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2024 Presidential Election Thread - Let's keep the party going.

bolverk

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 89625

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2 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

pelosi was speaker, dem controlled 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Republicans had more states in the House in 2020, and each state gets a single vote.

I know you're saying Pelosi would have tried to block it, but I also think Johnson is too fucking stupid to try and get something like that through.

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Chopper

Chopper 17230

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2 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

 

they can pass this and that, does it go directly to the Supreme Court ?

expect extreme federalist society and heritage foundation fuckery here. dumb ass paxton will jump on that wagon too, one way or another

Oh they're absolutely going to try a bunch of things when they lose. I believe they think they're much cleverer than they truly are. Who the Speaker is and whether it's a R or D, will have no bearing on vote certification imo. Why or how they think they can rig the election through the House is a mystery to me. If anything it would have to be done at the Supreme Court level, but the Court would need a case that would change the election to act on first, a longshot, so it's impossible to know what may happen for certain. 

You know how dumb Trump is, right? Who knows what "secret plan" he's worked out with Mike Johnson. Trump's a loon. 

 

 

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atomheartbevo

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At Kamala's inauguration, I want them to have offered Lee Greenwood a chance to sing, and when he turns it down, I want them to play "God Bless the USA".  Make MAGA lose their shit.

Speaking of losing their shit, those "speakers" tonight at MSG who helped Kamala out, they better watch their butts. MAGA won't forgive them for motivating Puero Ricans and Latinos to get out and vote. .

Edited by atomheartbevo
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tx 3 putt

tx 3 putt 76868

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14 minutes ago, Chopper said:

Oh they're absolutely going to try a bunch of things when they lose. I believe they think they're much cleverer than they truly are. Who the Speaker is and whether it's a R or D, will have no bearing on vote certification imo. Why or how they think they can rig the election through the House is a mystery to me. If anything it would have to be done at the Supreme Court level, but the Court would need a case that would change the election to act on first, a longshot, so it's impossible to know what may happen for certain. 

You know how dumb Trump is, right? Who knows what "secret plan" he's worked out with Mike Johnson. Trump's a loon. 

 

 

 

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mike-johnson-stop-election-certification_n_66fc7ecae4b0453dc1ee7025

good write up here on the new and beefed up elections 'laws' 

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tx 3 putt

tx 3 putt 76868

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well I didn't know this ...

The Jan. 6, 2025, certification will be unlike any before it. For the first time in the nation’s history, the counting of the electoral votes has been designated a national security event by the U.S. Secret Service ...

WASHINGTON – The 2025 Counting and Certification of Electoral Votes in Washington, DC on Jan. 6, 2025, has been designated a National Special Security Event by the Secretary of Homeland Security.

https://www.secretservice.gov/newsroom/releases/2024/09/2025-counting-and-certification-electoral-votes-designated-national#

 

 

if a fake  assassination attempt story breaks and secret service members were involved, this whole deal gets much more interesting 

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tx 3 putt

tx 3 putt 76868

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20 minutes ago, wood said:


Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism
The inflammatory rally was a capstone for an increasingly aggrieved campaign for Donald Trump, whose rhetoric has grown darker and more menacing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/27/us/trump-msg-rally.html

 

a rat trapped in the corner 

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PenelopeWitherspoon

PenelopeWitherspoon 19100

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12 hours ago, henrygandorf said:

 

Yep. Infuriating, but dead on.

12 hours ago, StassneyHorn said:

Yea, seemed really forced. He was a writer for the Comedy Central roasts as well and had the best set at Tom Brady’s.

Nikki Glazer had the best set, and it wasn’t close.

11 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

 

 

 

I would either. But I’d also go find a nice hotel. 

11 hours ago, henrygandorf said:

greg gutfeld thinks he’s a comedian too, so it’s not like the bar is set that high.  

His show tapes next door to my office. The people that attend are old and white.

10 hours ago, Ghost of LL said:

Jesus Christ--is this what a Yale education gets you these days?

London hasn't felt like an English city in 300 years.  It's an Imperial capital.  It feels like an Imperial capital.  It has felt like an Imperial capital for three centuries.  When you land at Heathrow, you land alongside flights from the Subcontinent, from the Caribbean, and from the Antipodes.  Then when you take the Elizabeth Line in, you're going to be next to people from right across the old Empire.  And when you get into town, you'll get some kick-ass Chinese, Jamaican, and Pakistani food--all because many of those families came to London when London was still their capital, too.

