Current polling is quite depressing. And slightly contradictory. On recent trends, the NPV looks like a tie, and a tie / small Harris win there is a defeat in the EC. Polling in the swing states is holding up better, so either the split is much, much smaller this year (Florida vote sink?) or something doesn't add up.
I buy that Reps voting early at much higher rates makes any attempt at reading the early vote useless.
I feel that Harris' best chance now is record women turnout. White college voters won't be enough to balance the latino and black loses, although on the while I think they won't be that different from 2020. But Dobbs happened after 2020, and women do know who put those justices in the Supreme Court.
One thing that really bothers me about the "Sure, Trump has momentum and maybe it's from Repub pollsters flooding the zone, but it's still within the margin of error so it doesn't matter!" is that is assumes [1] a collective understanding of how polls work and [2] the election will be called fairly and without some sort of legal hijinks.
[1] ranges from a bias among the statistically literate to an ignorant fantasy. Especially with the election being a 50/50 this whole time, it is way too easy for someone look at election odds and say "Trump was ahead by 6% just two weeks before the election, RIGGED!" and it catch fire as a completely valid thing to say. It DOES NOT MATTER how many times you remind people in the subtext that these are odds, not polls, a massive group will still misunderstand, and these "50/50" forecasters will be partially responsible when they do.
[2] the above makes this scenario that much more dangerous. When the election still too close to call on November 7th and the legal challenges begin, the narrative that Trump "had momentum" leading up to the election is going to be the broken record for everyone arguing for the Trumpist interpretation of whatever election disputes exist. They will have been allowed to fabricate a narrative, have it laundered through 'academically informed' sources, and point to that as evidence to justify a fascist takeover of government.
Thank you for presenting an alternative view, but please, be way more critical way more publicly about how certain figures are being allowed to nudge public perception towards 50/50 because that makes the betting market more interesting. A forecaster has every incentive to present the race as the most defensibly controversial version that exists.
I appreciate this point regarding using poll data as evidence of something, but I think it's a little more complex than that
On some level, these people know their arguments are not valid
I'm not talking about polls-as-predictions mentality which is wrong and poorly understood, I mean the logic/rationale people use to defend their conspiracies
They will always - ALWAYS - cite whatever piece of "data" that confirms the conspiracy. It doesn't matter if it is actually what they believe, because preservation of the conspiracy justifies the rationale
You might remember, during the pandemic
"I'm not getting that vaccine because it's not even FDA approved"
Did they change their mind once it became FDA approved?
Nope. It was just the most reasonable "data point" to confirm the conspiracy at the time.
Once that data point was gone, they moved on to something else.
It will always happen that way.
Which is, don't sweat their ignorance over poll data, because if it weren't for that, it'd just be something else
Do any of the scenarios assume a certain population of registered republicans voting democrats? This appears to be the first election where a large contingent of republicans are publicly endorsing Harris and encouraging other republicans to vote for Harris.
This is what drives me crazy. We have real data that shows a shift in party coalitions, with ancestral Dem non-college whites switching in '16 and ancestral R suburban college whites shifting between '16-'24. And yet ALL the early vote analysis I see assumes that party registration equals vote.
I get they're working with what they have, but to me what they have is sufficiently unclear to make it untrustworthy.
We could look at places with known party switch to get a baseline, but I don't see that happening.
Yes of course. Both party motivation and raw turnout. There's a pretty narrow range of possibilities - slightly lower turnout to slightly higher turnout compared to 2020.
A few quick comments... pretty much 100% vibes:
Current polling is quite depressing. And slightly contradictory. On recent trends, the NPV looks like a tie, and a tie / small Harris win there is a defeat in the EC. Polling in the swing states is holding up better, so either the split is much, much smaller this year (Florida vote sink?) or something doesn't add up.
I buy that Reps voting early at much higher rates makes any attempt at reading the early vote useless.
I feel that Harris' best chance now is record women turnout. White college voters won't be enough to balance the latino and black loses, although on the while I think they won't be that different from 2020. But Dobbs happened after 2020, and women do know who put those justices in the Supreme Court.
One thing that really bothers me about the "Sure, Trump has momentum and maybe it's from Repub pollsters flooding the zone, but it's still within the margin of error so it doesn't matter!" is that is assumes [1] a collective understanding of how polls work and [2] the election will be called fairly and without some sort of legal hijinks.
[1] ranges from a bias among the statistically literate to an ignorant fantasy. Especially with the election being a 50/50 this whole time, it is way too easy for someone look at election odds and say "Trump was ahead by 6% just two weeks before the election, RIGGED!" and it catch fire as a completely valid thing to say. It DOES NOT MATTER how many times you remind people in the subtext that these are odds, not polls, a massive group will still misunderstand, and these "50/50" forecasters will be partially responsible when they do.
[2] the above makes this scenario that much more dangerous. When the election still too close to call on November 7th and the legal challenges begin, the narrative that Trump "had momentum" leading up to the election is going to be the broken record for everyone arguing for the Trumpist interpretation of whatever election disputes exist. They will have been allowed to fabricate a narrative, have it laundered through 'academically informed' sources, and point to that as evidence to justify a fascist takeover of government.
Thank you for presenting an alternative view, but please, be way more critical way more publicly about how certain figures are being allowed to nudge public perception towards 50/50 because that makes the betting market more interesting. A forecaster has every incentive to present the race as the most defensibly controversial version that exists.
I appreciate this point regarding using poll data as evidence of something, but I think it's a little more complex than that
On some level, these people know their arguments are not valid
I'm not talking about polls-as-predictions mentality which is wrong and poorly understood, I mean the logic/rationale people use to defend their conspiracies
They will always - ALWAYS - cite whatever piece of "data" that confirms the conspiracy. It doesn't matter if it is actually what they believe, because preservation of the conspiracy justifies the rationale
You might remember, during the pandemic
"I'm not getting that vaccine because it's not even FDA approved"
Did they change their mind once it became FDA approved?
Nope. It was just the most reasonable "data point" to confirm the conspiracy at the time.
Once that data point was gone, they moved on to something else.
It will always happen that way.
Which is, don't sweat their ignorance over poll data, because if it weren't for that, it'd just be something else
Do any of the scenarios assume a certain population of registered republicans voting democrats? This appears to be the first election where a large contingent of republicans are publicly endorsing Harris and encouraging other republicans to vote for Harris.
This is what drives me crazy. We have real data that shows a shift in party coalitions, with ancestral Dem non-college whites switching in '16 and ancestral R suburban college whites shifting between '16-'24. And yet ALL the early vote analysis I see assumes that party registration equals vote.
I get they're working with what they have, but to me what they have is sufficiently unclear to make it untrustworthy.
We could look at places with known party switch to get a baseline, but I don't see that happening.
Hey Carl, do any of the forecasts incorporate voter turnout scenarios? Thanks!
Yes of course. Both party motivation and raw turnout. There's a pretty narrow range of possibilities - slightly lower turnout to slightly higher turnout compared to 2020.