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For those watching the Presidential election, things have been looking very bad for Kamala lately, with national polls tightening, and Trump ahead in several key states. Although it remains too close to call, Trump's odds have shot up to 57% according to Polymarket.
Harris's 1.4% lead in national polls is cold comfort given that, at a similar point in the election, Biden was up by 9.4% and Clinton was up by 6.7%.
Democratics are panicking about Trump's support in the black community, which has traditionally voted 90/10 in favor of Democrats. While Trump will still lose the black vote by large margins, his style is more appealing to black voters (especially men) then previous Republican candidates like Mitt Romney. Democrats have responded by trying to shame black voters. Recently, Barack Obama was even unearthed to chastise black men for not wanting to vote for Harris.
Enter the latest vote-buying scheme, which I think is the most naked attempt to buy votes I've ever seen in recent US politics, even more than college debt forgiveness.
https://x.com/KamalaHarris/status/1845993766441644386
Harris-Walz have proposed a 20k forgiveable loan for up to 1 million Black (capital B) entrepreneurs to start a business. The fact that the loan is forgiveable means that this is essentially a gift to any grifter who wants to take advantage. But most importantly, it's explicit racial discrimination against the 86% of the country who isn't black.
Personally, I think this appeal is likely to backfire as most swing voters are sick of handouts to people who aren't them.
Will Trump counter with some asinine scheme of his own? Probably.
I know very little about prediction markets, so can someone explain to me how likely it is that Trump's surge on for example Polymarket is the result more of speculative behavior than of people rationally trying to predict the winner of the election? I don't really see any reason to currently view the race as being anything other than pretty close to 50-50. People might say well, if I believe that then why not try to make some money on it? And maybe that's fair. But that does not necessarily mean that the betting odds on Polymarket are actually an accurate guide to the likely election outcome.
The prediction markets, if anything, seem to be underselling Trump's chances right now.
I'd check out RealClearPolitics, which does a good job of aggregating all the polls. Trump is ahead in 6 of 7 swing states right now. Based on current polling averages, Trump wins 302 electoral votes. More importantly, polls are moving in his favor each day:
https://www.realclearpolling.com/elections/president/2024/battleground-states
Another data point. At this point in the campaign 8 years ago, Hilary was up by over 6.7 points nationally. Biden was up by 10 points. So we'd expect the polls to undersell Republican support on average. If the 2024 campaign follows the same trajectory as previous ones, Trump wins the popular vote by 3% and an electoral college landslide.
So, absent other information, I'd put Trump's odds at 70-80%. But I also know that I'm lacking information and fallible. I trust that the prediction markets are likely to be a truer reflection of the current state of the race than my opinions. There's actually a decent amount of liquidity in this particular market, with over $1 billion gambled, and a small bid ask spread of just 0.1%.
As much as I think the "Trump campaign is in disarray! They were not prepared for Kamala! Coconut-couchfucker-joy!" offensive was fake, I'll keep repeating "it's not over until it's over". Someone else also pointed out back then that relying on pollsters' past bias might be risky, because you never know when they might decide to correct for it.
Oh yeah, I'm with you. And we also can't escape the fact that many swing states have serious flaws in their election security.
A lot can still happen. I would expect a maximally damaging and fake news story to drop against Trump in the next few days. (50% chance). But on the plus side, Biden seems to hate Kamala so some of the levers that the current administration can pull (like sabre-rattling with Iran) won't get pulled.
Source?
See the recent Harris DeSantis Biden exchanges.
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It was revealed to me in a dream
Low-effort comments lead to low-effort responses. Knock it off, all of you.
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Do you think you're on reddit or something?
Okay, @stuckinbathroom's "Source?" is obnoxious, but so is this.
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You want, like, a scientific study?
I’d take it if you had one.
But I’d settle for an interview, or even rumors like we had for Obama and Biden.
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You make it sound as if pollster bias is just a simple matter of them deciding not to correct for them, rather than them trying repeatedly to correct for it but reality being surprising in various ways.
Hofstadler's Law of polling mean there is always a shy Tory effect, even when you correct for Hofstadler's Law.
Right, but that doesn’t mean the pollsters aren’t trying to correct for it all the same.
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Yes, and you seem to be implying there's something strange about that?
If the bias is consistently in the same direction, I find it unlikely that they are actually trying to correct it. I'd have to look up the post I'm citing, but I think they were talking about Sweden where their right-populist party was underestimated during one election, overestimated in the next one, and finally estimated correctly in the one after that. This is what you'd expect to see if they were trying.
How do you explain the pollster debate over polling methodologies if they’re not trying to correct for biases? Perhaps sometimes the biases are hard to correct for https://archive.is/6tjvT
The same way I explain debates over methodology in academia, which result in a peer review process that can't outperform laymen simply looking at studies' titles.
That does not imply a peer review process that can’t outperform laymen, because laypeople are only acting on the outputs of the peer review process. Moreover, a prediction performance of 67% may be much higher than chance, but there’s clearly a lot of signal still that laypeople cannot discern. You’d expect something different if they’re not trying at all.
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I’ll go one further. I don’t think any poll is actually trying to figure out who will win so much as to convince the electorate of whatever the polling centers want to be true. There’s really no reason to bother with them other than to see if anything is changing within the narrative.
Polls are destructive tests: once you conduct one and announce the results, the value changes.
Which is kind of the point. If the point was just to see who might win, why publish the results? If the polls say Trump wins, then it’s useful perhaps in business where you might want to long term plan for the future economic policies Trump brings. Or it might be useful to the various campaigns as a signal of where the weak points are. I suspect that they aren’t getting the polls generally available to the public, which are not about reporting the likely winners, but in motivating or demotivating various factions in the electorate. CNN isn’t trying to guess the outcome. They want to scare democrats into voting and working harder for Kamala and saying she might lose is motivation for people who are afraid of a Trump second term. If they’re wrong, it’s not like they get a black eye even.
I think what makes more sense is to try to gage enthusiasm and whether or not some factions of the base are not on board. Kamala has a big problem because of Israel Palestine. There’s a fairly large portion of the left that’s jumping to either staying home or voting Green Party. If they’re serious, I think that’s a problem no matter what the polls say. I don’t see the same divide with any issues for Trump. I see lots of people saying they can’t wait to vote for Trump. Both things seem important as data points.
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Nate Silver has written about how the Red Wave that never manifested was in fact never well supported by the polling data and instead was a result of just such an overcorrection so there is at least some evidence in that direction.
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Trump has had two Presidential elections so far. Even with no bias, you'd expect the error to be the same sign 50% of the time.
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The dark and cynical but not quite CapitalRoom level of cynicism is that the pollsters have to keep the polls showing the possibility of a Harris victory to give the Democrats cover when they "find" enough ballots to put her over the top.
This has been the theory put forth by some commenters over at the Dreaded Jim's blog.
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I do have to say it's concerning that this election runs through several of our nation's most corrupt cities: Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.
I won't make specific claims but it's the height of naivete to think these cities can run an election correctly.
What city exists that Republicans actually trust?
Until we get annexation of metropolitan areas it's just going to be like this.
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There is also the possibility that the underlying cause for the bias could have abated. Support for Trump can have normalised in poll answering demographics for instance.
I still find it likely that some underestimation is going on but I wouldn't be surprised if the poll aggregate is largely accurate or even overestimating Trump.
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