Kamala Harris Wipes Out Trump’s Swing-State Lead in Election Dead Heat
Kamala Harris Wipes Out Trump’s Swing-State Lead in Election Dead Heat
Paywall removed: https://archive.is/xWD8k
I'd like to remind everyone that 8 years ago, the polls showed Hillary was going to trounce Trump pretty handedly. There was tons of discussion after the election about how the polls could be so wrong.
I think Fivethityeight's explanation went something like...
If a candidate is only polling 40% to their opponents's 60%, and you were to run the election 10 times with a different sampling of voters each time, it doesn't mean that the candidate will lose by 60% every time. It means they're going to win four times out of ten.
Don't let polls lull you into either complacency or despair. The only thing polls are really good for is giving pundits something to talk about in the 24 hour news cycle. Polls don't decide the election. Only actual votes on actual ballots that are actually submitted in time decide the election.
And this messaging is a large part of what led to low democrat turnout when Hillary was running for office. Her early campaign had basically been “lol don’t worry about this, he’s an idiot who doesn’t gave a chance of winning.” It wasn’t until about a month before the actual election that someone in her campaign team realized this would lull voters into a false sense of security. Suddenly, their entire tone changed from “he has no chance of winning” to “oh for fucks sake please go vote”. But it was too little, too late. Democrat voters stayed home, and handed the win to Trump.
Well this time Harris has been telling everyone that Trump is trying to end democracy from the beginning
There was an acknowledged gap in polling in 2016 that excluded likely trump voters. It has since been resolved and polling in 2020 and 2022 was highly accurate.
With that said, I am not advocating for taking polls as gospel, 2016 showed us there can be flaws and mistakes. At the end of the day, I don't give a fuck what the polls say, we all need to show up and vote. If Kamala had a 50 point lead in my state, I am still showing up and voting for her.
“There was an acknowledged gap in polling in 2016 that excluded likely trump voters. It has since been resolved and polling in 2020 and 2022 was highly accurate.”
I would respectfully dispute that statement. In the last dozen or so special elections as well as the last mid term election the Republicans have under performed with respect to their polling.
There is a large swath of the population that doesn’t participate in polls because they don’t answer the phone for strange numbers and don’t answer questions online or in person.
This “silent” population segment has favored Dems over the last few years but they could just as easily go for Republicans (as we saw with Trump in 2016) as we simply do not have good polling. I think they will swing Democrat again this election but we should take nothing for granted.
Sounds like you're thinking of 538's election needle, not polling data. If a candidate has 60% of the votes in a poll, assuming the poll is accurate, they win 100% of the time. The standard deviation on a population this big is practically 0
That could be. It was 8 years ago and I was very upset. Still haven't recovered.
Thats absolutely not how polling statistics would work.
538 put Trump's 2016 chances at about 75%. That means Trump needed to flip two coins and have them both come up heads. It wasn't a ridiculous outside chance at all.
People have also let Comey and his last minute letter off the hook. Polls were really close, but favored Hillary. That letter came too late for any poll to absorb the new information, but it very likely tipped the scales. There were a lot of things that went wrong in that election--it never should have been so close in the first place--but that very likely shifted the outcome.
Very very true, I put time and money into Bernie Sanders second bid, the polling made it look like he was going to win the primary in a devistating landslide. It never materialized, his base, if they ever were serious weren't serious enough to actually make it to a polling place on the day of. Very disappointing. Never think the polling will match the voting, they can be very different animals.
the polls showed Hillary was going to trounce Trump pretty handedly.
Not true. She was within the margin of error in the swing states.
I think Fivethityeight's explanation went something like...
Don't confuse 538's model with polls. 538 takes polling data as an input, and then runs simulations that output the odds which side will win.
Polls don't measure the odds a candidate will win, they measure how many people would vote a certain way if the election were held today. Predictive models take that data and do a lot more than simply average the results.
538s model was a good estimator that year too, they leaned towards Hillary (and to be fair, she did win the popular vote) but certainly kept a trump win in the swing states within margin of error.
270 to win is another good site
Get your shit together PA. Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania is game over.
Get your shit together PA.
Pennsyltuckians would be very upset if they could read.
Kamala Harris is going to wipe the floor with Trump.
I need you to be right.
We are!
She can’t do it alone, and we can’t assume that she’ll win. Keep pushing until she’s sworn in Jan 2025.
This is Trump’s last chance. The republicans will literally stop at nothing to ensure he wins.
Did they only take polls in Pittsburgh?
Will forever laugh at the "Biden or busters" and Anarcho-Bidenists saying swapping to Kamala would be a bad idea electorally. Biden was really unpopular.
I think him "voluntarily" stepping aside helped. If he were primaried, that might not have gone as well as it would look like he got kicked out, and that generally doesn't have a great result for the incumbent party
North Carolina poll respondents: "Black AND a woman?!" as well as "Black AND a woman!!"
Those margins are all uncomfortably close - "wipes out" is needlessly bombastic.
I think that "wipes out" here is referring to the lead that Trump had in the polls previously. All the states went from a clear lead for Trump over Biden, to basically even, with one exception showing a clear lead.
I think that it suggests a competitive race, rather than one side coasting to victory. It is hard to draw concrete conclusions still, but the clear lead is definitely gone
Yeah. Like everyone is saying it's dangerous to infer a democrat win on the back of this polling... but I think we can conclude that swing states have responded favourably to swapping her in.