For its part, New York isn't "American."  It was a Dutch colony.  Actually, it was an enterprise of the Dutch East India Company.  And the Company didn't give a fuck whether you came from the Netherlands or England or Italy.  The Company didn't care whether you were Protestant or Catholic or Jewish or Muslim or nothing in particular.  The Company cared that you would be economically beneficial for New Netherlands.  These weren't religious zealots like you had up in Boston.  New York has always been multicultural from the moment it was founded--intentionally so.

 

Do they seriously not teach this shit at Yale anymore?

Exactly.

10 hours ago, Sawbonz said:

10 to 1 the stupid fuck doesn’t realize Puerto Ricans are US citizens 

Absolutely doesn’t realize it.

10 hours ago, Texas Jeff said:

Every one of these assholes will go out to eat tonight or stay at a clean hotel or take a cab or eat food that someone else picked or have their lawn mowed or need help in some way with something and there is a good chance that an immigrant will provide that service for them.  An immigrant who is just trying to climb up the ladder and provide a safe home for their family.

We all benefit from the work of people who are just here to live the American dream.

This.

8 hours ago, Chopper said:

image.png.573ba29bee279d676481c6e5a309a9eb.png

 

Using the C-Word. Was only a matter of time before Maga implied cunt. Of course it was Elon.

8 hours ago, Brisketexan said:


This is what Brisket has been fucking saying for years now.

Talking about yourself in the third person…really?

8 hours ago, safe sex said:

If you haven't nuked your twitter by now, what's keeping you from doing it? It's owned and run by an openly proud Nazi. Look at his FUCKING HAT

This!

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G650

G650 14229

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7 hours ago, NIUHuskies said:

Driving through the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia today, my guess rural areas had like a 65 35 Trump sign advantage. Take that as what it is.

That's actually an improvement for Ds

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horn4life

horn4life 3759

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Well after seeing Trump's triumphant return to Madison Square Garden, I thought to myself.  That is the largest gathering of this like minded group in the Garden since February 20th 1939.  With the only exception being that Trump has told us he was a better President that the guy on the wall in the black and white.

 

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Chuckie Finster

Chuckie Finster 22694

Posted
Posted
NYT has Trump +10 in Texas (lol no) but Cruz only +4
Also Harris +12 in NE-02 and only -4 in NE-01
 

The funny thing about the polls across the board this year is that they generally, logically make sense … except for the Presidential race.
It seems fairly obvious at this point that in order to avoid a third straight MAGA underestimation, there is a Trump-specific correction being applied to that race that is not being applied to the rest by the pollsters.
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Francisco 2.0

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-campaign-worker-blows-whistle-on-grift-and-bugging-plot-in-bombshell-email/

 

Quote

A Trump campaign worker has been fired after trying to blow the whistle on what she called “grift and greed” by top campaign officials—and an alleged “bugging” plot, the Daily Beast has learned.

The worker, whose identity the Beast is withholding, wrote an explosive email after she was fired detailing her concerns about how the campaign’s most senior leaders, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, appear to be funneling millions of dollars to companies which, she alleges, are overcharging Donald Trump. One of them is run by a major donor to Kamala Harris.

 

Quote

“The grift and greed I’ve witnessed makes me sick and I think leadership has been bad stewards of generous donors money,” the campaign worker wrote in an email to a former colleague after she was abruptly fired on Oct. 18. “I‘m 100% on Team Trump—I want the very best for this campaign, but what I’ve witnessed is greedy and wrong.”

 

Quote

Even more sensationally, the woman also wrote in her email that campaign employees became convinced that leadership had installed “a listening device in a cut out hole” to a conference room at campaign headquarters in South Florida to eavesdrop on private conversations by their colleagues.

Sean Dollman, the campaign’s chief financial officer was so worried he was being snooped on that he and others searched the conference room in an attempt to find the surveillance device and block its ability to intercept his conversations, she wrote.

 

Spoiler

Dollman “has alluded to the fact that he can’t say things for fear of retaliation,” the woman added. “There are napkins stuffed in all the gaps in the conference room now. It seems like they’re willing to go to extremes.”

