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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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Kamabla's poll numbers were surging. But the pollers have been MIA for a few days, even though tons of polls dropped every day up to last week. Meanwhile Rasmussen claims that other pollsters have changed their methodology in order to juice Kamabla's numbers. On one hand Rasmussen Reports is a partisan hack, but on the other hand they do a respectable job actually polling.

Is there any evidence of this happening? I remember seeing a post claiming that recent polls have polled proportionally more democrats rather than Republicans and Independents. And since party identification likely changes slower than voting preference, we could be seeing a big Simpson's paradox happening. But it would also be hard for pollsters to secretly juice these numbers without noticeably changing their methodology.

edit: Of course there's no doubt that Kamabla is performing much much better than Joe, but is it overstated as part of the campaign's big money blitz, or is it accurate?

Seeing the NPR story below, I don't trust media to give us the raw truth without putting their thumbs heavily on the scale first. So, yeah, I assume the polls are somewhat faked as well, although low confidence.

But why are you spelling it Kamabla? Whatever that is, please don't.

Here's an article I found with a number of theories on why Trump is calling Kamala Kamabla.

The funniest but highly improbable explanation would be that Trump is speaking Lojban.

"ka mabla" literally means "shittiness" (or more accurately "[generic derogative]-ness", but that's harder to translate).