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NYT: Trump Leads in 5 Critical States as Voters Blast Biden, Times/Siena Poll Finds
This is a bit of a surprise to me, considering PredictIt has Biden up 42 vs Trump 37 (the rest are Newsom, DeSantis, etc), and Biden is at 53% on Manifold. ElectionBettingOdds.com has had Trump up for weeks now, though, so make of that as you will.
But the real reason I wanted to share the NYT article is just how delusional I thought the comments are. I'll post the top five, by number of reader recommends (i.e. upvotes).
Stats about the polling:
The polls of 3,662 registered voters were conducted by telephone using live operators Oct. 22-Nov. 3. The margin of sampling error for each state is from 4.4 to 4.8 percentage points. ...by telephone using live operators. Again with the voice call polling. So in other words people answering a phone call from unknown caller. This is anecdotal but I don't know anyone under 50 who answers a call from numbers they don't recognize or don't hang up when it sounds like a telemarketer.
41 Replies 1254 Recommend
What were the demographics of those who gave their views? And these individuals contacted, were they only speaking on land line phones? Very important considerations in determining the validity of such a survey.
21 Replies 634 Recommend
Regarding the folks who voted for Biden last time, yet will be supporting Trump in 2024 that were mentioned in the article, what I can't understand is if they voted for Biden solely because Trump's behavior turned them off, how is it that they are suddenly okay with it now? I'm especially baffled by this given that Trump's worst action was the Jan. 6 insurrection in my opinion, and that occurred after the 2020 Election.
7 Replies 591 Recommend
More than anything, these polls remind me that the Republicans are vastly superior at controlling the narrative and perceptions. Terrible at actually governing, but brilliant at marketing - especially fear-based marketing.
3 Replies 551 Recommend
The actual numbers on the economy don't translate to relief for working families. 6 years ago I could buy lunch from a food cart near work for $6. Now it's $11. Rent has increased by nearly 50 percent in that time, too. My income sure has not.
The people buying lunch are feeling it. So are the food cart owners.
The unfortunate part of this is Trump (or any other Republican running) won't do a thing to curb inflation or reorient the economy in favor of normal people. He's going to give more handouts to rich friends and billionaires.
Worse yet, he's going to head an anti-labor administration whose NLRB made it almost impossible to unionize. Biden still isn't the strong labor backer we need, as we saw with the rail workers strike, but it is at least much easier to organize under a Biden NLRB.
That's the only way working people are going to fix our economic situation: a president won't do it. We have to organize and demand a fair share of what we do.
14 Replies 510 Recommend
OK let me just share the next three because they're short:
These poll results defy common sense.
7 Replies 467 Recommend
never mind just the under 50. I'm over 70 and don't answer unknown callers. All this proves is the type of personality that answers unknown calls is more likely to vote for Trump.
In Reply to Darrell J 431 Recommend
How is this even possible? What a horrible headline to wake up to on a Sunday morning.
6 Replies 404 Recommend
I don't think the reader bias will surprise anyone, but what surprised me was just how emotionally skewed it seemed to be. It's like a mass mourning, with people trying to shoot the messenger (i.e. poll methodology) rather than accepting the message. The only comment that made sense to me, highlighting the perniciousness of inflation, still had to incorporate pot shots at Trump or the GOP. Anything for that upvote, I guess.
At any rate, I don't think this means all that much when we're a year out. No one knows where the economy will go in this time, or if Haley magically nabs the GOP nom, or if the Dems pull a 5D move and get Biden to withdraw after Trump gets the GOP nomination and have Newsom step in.
Low hanging fruit to pull zealots from comments sections, it’s not like Facebook comments on Fox News articles would be any better.
Skeptical Trump will win. Far from impossible, but I’d give Trump-Biden 30-70 odds. The “‘member Charlottesville/Jan6/Roe reversal” messaging has barely even begun, lots of liberals are performatively critical of Biden now because of inflation/Palestine/not being as progressive as they want etc etc. But I see little reason to believe they won’t come out against the great satan when the time comes. These people are going to be bombarded with 6+ months of messaging saying that women will be executed for having abortions under Trump, that all migrants will be deported, that gay marriage will be reversed, that Medicare will be stopped, that POC will be (more) oppressed blah blah blah.