“This is nothing more than fanciful lies and fabrications from a disgruntled former employee of a vendor, and this person apparently was a terrible teammate who also disclosed private, internal information to outside individuals,” the senior campaign official said.

The campaign worker, who has requested that she not be publicly identified, had been responsible for placing Trump’s official campaign ads on platforms such as YouTube and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram. She worked in campaign headquarters for months but was not employed directly by the campaign. Instead she worked for Launchpad Strategies, an in-house ad firm founded and owned by Dollman who, she claimed in the email, had fired her at Wiles’ direction.

In a text message to the Daily Beast, Dollman wrote: “Launchpad made the decision to terminate her for spreading rumors about clients, and repeatedly showing poor judgment.” He declined to respond to further questions about details of the woman’s claims.

The woman in her email does not spell out what she meant by “grift and greed.” But sources told the Daily Beast that the woman had raised concerns for months with Dollman and others about how money for ads was being spent at the direction of LaCivita and Wiles. The issue burst into the spotlight when the Daily Beast revealed how LaCivita’s consulting firm—headquartered in his Virginia home—had already collected $22 million from the campaign and two Trump super PACs since 2022, much of it from commissions on placing ads, with millions more due him by the end of the campaign.

The campaign worker, who was fired three days after the LaCivita story broke, was not the source of the Daily Beast’s exclusive reporting and, when contacted last week, declined to comment for this story. (The Daily Beast has no reason to believe the emails and documents cited in this story were in any way connected to the recent compromise of the Trump campaign by Iranian hackers.)

The issues raised by the fired campaign worker underscore larger complaints about the lack of transparency in the Trump campaign’s disclosure reports, including an alleged repeated failure to identify the ultimate recipients of millions of dollars in campaign ad spending.

Sources told the Beast that over the summer the ad buyer became concerned that Wiles and LaCivita were farming out large digital ad buys to two outside firms, Strategic Media Services in Arlington and Zeta Global in New York, rather than using the campaign’s in-house Launchpad firm. After reviewing invoices, she concluded the outside firms were costing the campaign far more for the same business.

The woman, an ad buyer, prepared detailed charts under the title “How the campaign is being overcharged by political operatives.” One of the charts lists payments to Strategic Media Services, describing it as the firm that had been “chosen by Chris, Susie, political operatives in DC,” referring to LaCivita and Wiles. It then lists invoices appearing to show that Strategic Media was charging 32 percent higher fees on commissions than Launchpad was charging.

As for Zeta Global, also “chosen by Chris/Susie,” the whistleblower’s charts shows it charged the campaign $20 million for placing media ads—$6 million more than the $13.9 million that Launchpad would have charged for the same ads.

The whistleblower also noted that David Steinberg, the CEO of Zeta Global, was a significant Democratic donor to the Harris campaign and other Democratic campaign committees.

Strategic Media and Zeta did not respond to emails seeking comment.

The whistleblower’s email makes no direct allegation that LaCivita or Wiles were receiving portions of the higher commissions from the outside media firms, a not uncommon practice in presidential campaigns. Asked if either of the campaign’s two top officials had received such undisclosed payments, the senior campaign official said: “Not true at all and a complete lie.”

Although the senior Trump campaign official described the woman as an untrustworthy “disgruntled former employee” who is not to be believed, an email exchange the woman had with Wiles after she was fired suggests that, at least at the time and in part, the views of her at the highest levels was not quite so harsh.

The campaign worker, after being fired by Dollman, reached out to Wiles to ask if she could get her job back. Wiles did not offer any immediate hope, saying she would give the matter “a great deal of thought,” according to portions of an email exchange that the woman shared with the source who provided it to The Daily Beast.

Wiles, the campaign co-manager, then added: “You are a talented young woman with many wonderful and important qualities. You have a great work ethic, you’re creative and you have an expertise in your field that is impressive.”

 

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Chad Fuck

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-campaign-worker-blows-whistle-on-grift-and-bugging-plot-in-bombshell-email/
 
A Trump campaign worker has been fired after trying to blow the whistle on what she called “grift and greed” by top campaign officials—and an alleged “bugging” plot, the Daily Beast has learned.
The worker, whose identity the Beast is withholding, wrote an explosive email after she was fired detailing her concerns about how the campaign’s most senior leaders, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, appear to be funneling millions of dollars to companies which, she alleges, are overcharging Donald Trump. One of them is run by a major donor to Kamala Harris.
 