Just 10 days ago people were saying it's too late to trade horses because no one knows her so we're stuck with Biden. These polls thoroughly demonstrate that assertion was incorrect.
I think it was John Stewart said we're happy to have gone from Trump lead to statistical tie.
I'm not sure the country is ready for a gay VP, but my god Pete would destroy JD in the debate.
Let's just get the orange turd defeated, we're already pushing boundaries enough here. Pick a safe VP that calms the boomers and carry on later.
I think Trump proved that literally anyone can be president.
This is awesome, the momentum looks like it’s going to keep up! The +11 point lead in MI is nothing to doubt, let’s go President Harris!
I hope her campaign keeps reminding voters everywhere of project 2025, and exactly how it’s going to negatively impact their lives.
How is drumpf even a candidate at this point?
Welcome back!
"Funny" story, there's been some flux in a gravitational waves or some yada yada, and next thing you know, surprise, we've been teleported to an alternative universe where politics SUCKS ASS.
That's how.
Yeah, this theory can be funny, but it completely ignores how the Kochs and John Birch Society, among many others, have been trying to "take back" the country since... well civil war at least if you include the KKK and south. Though more since FDR. They have been planning, shifting the Overton window, and trying every little thing they can. They even freaked out about Timothy McVeigh a bit, thinking he set them back by exposing the general secretly violent right wing by going so public, iirc.
Overall the polls have been encouraging for her, but that MI one look really wrong. 538 has her about down a point on average.
538 shows the same result, Kamala +11, for the specific Morning Consult poll cited in the chart.
But you are correct that this poll is an outlier compared to other polls, and we probably need more data and for the race to settle a bit before we have a sense of the actual margin.
I'm hesitant to put too much stock in any numbers a single week into her candidacy. It also bears repeating that no poll matters unless people vote.
I didn't realize Nate Silver left 538 (he's over at Silver Bulletin now.) Not sure how credible they are anymore, after Disney/ABC gutted the team, and he left with the magic sauce algorithms. They were the one place I semi-trusted for polling, most accurate I've come across (since 2012 or so).
Yeah, I'm not sure how reliable their final predicitons will be, but they're definitely still useful for compiling polls, and their pollster ratings are useful since they only have to look at how close polls came to being correct after the actual vote. That's primarily what I use them for.
Wow that's a long poll. I got to 100 questions before I stopped counting, and "who would you vote for" is in the second half. Did they ask every respondent all the questions?
Oh cool, I was worried I'd have to go vote.
Vote anyway just to be safe
Why are liberals being so negative about Kamala's progress? I get that we need people to not be complacent and go vote. But feeling like it's hopeless is just as good as getting people to stay at home. We need to celebrate the support if we want to keep it, you know.
True story: half the country doesn't even know she's in yet.
Had to tell 3 peeps at dinner yesterday what's up.
I'm not alone.
I get how there are people who don't follow politics, but man... how do you avoid news like this?
I mean, technically, she's not in until the convention... but you would think it would be common knowledge unless you're a recluse or a child who doesn't know most people by name.
Someone more famous than I (Meryl Streep?) once suggested that upon graduation, one should be mandated to drive a taxi for a year, just to see what it's "really like" out there.
You'll have to take my word for it, she's so right.
People still talk about litter boxes in schools for the furries - with a phone attached to their palms 24/7 that'll PROVE to them in seconds that it never happened...and, yet....
I honestly wish I could look away and just be blissfully ignorant. Fuck I'm not even American.
I think we are all in literal Hell. That's the only explanation that makes sense that other people are so clueless. We are all dead and in Hell; they are actors put here to torment us.
In my experience, with so much option offered by the Internet, an individual could easily curate the type of information they're consuming and exclude others.
I'm aware of targeted ads and algorithm having some influence, but overall the internet still offers better freedom of choice than TV, radio and newspaper would have offered. But the problem with this is people curating only what they want to see and making their own personal informational bubble. Seeing what people only want to see, especially ones that comfort them. That's why too many people are unaware on certain things.
How? I’ll bet half the world knows, and probably most of them don’t want to
A whole lot of people are actively avoiding political news.
Some because they hate the vitrol, and a whole lot who are voting for Trump and don't want to face what that means.
Ask them!
You're surrounded!
We're painfully aware. Please get everyone who's eligible to go vote, we can't, but are still affected.
How anyone in the US doesn't know is beyond me. Hell, you'd have to not go outside, and not go online. Which you'd imagine to be fairly rare.
That does kind of explain a lot.
I know we're all in our own occasionally overlapping echo chambers, but the betting odds and prediction markets still tend to favor Trump, some of the larger ones pretty heavily. It's very disconnected from the narrative I've been seeing about Kamala here and elsewhere, I hope that narrative is right, but still doesn't line up.
Why do I keep seeing people putting stock in "betting markets"? ... Somehow professional gamblers became respected replacements for polls some and I do not get it
We're a week into Kamala's candidacy. Things are going to change around very quickly.
For now, this is a promising sign, but it doesn't mean Trump is done. There's still a long way to go until November.
2 weeks, and she's erased polling deficits!
#maga is drooling in fear through their "tooths", like Pavlov's dog, bc they're hearing the Ding! Ding! Ding! from the electorate.
Who cares what some sweaty terminally online gambling addicts think? Or do you treat the concept of markets as a religion?
So they didn't know "she's in" but did they know Biden dropped out?
"Who?"
-- them
Do they need to? She's not over 80 and she's not Trump.
Are you in a swing state?