The problem with Trump was never him directly (at least when it came to conservatives), but that he riled up the libs to the point that voter apathy on the left/center (which the right needs) was minimized. He’s going to spend the next year riling up the Libs with ever-intensifying rhetoric. Progressives can say they don’t really care and don’t really like Biden now, but will they be saying the same a year from now? It shifted fast with Bernie too.
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The betting sites do not seem to be factoring in current polling/general vibes i get. I’d say if we had a snap election in 2 weeks Trump would win big.
I’ve been extremely confused by betting markets. Either they think something will break for the Dems to get a coin flip (which Trump is less than a coin flip) or it seems like they are pricing in wide spread fraud. But I 100% agree with you noting the betting markets I’ve checked them lately and they don’t feel like they moved nearly enough.
Mean reversion probably will happen but Trump feels like a 90-95% win probability if we held elections now.
I mean, if Trump gets removed from the ballot, he can't win, and there are actual court proceedings going on about that. I wouldn't really term that "election fraud" so much as an "unfree election", but pricing that in is sound*.
*For someone who lives in the 'States and intends to continue living in the 'States, it's necessary to discount the "no Republican on ballot" situation steeply due to the "don't bet on situations where you won't be able to spend your winnings" issue, but there'd probably be enough time after market resolution to flee and cash out into a foreign currency, and foreign bettors don't have that problem.
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I don't think there is any confusion to be had. Polling is exactly about whether somebody would win in two weeks. Betting is if somebody is going to win in 2024.
I am not sure why this simple fact is somehow mysterious. There is a difference betting if some sports team wins head-to-head next Sunday or late 2024. There will be some underlying similarities, but a lot of things can change between now and then.
The betting markets aren’t perfect but they seem to indicate Biden is still favored head to head. It’s possible but feels wrong to me.
It’s like if the Steelers played the Cowboys. The Steelers went up 21-0 but espn probability calculator of victory was 54% Cowboys before the game and still 54% Cowboys after the Steelers went up 21-0. You can make a story why it’s correct but from a Bayesian calculation it feels like the score changing is important news.
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Seems like you answered your own question? But the betting sites aren't betting on who would win if the election was today and the correlation between polls and election results decreases the farther out the election is.
(Also it always bears pointing out that PredictIt charges 10% of your profits which seriously hampers the accuracy of its predictions).
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It doesn't need to be fraud for there to be a significant disjunct between the population being polled and the population whose votes actually get tabulated. Particularly with the relaxation of rules around drop-off ballots, early voting, and ballot harvesting in many states, activists have much more leeway to shape the electorate by activating particular groups of low-propensity voters than they did prior to the 2020 cycle.
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I think that the prediction markets might be pricing in things like 3rd parties, which a Trump vs Biden poll doesn't account for.
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Reddit used to say this about Bernie polls all the time
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Have we considered that democrats are just down bad because voters blame them for screwing the pooch badly, even if the pooch screwing was mostly bipartisan?
I’ve seen polling results from the nov 7 elections- granted that none of them are in places that would be competitive in ‘24, unless it’s like a city council race or something equally meaningless- indicating that republicans are winning the generic ballot by a lot a lot. Trumps personal unpopularity just takes him from ‘winning Wisconsin by double digits, flipping New Mexico Virginia and Colorado, and having a decent shot at Minnesota’ to ‘ahead in every swing state but Wisconsin’.
I suppose the only mystery is why Wisconsin was the odd man out- it certainly seems like the reddest out of the rust belt swing states.
Wisconsin is one of the hardest states to poll in the country and definitely the hardest state to poll of the rust belt states because of their demographics and decentralized population. It's pretty hard to get a representative sample.