“The grift and greed I’ve witnessed makes me sick and I think leadership has been bad stewards of generous donors money,” the campaign worker wrote in an email to a former colleague after she was abruptly fired on Oct. 18. “I‘m 100% on Team Trump—I want the very best for this campaign, but what I’ve witnessed is greedy and wrong.”
 
Even more sensationally, the woman also wrote in her email that campaign employees became convinced that leadership had installed “a listening device in a cut out hole” to a conference room at campaign headquarters in South Florida to eavesdrop on private conversations by their colleagues.
Sean Dollman, the campaign’s chief financial officer was so worried he was being snooped on that he and others searched the conference room in an attempt to find the surveillance device and block its ability to intercept his conversations, she wrote.
 
Spoiler

Dollman “has alluded to the fact that he can’t say things for fear of retaliation,” the woman added. “There are napkins stuffed in all the gaps in the conference room now. It seems like they’re willing to go to extremes.”
“This is nothing more than fanciful lies and fabrications from a disgruntled former employee of a vendor, and this person apparently was a terrible teammate who also disclosed private, internal information to outside individuals,” the senior campaign official said.
The campaign worker, who has requested that she not be publicly identified, had been responsible for placing Trump’s official campaign ads on platforms such as YouTube and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram. She worked in campaign headquarters for months but was not employed directly by the campaign. Instead she worked for Launchpad Strategies, an in-house ad firm founded and owned by Dollman who, she claimed in the email, had fired her at Wiles’ direction.
In a text message to the Daily Beast, Dollman wrote: “Launchpad made the decision to terminate her for spreading rumors about clients, and repeatedly showing poor judgment.” He declined to respond to further questions about details of the woman’s claims.
The woman in her email does not spell out what she meant by “grift and greed.” But sources told the Daily Beast that the woman had raised concerns for months with Dollman and others about how money for ads was being spent at the direction of LaCivita and Wiles. The issue burst into the spotlight when the Daily Beast revealed how LaCivita’s consulting firm—headquartered in his Virginia home—had already collected $22 million from the campaign and two Trump super PACs since 2022, much of it from commissions on placing ads, with millions more due him by the end of the campaign.
The campaign worker, who was fired three days after the LaCivita story broke, was not the source of the Daily Beast’s exclusive reporting and, when contacted last week, declined to comment for this story. (The Daily Beast has no reason to believe the emails and documents cited in this story were in any way connected to the recent compromise of the Trump campaign by Iranian hackers.)
The issues raised by the fired campaign worker underscore larger complaints about the lack of transparency in the Trump campaign’s disclosure reports, including an alleged repeated failure to identify the ultimate recipients of millions of dollars in campaign ad spending.
Sources told the Beast that over the summer the ad buyer became concerned that Wiles and LaCivita were farming out large digital ad buys to two outside firms, Strategic Media Services in Arlington and Zeta Global in New York, rather than using the campaign’s in-house Launchpad firm. After reviewing invoices, she concluded the outside firms were costing the campaign far more for the same business.
The woman, an ad buyer, prepared detailed charts under the title “How the campaign is being overcharged by political operatives.” One of the charts lists payments to Strategic Media Services, describing it as the firm that had been “chosen by Chris, Susie, political operatives in DC,” referring to LaCivita and Wiles. It then lists invoices appearing to show that Strategic Media was charging 32 percent higher fees on commissions than Launchpad was charging.
As for Zeta Global, also “chosen by Chris/Susie,” the whistleblower’s charts shows it charged the campaign $20 million for placing media ads—$6 million more than the $13.9 million that Launchpad would have charged for the same ads.
The whistleblower also noted that David Steinberg, the CEO of Zeta Global, was a significant Democratic donor to the Harris campaign and other Democratic campaign committees.
Strategic Media and Zeta did not respond to emails seeking comment.
The whistleblower’s email makes no direct allegation that LaCivita or Wiles were receiving portions of the higher commissions from the outside media firms, a not uncommon practice in presidential campaigns. Asked if either of the campaign’s two top officials had received such undisclosed payments, the senior campaign official said: “Not true at all and a complete lie.”
Although the senior Trump campaign official described the woman as an untrustworthy “disgruntled former employee” who is not to be believed, an email exchange the woman had with Wiles after she was fired suggests that, at least at the time and in part, the views of her at the highest levels was not quite so harsh.
The campaign worker, after being fired by Dollman, reached out to Wiles to ask if she could get her job back. Wiles did not offer any immediate hope, saying she would give the matter “a great deal of thought,” according to portions of an email exchange that the woman shared with the source who provided it to The Daily Beast.
Wiles, the campaign co-manager, then added: “You are a talented young woman with many wonderful and important qualities. You have a great work ethic, you’re creative and you have an expertise in your field that is impressive.”

