a well oiled machine. Without exception it appears to me that they have been on message with precision, being able to goad Trump into panicking. From prompting him to blurt out that Haitians are eating pets, to his creepy insistence that he’s gonna protect us little ladies OR ELSE.
At this stage his rally attendance has to be people eager to see a car crash like at a NASCAR race and not to hear anything remotely about his “policies”.
I believe that women will move the needle in Harris’s favor. Even at this moment the RWNJ, MAGAt men still refuse to listen and acknowledge what is of paramount importance to us and that is having control over our own bodies. Rape, whether it’s actual penetration or just intimidation is never a winning strategy.
>> What’s encouraging is that Trump isn’t doing much to turn out his supporters. His campaign has zero presence in swing states where the Harris campaign is knocking on doors and talking to voters. Harris wants to win. Trump wants to whine. <<
IANAElections expert, but this seems to me to be key. Obviously people feeling like you're the better candidate does nothing for you if they don't actually show up to vote. GOTV efforts are an integrated part of national campaigns because they do make a difference. The lack of GOTV on the R side is going to hurt them. How much is unclear -- at least to me, an expert like Selzer would probably have a good idea -- but it will hurt them.
One thing that I haven't heard as much is that at least one major reason (and possibly the primary reason) for the lack of a Trumpy GOTV effort is that the GOTV money was handed over to Charlie Kirk with a grin and a wink. I'm not disputing your characterization of Trump being in it to whine and not to win, SER, but while he doesn't care enough to lead a GOTV push himself, he did raise money for one. But Kirk has reportedly spent it all on grift and graft, pocketing some significant sum while ranting a bout a new, 21st century GOTV that somehow involves technology, social media, a brand new Turning Point app with zero privacy controls, and a new Kirk vacation home or three.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-turning-point-voter-mobilization-musk-07286c2572b02aafefdda1cda093e788
$100M isn't a bad slush fund if it went to real GOTV, but instead it's going to the Turning Point app and promotional campaigns for it. Getting people to download an app is harder than getting them to fork over an e-mail address or phone number, but the way the new app is structured allows TPUSA to pull data continuously, then to sell that data not merely for election efforts but also to all the right wing grift machines that make money marketing to MAGAs.
Is it fair to say that Trump doesn't have a ground game? Maybe, but no presidential candidate gets too in the weeds with GOTV. Handing it off to an outside group doesn't automatically indicate a lack of emphasis, especially when $108M goes with the assignment. To say that there's no GOTV based on Trump's lack of care about doing the work is only fair in the sense that he didn't care if he hired someone with a credible track record. (And that is fair.)
Hiring Kirk was lazy and based far more on who flatters Trump rather than who is going to make effective use of the money -- which is how he ran both his business and his presidency, so no surprise there. Trump never cared about any of this. It's just that in 2016 he had more people supporting him who were part of traditional Republican electoral machinery. As time has gone on and he has collected grievances against people that in his first campaign were to new to him to hate, he's progressively pushed away all the credible, effective people.
Now even if he recognized the importance of GOTV efforts and even if he wanted to hire someone competent, I doubt he could.
Also a lot of the RNC dosh is going to President Klan Robe's legal fees. It's grifters all the way down!
That's why he's hawking shoddy marketed tchotchkes to the MAGA cult with all the production values of late night public access. And all the right wing media human centipede channels have the same crap, as well as the "buy gold/sell gold" crap.
C.Dyke you’re right about hiring Kirk for the ground game. He did as little as he possibly could just to look like he was doing something for the campaign while probably shopping for another expensive dwelling or nice boat. If his campaign did an audit I’d bet you’d find a tranche of embezzlement from a lot of people working for this. No doubt Lara has filtered a shit ton of cash into the family pockets.
When I was in high school, I read "A Prayer for Owen Meany." The title charachter was described as having an unusual voice, which the author kept front and center in the reader's mind by using all-caps for any time Owen was speaking. I miss associating all-caps with Owen. It may be time for me to re-read it, it takes place where I grew up and I could use a little nostalgia in my psyche right now.
I'll do my best to not-stress. Deep breaths everyone. I'm going to take a walk and enjoy the cool air.
In the words of Wyld Stallyns, "Be excellent to each other."
“While senior voters overall prefer Harris, senior women support her by a two-to-one margin, 63 percent to 28 percent.”
“Women are rightly pissed, especially older women who remember what life was like for them before Roe v Wade. You don’t want to piss off older women because they reliably vote.”
“It’s … repulsive that women would need a permission slip from their rapist before they can have a medical procedure performed on their own body.”
“Women have DIED because of the Supreme Court Dobbs decision.”