No. Trump's popularity is what wins Wisconsin when he campaigns there or is on the ballot because he motivates voter turnout. When he's not or when [insert establishment GOP here] is running, they lose because they don't motivate voters to show up. Ron Johnson is an excellent example of this. Wisconsin is a Trump/MAGA state, not a GOP state. Mitt Romney lost Wisconsin by 7+ 2012 and McCant lost by 13+ points in 2008. The demos in Wisconsin didn't change much; the reason Trump won Wisconsin and won again 2020 absent illegal elections changes and obvious fraud is because the new working class/MAGA message resonates and motivate the voters there. This is the same story from the 2022 election when you compare the house seats to the state-wide offices.
which is why a dude like Dan Kelly was obliterated in the Supreme Court race 6 months ago despite the "generic ballot" looking great for the GOP at the time
This bogus claim that absent Trump the GOP would be killing it in the rustbelt states is a popular un-falsifiable belief of large portions of this forum and it's garbage and it has little support and a bunch of evidence against it. No, [insert GOP derp here] as presidential candidate wasn't going to win Wisconsin in 2016 or 2020.
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Other Republicans poll worse than Trump against Biden. Trump is the only one polling a win.
Haley beats Biden by more than Trump does on current polling.
One, Haley likely loses every single rustbelt state and therefore the election. National election polling isn't the most predictive.
Two, current polling is what matters, not the average of a couple polls from months ago with one from a few weeks ago. In your own link, the one recent poll (within the last few weeks) has Biden beating Haley by 4 and Trump performing better in every single poll from the time of the last Haley Poll to now.
No, Haley doesn't beat Biden more than Trump. Not in polling and not in the state level polls which are the ones which matter.
Has Haley even been polled vs Biden in state level polls?
Granted it's all a bit of an academic question at the moment - in practice the GOP nomination is a 1 horse race.
The question has been asked in some polls which then adjust and publish results for top-level questions like Trump v Biden or Trump v Desantis v Haley v etc. You can get that unadjusted data for these other questions in cross-tabs from some polling firms.
Oh hey, turns out NYT/Siena polled Haley v Biden in the same battleground states as they just did for Trump. So we have some recent direct comparisons from a reputable pollster.
GA: Haley +5 (equal with Trump)
AZ: Haley +9 (4 better than Trump)
NV: Haley +9 (2 worse than Trump)
PA: Haley +10 (5 better than Trump)
MI: Haley +10 (10 better than Trump)
WI: Haley +14 (16 better than Trump)
Doesn't seem like she loses every rustbelt state.
are these raw or adjusted? did you look at the poll or just link tweet?
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Prediction markets are of course reflecting not just the current polls (which are disastrous for Biden) but also the realistic prospect that Trump will be in prison at the time of the election.
Is there protocol for that? Is he even eligible at that point? Does he reign from prison? Is he released? Can he release himself? Seems like I should know these things.
Eugene Debs' 1920 run on the Socialist ticket was from prison because he was still serving a 10-year sentence he received for sedition based on 1918 speeches advocating resistance of the WWI draft. Notably, in addition to the prison term he was also sentence to a lifetime disenfranchisement, so in addition to running from jail he couldn't even vote for himself. However, he only got 3% of the vote and didn't win any states, so there was never any cause to examine the matter further.
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He can pardon himself for federal crimes, which are the ones he will likely be convicted of first. The Georgia case will be a lot messier, but also it's unlikely to conclude before the election (unless Willis can get another dozen people to take plea deals).
I think it's pretty unlikely that he wins from prison though. Even if he apparently has the nomination sewn up by that point, there's still the prospect of the GOP pulling some kind of shenanigans at the convention to give the nomination to someone else. And if they really do go ahead and try to win with their candidate in prison, they probably lose.
You think the Dems will go that far versus just being an election stunt? Regardless of whether he was guilty or not it looks like a huge issue for Democracy if they put him in jail before the election.