 

lol. She’s almost there but of course it’s the bad people around tfg who are the problem.

It reminds me of a letter to Hitler I read once from a German worker who was building the autobahn. The gist was “I know if you knew what they were doing to us here, you’d stop it.” I’m sure they could hear the Bavarian corporal’s laughter echoing through the Alps for days after that one.

I’m sure the same is taking place at Mar A Lago.

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32386

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/presidential-polls-unreliable/680408/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-atlantic-am&utm_term=The Atlantic AM

 

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Well, it’s that time again: Millions of Americans are stress-eating while clicking “Refresh” on 538’s presidential forecast, hoping beyond hope that the little red or blue line will have made a tiny tick upward. Some may be clutching themselves in the fetal position, chanting under their breath: “There’s a good new poll out of Pennsylvania.”

The stakes of this election are sky-high, and its outcome is not knowable in advance—a combination that most of us find deeply discomfiting. People crave certainty, and there’s just one place to look for it: in the data. Earlier humans might have turned to oracles or soothsayers; we have Nate Silver. But the truth is that polling—and the models that rely primarily on polling to forecast the election result—cannot confidently predict what will happen on November 5.

 

Quote

The widespread perception that polls and models are raw snapshots of public opinion is simply false. In fact, the data are significantly massaged based on possibly reasonable, but unavoidably idiosyncratic, judgments made by pollsters and forecasting sages, who interpret and adjust the numbers before presenting them to the public. They do this because random sampling has become very difficult in the digital age, for reasons I’ll get into; the numbers would not be representative without these corrections, but every one of them also introduces a margin for human error.

Most citizens see only the end product: a preposterously precise statistic, such as the notion that Donald Trump has a 50.2 percent—not 50.3 percent, mind you—chance of winning the presidency. (Why stop there? Why not go to three decimal points?) Such numerical precision gives the false impression of certainty where there is none.

 

Quote

Early American political polls were unscientific but seemingly effective. In the early 20th century, The Literary Digest, a popular magazine in its day, sent sample ballots to millions of its readers. By this method, the magazine correctly predicted the winner of every presidential election from 1916 until 1936. In that year, for the contest between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Alf Landon, the Digest sent out roughly 10 million sample ballots and received an astonishing 2.4 million back (a response rate of 24 percent would be off the charts by modern standards). Based on those responses, the Digest predicted that FDR would receive a drubbing, winning just 41 percent of the vote. Instead, he won 61 percent, carrying all but two states. Readers lost faith in the Digest (it went out of business two years later).

 

Spoiler

The conventional wisdom was that the poll failed because in addition to its readers, the Digest selected people from directories of automobile and telephone ownership, which skewed the sample toward the wealthy—particularly during the Great Depression, when cars and phones were luxuries. That is likely part of the explanation, but more recent analysis has pointed to a different problem: who responded to the poll and who didn’t. For whatever reason, Landon supporters were far more likely than FDR supporters to send back their sample ballots, making the poll not just useless, but wildly misleading. This high-profile error cleared the way for more “scientific” methods, such as those pioneered by George Gallup, among others.

The basic logic of the new, more scientific method was straightforward: If you can generate a truly random sample from the broader population you are studying—in which every person has an equally likely chance of being included in the poll—then you can derive astonishingly accurate results from a reasonably small number of people. When those assumptions are correct and the poll is based on a truly random sample, pollsters need only about 1,000 people to produce a result with a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

To produce reasonably unbiased samples, pollsters would randomly select people from the telephone book and call them. But this method became problematic when some people began making their phone numbers unlisted; these people shared certain demographic characteristics, so their absence skewed the samples. Then cellphones began to replace landlines, and pollsters started using “random-digit dialing,” which ensured that every active line had an equal chance of being called. For a while, that helped.