I just wanted to repeat these solid statements from Stephen. This is it, right here. As the current paraphrase of James Carville’s classic line goes: “It’s Abortion, Stupid.”
Women have been harangued all election season to “Vote like your life depends on it!” and “White women need to get out and vote for Kamala, otherwise we’ll lose!” As if WE DIDN’T KNOW THAT. As if it’s totally upon the shoulders of America’s women to save the country. As if somehow women vote stronger and harder than men, so if the unspeakable happens, once again, it will be women’s fault, somehow.
What would have been useful would have been MEN showing up at pro-choice rallies, or saying out loud that abortion rights is their No. 1 issue rather than mumbling generic platitudes about the economy or climate change. It doesn’t need excuse-framing like “I want a better world for my daughter/sister/granddaughter.” It’s okay to frame women’s rights simply as human rights, because we are human beings.
WOMEN ARE DYING. NOW.
It’s Abortion, Stupid.
Women's Rights Are Human Rights.
This.
It's interesting that pollsters aren't concerned that they will lose credibility by undercounting Harris support because they are afraid of undercounting trump support for a third time. If it's close, they may have a point, but if it isn't close, and Harris wins in a landslide, they are toast. The pollsters claimed that their numbers were close in 2016 and 2020, but NOW, they are claiming that they undercounted trump support. Well, which is it, pollsters? The info from the Nates tells us that we can ignore the pollsters, except Selzer, and maybe some other pollsters that concentrate on one state.
Agree completely--if they're afraid they underestimated Trump twice before, all the more reason to make sure they get it RIGHT, not that they underestimate Harris to make it even!
They should be asking themselves what assumptions about the model they got wrong last time, what they could be getting wrong this time, and correct for that. Otherwise, they're useless if they just figure "well, a few points the other way and maybe we'll land at the right spot." That's not polling, that's guesswork!
𝑴𝒂𝒚𝒃𝒆 𝑳𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒐 𝒎𝒆𝒏 𝒅𝒐𝒏’𝒕 𝒍𝒊𝒌𝒆 𝒉𝒐𝒘 𝒍𝒊𝒃𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒍 𝒂𝒄𝒂𝒅𝒆𝒎𝒊𝒄𝒔 𝒖𝒔𝒆 “𝑳𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒙.” (𝒀𝒆𝒔, 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒂 𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒍 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒐𝒓𝒚.)
This theory puzzles me, as liberal academics aren't running for president, and I've not heard Harris or Walz use the term. Maybe it is just wishful thinking on the part of the pollsters, yet they ignore all of the insults that trump hurls at various Latino groups, before and since MSG.
"Latinx" pissed off a lot of people who heard it, but not a lot of people heard it. It's not like Harris uses it in her speeches or anything.
Erosion among Hispanic voters has more to do with the erosion they've been having among white non-college voters.
Trump seems more unhinged than normal which makes me think he’s losing.
And he knows it. He's facing prison, or more likely, house arrest, with an ankle monitor. Or, he could flee the country, and be someone else's problem.
Imagine being the pollster who has to show him his internals.
Before winemakers understood how the bubbles were forming in their champagne, the workers in the cellars wore iron masks to keep from being blinded or killed from bottles exploding.
I assume the staffer charged with showing interal polling eother does it on zoom or wears a head to toe smock to keep the ketchup off their suit.
An iron mask couldn't hurt.
I can understand the temptation to just tell him what he wants to hear, take your fee, and be out of there on Election Day.
The "They're cheating in Pennsylvania" tells me he has a HORRIBLE internal poll there.
Living here has been a real treat, let me tell you. This morning I was seeing the same anti -Harris and literally on loop, just running 4 times back to back during commercial breaks on HGTV in the train station waiting room.
And they are doing it by "Eating the dogs and eating the cats!"
Good stuff!
The final line of this amazing post is actually a great bumper sticker for the campaign.
Ultimately, the backing of a lot of these pollsters is McCain's Law...there cannot be good news for Democrats. It also is a big help from Murc's Law, because well you just can't do anything about Republicans wilding out and ripping you to shreds if you provide coverage they don't like. Democrats just sit and take it. And if that isn't emblematic of the shambolic state of mainstream media I don't know what is!
In the end let's get past the useless concern-trolling of Republican-owned mass media, scaredy-cat pollsters, and the unreconstructed party's voter suppression and bring it home.
If you are voting on Election Day and encounter long lines, remember that is a deliberate policy choice. It's how unreconstructed states remain unreconstructed. Look for mutual aid...sometimes you can befriend people in line and get them to hold your place if you have need (for example, the long lines are ableist as they disenfranchise those with health and/or mobility issues).
Let's mount up and save America!
We ride at dawn.
One more wake-up!
Appreciate you, and your perspective, so much!
We’re going to win this thing!