I still work on a model that they want bad press. Winning an election thru the criminal justice system seems wrong and a threat to half the country trusting the system. I’m not sure we can come back from that which makes me think the power brokers would back off from going quite that far.
After the election there’s no reason to prosecute Trump.
If he is truly guilty (and obviously that is a big if) then not jailing him is also a huge issue for democracy. It will unambiguously show that the powerful do not have to follow the same rules as everyone else, that ex-Presidents are not held to the same standards as the common man. Which has probably always been true, but that is one reason politicians often step down at the whiff of scandal. So the curtain is not entirely pulled back.
Of course they aren't, this is priced in, it's standard wisdom. We try not to prosecute the previous president so as not to become a banana republic.
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Well legal or illegal is really just breaking the rules of the current ruling class. Elections decide who is the current ruling class. Elections get to decide who wields power.
From that perspective I do think elections are > some court case. If he wins tbe election he literally because innocent because he’s now the one who decides if something is legal or illegal. That’s Democracy.
That might be kind of how democracy works in practice, but its not how the illusion of democracy is said to work so it gains support from the people.
No-one is above the law is the myth here.And its an important one for stabilities sake.
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That is very much not democracy as envisioned in the constitution of the United States of America. There is a separation of powers and being elected president doesn't make you emperor. The legislature and courts determine the law. Power is deliberately separated and modeled after the Roman Republic, not the Empire.
Well lawfare exist, and with enough prosecutorial power you can find some regulation that’s broken to throw a guy in jail especially anyone whose had to make a lot of decisions. So in practice it just becomes an ability to put political opponents in jail.
Obama had Rezko. Clinton had perjury. Hillary had document management issues. Biden well has his whole crime family. Bush probably broke some war crimes if I look into it. They could all be imprisoned with control of the justice system.
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Lol, no he doesn't. The legislature decides if something is illegal or illegal.
With limits. They cannot criminalize valid exercises of executive or judicial powers.
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Prosecutorial discretion don't real?
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Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Who do you think is going to be the decision maker who stops this ball rolling? Do you think Jack Smith is going to suddenly drop the charges? Do you think Tanya Chutkin is going to just dismiss the case out of hand? And if so on what legal basis? Do you think the DC-based jury, pulling from a jurisdiction that voted 92-5 against Trump, is going to give Trump a pass after all the Jan 6 trials got convictions?
None of that is happening. The best case scenario for Trump is he somehow gets one diehard MAGA person on the panel to hang the jury.
"Are we really going to do this?" is a serious decision. But you don't make that decision when the trial is already underway, you make it before you bring charges. In large part that's what the Jan 6 Committee was about - not so much convincing the public that Trump was a crook, but pressuring the DoJ to pull the trigger on prosecuting him and putting him in prison.
All the choices have been made. We're now just watching them play out. It's not a stunt, they are coming to bury him.
Who would stop them? Biden/Blinken/top members of the Democrats. Tell them to pause or shut things down.
Why?
The system would be ungovernable if Trump is in jail and we have him as the GOP candidate. If he loses say with 48% of the vote then GOP has cause to break the entire system. The entire system works because of voluntary compliance. If you end that then nothing works and prosecuting Trump gives you justification. Secession becomes quite justifiable if they remove half the countries ability to participate in Democracy. It would be 1860 again. Would be equally as bad if Trump wins from prison (highly likely). Or you could see Desantis refuse extradition which he would be justified in doing.
I’d think the adults in the room like Blinken get this. And it’s a stunt. Because the alternative can’t happen.
Where do you put the odds on it happening without their say so?
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Lol, Biden is not going to save Trump. You're delusional.
That seems very Danerys Targaryen of wanting to rule over the ashes. It’s not saving “Trump” it’s maintaining some part of America and Democracy.
You don’t think jailing a likely Presidential winner during an election is a constitutional crisis and an attempt to disenfranchise a significant part of the electorate?
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He can most likely release himself. I believe it has to do with The Federal government having supremacy on these matters. It would be a constitutional issue and open up a can of worms to keep him in prison. If that occurred then any rogue state could just imprison political enemies (basically what is happening here).