But the matter of whom pollsters contacted was not the only difficulty. Another was how those people responded, and why. A distortion known as social-desirability bias is the tendency of respondents to lie to pollsters about their likely voting behavior. In America, that problem was particularly acute around race: If a campaign pitted a minority candidate against a white candidate, some white respondents might lie and say that they’d vote for the minority candidate to avoid being perceived as racist. This phenomenon, contested by some scholars, is known as the Bradley Effect, named after former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley—a Black politician who was widely tipped to become governor of California based on pre-election polling, but narrowly lost instead. To deal with the Bradley Effect, many pollsters switched from live callers to robocalls, hoping that voters would be more honest with a computer than another person.

But representative sampling has continued to become more difficult. In an age of caller ID and smartphones, along with persistent junk and nuisance calls, few people answer when they see unfamiliar numbers. Most Americans spend much of their time online, but there are no reliable methods to get a truly random sample from the internet. (Consider, for example, how subscribers of The Atlantic differ from the overall American population, and it’s obvious why a digital poll on this site would be worthless at making predictions about the overall electorate.)

These shifts in technology and social behavior have created an enormous problem known as nonresponse bias. Some pollsters release not just findings but total numbers of attempted contacts. Take, for example, this 2018 New York Times poll within Michigan’s Eighth Congressional District. The Times reports that it called 53,590 people in order to get 501 responses. That’s a response rate lower than 1 percent, meaning that the Times pollsters had to call roughly 107 people just to get one person to answer their questions. What are the odds that those rare few who answered the phone are an unskewed, representative sample of likely voters? Zilch. As I often ask my undergraduate students: How often do you answer when you see an unknown number? Now, how often do you think a lonely elderly person in rural America answers their landline? If there’s any systematic difference in behavior, that creates a potential polling bias.

To cope, pollsters have adopted new methodologies. As the Pew Research Center notes, 61 percent of major national pollsters used different approaches in 2022 than they did in 2016. This means that when Americans talk about “the polls” being off in past years, we’re not comparing apples with apples. One new polling method is to send text messages with links to digital surveys. (Consider how often you’d click a link from an unknown number to understand just how problematic that method is.) Many pollsters rely on a mix of approaches. Some have started using online “opt-in” methods, in which respondents choose to take a survey and are typically paid a small amount for participating. This technique, too, has raised reasonable questions about accuracy: One of my colleagues at University College London, Thomas Gift, tested opt-in methods and found that nearly 82 percent of participants in his survey likely lied about themselves in order to qualify for the poll and get paid. Pew further found that online opt-in polls do a poor job of capturing the attitudes of young people and Hispanic Americans.

No matter the method, a pure, random sample is now an unattainable ideal—even the aspiration is a relic of the past. To compensate, some pollsters try to design samples representative of known demographics. One common approach, stratification, is to divide the electorate into subgroups by gender, race, age, etc., and ensure that the sample includes enough of each “type” of voter. Another involves weighting some categories of respondents differently from others, to match presumptions about the broader electorate. For example, if a polling sample had 56 percent women, but the pollster believed that the eventual electorate would be 52 percent women, they might weigh male respondents slightly more heavily in the adjusted results.

The problem, of course, is that nobody knows who will actually show up to vote on November 5. So these adjustments may be justified, but they are inherently subjective, introducing another possible source of human bias. If women come out to vote in historically high numbers in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, for example, the weighting could be badly off, causing a major polling error.

The bottom line is that modern pollsters are trying to correct for known forms of possible bias in their samples by making subjective adjustments to the data. If their judgments are correct, then their polls might be accurate. But there’s no way to know beforehand whether their assumptions about, say, turnout by demographic group are wise or not.

Forecasters then take that massaged polling data and feed it into a model that’s curated by a person—or team of people—who makes further subjective assessments. For example, the 538 model adjusts its forecasts based on polls plus what some in the field call “the fundamentals,” such as historical trends around convention polling bounces, or underlying economic data. Most forecasters also weight data based on how particular pollsters performed in earlier elections. Each adjustment is an educated guess based on past patterns. But nobody knows for sure whether past patterns are predictive of future results. Enough is extraordinary about this race to suspect that they may not be.

