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Notes -
Re: the Selzer poll.
I'd like to examine the wording of this poll and the effect had on the outcome. The wording was as follows:
The September poll, by contrast, did not include language targeted at early voters:
The 2020 wording of the Selzer poll was as follows:
The 2016 wording was as follows:
I believe the "If you already voted, for whom did you vote?" wording of the October 2024 poll skewed the results for a few reasons. First, it seems slightly confusing. It's possible that respondents could have interpreted the additional wording as being about their perception of how others would have voted. Given that Democrats tend to vote early and people tend to know this because of the 2020 election coverage, this may have skewed the result. Secondly, poll questions should be as short and simple as possible. The 2020 wording of the question was much shorter, and did not include multiple parts for poll respondents to think through. The 2016 wording, while structured similarly to 2024, also did not include language about early voting. One rule of survey design is to avoid asking multiple questions at once, and this violates that.
Lastly, the inclusion of this language may bias participation towards respondents who did vote early. And while that does tend to favor Democrats, Nate Silver has written about how early voting doesn't predict results. Therefore, the accuracy of this poll result may be skewed.
Overall: The markets moving from 60/40 to 50/50 might have happened anyway and this just happened to be the outlier poll that triggered it. It's probably a good thing that the betting markets now accurately reflect where the race has been according to aggregators like Nate. But the result seems to be due to the wording of the poll, rather than an underlying change in the Iowa (read: Midwestern) electorate.
EDIT: For contrast, the Emerson poll showed a 53%/43% lead for Trump and was worded as follows:
It seems like she heavily oversampled democrats in a state that has gotten redder since 2020. Oddly she gave the poll results to Dems before releasing. I think it is a bad poll designed to discourage Republican turnout nationally.
Edit:
If you look more you see things like seniors moving allegedly almost 30 points away from Trump. Ditto non college voters. We aren’t seeing that kind of data anywhere else. Indeed Selzer showed Trump up over 18 points against Biden. Are we really to believe that Trump lost 21 points over a few months to Harris led by a surge in 65+ voters?
I have to control for my own partisan bias and wishcasting, but the Democrat confidence in abortion being such a powerful swing issue as to decide this election is baffling to me. Does it have such a powerful grip on the female vote?
In my opinion, it's what Democratic operatives want to be true rather than reflecting the reality of the electorate - in that the most ardently pro-life voters are also women. Kamala is already winning her base of single affluent women by a lot. Increasing their turnout doesn't seem like a winning play - especially with her losses everywhere else.
Abortion is functionally the only issue that gains votes for democrats this cycle(economy/inflation, crime, the border, censorship etc all gain votes for Trump and usually other republicans. Even the damn squirrel), so it makes sense for democrats to emphasize it.
There is democrat messaging that looks, to me, like being high on their own supply- eg, the Harris ad about how nobody knows who you voted for. But punching the abortion issue, especially in the way that they're doing it(eg- Collin Allred has an ad in my market featuring an ob/gyn claiming Texas law bans abortions to save a woman's life. This is explicitly a lie, but functionally nobody wants it to be true either) is good politics. Democrats are competently and intelligently playing a pretty bad hand most of the time.
There's also the scare tactic "Trump is a Fascist! Electing him will mean the end of democracy!" which has been everywhere on Reddit the past few days.
My MIL shockingly seems to support Trump. This is a woman who voted for Biden in 2020. She is pissed off with the Nazi comps as she had family lost in the holocaust.
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