A felon sometimes can’t vote but they can hold office.
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Seems plausible result. If people are fed-up with That Lot then it's natural they want to vote The Other Crowd in next time. Happens everywhere, and as somebody once said, "it's the economy, stupid". People who are feeling the pinch in their own pay packets don't much care if "But Bezos made another eighty million this month, so the economy is going gangbusters!" and they do blame whoever is currently in power for that.
Since Trump right now looks like the most likely Republican potential nominee, then yeah it's going to be Trump versus Biden Round II and the 'mushy middle' voters are going to switch from Team Blue to Team Red.
All that being said, there is a good point about telephone polling and how effective it is, now that everyone including Grandma has moved to smartphones and hardly ever answer their landline phones, particularly if the phone rings and you're not expecting a call. Now you simply assume it's a scammer or a cold calling sales person (but I repeat myself) since if it's family, friends, or even work, they'll ring you on your mobile. Thus you ignore the call.
They have ways around this. It's not like this type of problem isn't well known since they got the FDR election wrong with the phone book bias.
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Interesting data point against the recently debated idea that Americans actually do think that the economy is doing well when it comes to themselves.
Anyway, I still don't know why I'm supposed to care so much which one of these two candidates wins. Biden would do some things to hurt democracy, would support Ukraine a bit more, would support Israel a bit less, and would yell at Russia more. Trump would do some things to hurt democracy, would support Ukraine a bit less, would support Israel a bit more, and would yell at China more. The economy would muddle along without either one being able to do much more than just cheerlead when it's good and shift blame when it's bad. Biden would make certain kinds of mouth noises about immigration through the southern border, Trump would make a different kind of noises. At the end of the day probably not much would change because the president has limited power over the issue and Americans like cheap burritos and construction work, and companies like to hire the people who make it possible.
Neither candidate is someone I could imagine ever voting for. Both parties deeply, fundamentally disgust me in different ways. Biden would make one group of annoying people online scream that the world is ending, Trump would make a different group of annoying people online scream that the world is ending. As before, the Internet outrage would overrepresent the kind of person who spends a lot of time online writing about politics and would fail to capture the fact that in the "real world", most Americans don't really care that much about politics.
The only way I can think of that either candidate could truly screw things up as president is by getting into a major war with Russia and/or China. And, while Trump's legacy in office is more peaceful than Biden's, the combination of Biden's restraint from actually directly intervening in Iran, Israel, or Ukraine and Trump's volatile chest-pounding, boomercon love of Israel / hate of Iran, and anti-China rhetoric leaves me not entirely convinced that Trump would actually be less likely to go to war. I do think Trump is probably a bit less likely to go to war, but it's not enough to make me want to go vote for him.
If Trump is somehow actually significantly leading in polls with the election a month away, despite the usual rioting and screaming about fascism from Dem-aligned news outlets that we'll probably see next year, we will be in for an interesting outcome though if Biden wins anyway. I doubt that it would be enough to make the True Trump Patriots (tm) actually get up off their couches and do anything with their gun collections other than post pictures of them online, but who knows.
I don't much bother with polls, since there's little to no way you can find out what questions they asked, how they asked them, and who they asked them; what matters is the result on the day when people go out to vote (or mail in their votes).
They can certainly give an indication of which way the wind is blowing, but I think if you pin your hopes on "polls say we're ten points ahead, it's in the bag!" then Hillary Clinton has an unused inaugural address she can give you for nothing.
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I feel like attacking polling methodology is a pretty bipartisan pastime and isn’t surprising at all to me that it’s happening in the comments section.
We had multiple threads on here with challenges to official inflation data so unsure why polling wouldn’t be challenged.
All pollsters have significant errors in their models, but taken in aggregate they're the best predictor of who will win an election, particularly once the candidates are well-known. Certainly better than economic models (although economic factors are important, that signal is captured by polls), yard sign counts, donations, or people's gut instincts.
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