More bad news: Modern polling often misses the mark even when trying to convey uncertainty, because pollsters grossly underestimate their margins of error. Most polls report a plus or minus margin of, say, 3 percent, with a 95 percent confidence interval. This means that if a poll reports that Trump has the support of 47 percent of the electorate, then the reported margin of error suggests that the “real” number likely lies between 44 percent (minus three) and 50 percent (plus three). If the confidence interval is correct, that spread of 44 to 50 should capture the actual result of the election about 95 percent of the time. But the reality is less reassuring.

In a 2022 research paper titled “Election Polls Are 95 Percent Confident but Only 60 Percent Accurate,” Aditya Kotak and Don Moore of UC Berkeley analyzed 6,000 polls from 2008 through 2020. They found that even with just one week to go before Election Day, only about six in 10 polls captured the end result within their stated margin of error. Four in 10 times, the polling data fell outside that window. The authors conclude that to justify a 95 percent confidence interval, pollsters should “at least double” their reported margins of error—a move that would be statistically wise but render polling virtually meaningless in close elections. After all, if a margin of error doubled to six percentage points, then a poll finding that Harris had 50 percent support would indicate that the “true” number was somewhere between 44 percent (a Trump landslide) and 56 percent (a Harris landslide).

Alas, the uncertainty doesn’t end there. Unlike many other forms of measurement, polls can change what they’re measuring. Sticking a thermometer outside doesn’t make the weather hotter or colder. But poll numbers can and do shift voting behavior. For example, studies have shown that perceived poll momentum can make people more likely to vote for the surging party or candidate in a “bandwagon” effect. Take the 2012 Republican primaries, when social conservatives sought an alternative to Mitt Romney and were split among candidates. A CNN poll conducted the night before the Iowa caucus showed Rick Santorum in third place. Santorum went on to win the caucus, likely because voters concluded from the poll that he was the most electable challenger.

The truth is that even after election results are announced, we may not really know which forecasters were “correct.” Just as The Literary Digest accurately predicted the winner of presidential races with a deeply flawed methodology, sometimes a bad approach is just lucky, creating the illusion of accuracy. And neither polling nor electoral dynamics are stable over time. Polling methodology has shifted radically since 2008; voting patterns and demographics are ever-changing too. Heck, Barack Obama won Indiana in 2008; recent polls suggest that Harris is losing there by as much as 17 points. National turnout was 55 percent in 2016 and 63 percent in 2020. Polls are trying to hit a moving target with instruments that are themselves constantly changing. For all of these reasons, a pollster who was perfectly accurate in 2008 could be wildly off in 2024.

In other words, presidential elections are rare, contingent, one-off events. Predicting their outcome does not yield enough comparable data points to support any pollster’s claim to exceptional foresight, rather than luck. Trying to evaluate whether a forecasting model is “good” just from judging its performance on the past four presidential elections is a bit like trying to figure out whether a coin is “fair” or “rigged” from just four coin flips. It’s impossible.

The social scientists Justin Grimmer, Dean Knox, and Sean Westwood recently published research supporting this conclusion. They write: “We demonstrate that scientists and voters are decades to millennia away from assessing whether probabilistic forecasting provides reliable insights into election outcomes.” (Their research has sparked fierce debate among scholars about the wisdom of using probabilistic forecasting to measure rare and idiosyncratic events such as presidential elections.)

Probabilistic presidential forecasts are effectively unfalsifiable in close elections, meaning that they can’t be proved wrong. Nate Silver’s model in 2016 suggested that Hillary Clinton had a 71.4 percent chance of victory. That wasn’t necessarily “wrong” when she lost: After all, as Silver pointed out to the Harvard Gazette, events with a 28.6 percent probability routinely happen—more frequently than one in four times. So was his 2016 presidential model “wrong”? Or was it bang-on accurate, but an unusual, lower-probability event took place? There’s no way of knowing for sure.

The pollsters and forecasters who are studying the 2024 election are not fools. They are skilled analysts attempting some nearly impossible wizardry by making subjective adjustments to control for possible bias while forecasting an uncertain future. Their data suggest that the race is a nail-biter—and that may well be the truth. But nobody—not you, not me, not the betting markets, not Nate Silver—knows what’s going to happen on November 5.

 

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Js1

Js1 85271

Posted
Posted (edited)
43 minutes ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

The dotard needs the rubes to be minimum 85% in his favor.  If it's 65-35, Harris walks away with this in a landslide.

Yeah I just saw the NYT NE poll had NE-03, the most rural district, at Trump +51. He won that +52. There is a thought that MAGA has maxed out the rurals in a lot of places and if they shift even 1 or 2 points left, that dooms him with the suburban shift of 3+ points left. Or 5+ in some spots, I was being conservative with 3

Edited by Js1
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SydneyCarton

SydneyCarton 48054

Posted
Posted
12 minutes ago, Js1 said:

Yeah I just saw the NYT NE poll had NE-03, the most rural district, at Trump +51. He won that +52. There is a thought that MAGA has maxed out the rurals in a lot of places and if they shift even 1 or 2 points left, that dooms him with the suburban shift of 3+ points left. Or 5+ in some spots, I was being conservative with 3

Well, don't read Sushi Horn's post on the election lab thread. Becuase I'm about ready to drink bleach. 

1 minute ago, Js1 said:

Also I can’t believe some of y’all think I’m AI. That is so funny.

Yes, someone pointed me to the discord where yall talked about me 😂

I mean, I wouldn't say we were talking ABOUT you. I'd say that guy was just in awe of your analytical skills and free time. 

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Beantown Express 2.0

Beantown Express 2.0 6559

Posted
Posted
2 minutes ago, Js1 said:

Also I can’t believe some of y’all think I’m AI. That is so funny.

Yes, someone pointed me to the discord where yall talked about me 😂

I am starting to believe all of you are AI and I am the only human on this website being put through some kind of psychological experiment by our alien overlords. 

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Js1

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Posted
Posted
Just now, Beantown Express 2.0 said:

Tell me this is total bullshit before I jump on the brisket ledge with my bottle of Pappy. 

 

Independents are split evenly between Trump and Harris - and that might be bad news for the VP on election day

Wait she’s only +1 with indies and leads by 4? What’s the issue then? She’s doing better than Biden among some of the most likely to vote demographics - college educated voters (men and women). 

Also don’t doom over one poll’s sub samples. 

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BamaATL

BamaATL 16593

Posted
Posted

Georgia Overnight takeaways

1.  Sunday's are muted a bit because polls are mostly closed

2.  2.82 Million have now voted, an increase of 40kish

3.  Women bumped to 55.7% (.2% uptick)

4.  2020 Non voters to 504k

5.  2020 day of to 8.3% (likely Republican and an uptick of .4%)

Tomorrow I will have a more a comprehensive look. 

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Reynolds Woodcock

Reynolds Woodcock 4739

Posted
Posted
4 minutes ago, Beantown Express 2.0 said:

I am starting to believe all of you are AI and I am the only human on this website being put through some kind of psychological experiment by our alien overlords. 

This thread is about the only data point (using that term facetiously) I have for hopium at this point. All other anecdotal evidence in my real life signals a Trump win, even while living in an ostensibly blue bubble like Manhattan. Hope the sentiment/AI on this thread prevails, but I’m expecting 4 years of shit.

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Fudge Nuggets

Fudge Nuggets 19187

Posted
Posted
54 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

The whistleblower’s email makes no direct allegation that LaCivita or Wiles were receiving portions of the higher commissions from the outside media firms, a not uncommon practice in presidential campaigns. Asked if either of the campaign’s two top officials had received such undisclosed payments, the senior campaign official said: “Not true at all and a complete lie.”

I can actually believe this.  The undisclosed payments went straight to the dotard.

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SydneyCarton

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Posted
Posted
2 minutes ago, Reynolds Woodcock said:

This thread is about the only data point (using that term facetiously) I have for hopium at this point. All other anecdotal evidence in my real life signals a Trump win, even while living in an ostensibly blue bubble like Manhattan. Hope the sentiment/AI on this thread prevails, but I’m expecting 4 years of shit.

If he's elected it won't be just 4 years. Your best case is somehow democracy isn't dismantled during his term, but the project 2025 and economic damage will take decades to recover from...and he's going to dismantle democracy. 

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