The Blowout No One Sees Coming

Posted by thomascountz 10/27/2024

The Blowout No One Sees Coming(app.vantagedatahouse.com)

35 points | 48 commentspage 2

dragontamer 10/27/2024|

I've made this bet with some of my friends for this election cycle: the polls are wrong, I just don't know in which direction yet.

I'll save this topic at least. In just a few short weeks we will see which theories were correct. But its important to see these predictions _BEFORE_ the election results are announced.

There will be a lot of people after the election pretending to be correct and on the "I Told You So" despite their poll numbers being bullshit. So now is the time to collect arguments and theories.

MostlyStable 10/27/2024|

If your friends took that bet, and if "wrong" doesn't mean "more than 5 points off", then they are suckers, since the historical average polling error is 2-4 points, so betting that "the polls are wrong" without picking a direction and magnitude is a gimme.

dboreham 10/27/2024||

It's obvious for several reasons that political polling is at best nonsense and worst outright fraudulent. Reason 1: people don't change their voting intentions much. So how can polls swing one way and the other so much? Answer must be that they are measuring noise. Reason 2: headline numbers aggregate several polling results, but apparently don't discard known fraudulent data from partisan polsters. So the results can be trivially changed by simply spending money. Reason 3: nobody sane responds to a polster. So they are measuring data from provably insane people. Reason 4: polsters often exclude samples that should be included, for example by requiring respondents to have voted in two previous elections. So the samples is skewed. And on and on. Add to this the incentives in the news industry to make things click worthy and you have the result we observe. Nobody wants to say the emperor has no clothes. There's also a bias in some media to report a close race for fear of being accused of influencing the outcome.

dave4420 10/27/2024||

Re your reason 4: the hardest part of political polling is working out who will actually vote. If your polls are going to get judged on their similarity to the final result, you want to filter out the people who won’t vote.

jsnell 10/28/2024|||

How do you know that people don't change their voting intentions much? The only way you could know what people intend to do is by... umm... polling.

Anyway, the polls haven't actually been swinging much this year, I don't know where you're getting that from. The only significant movement was when Biden withdrew from the race, which you would expect to make a big difference.

whimsicalism 10/27/2024|||

> There's also a bias in some media to report a close race for fear of being accused of influencing the outcome.

This is certainly true. the response I see nowadays if an NYT sponsored poll shows Trump is ahead is… not pretty. People are treating it like a sports game nowadays, wish they would stick to football.

TibbityFlanders 10/27/2024||

[dead]

ezxs 10/27/2024|

a lot of debate here but one thing is not a debate: both parties want to portray the other one as a devil, in truth the actually both are going to be OK. We had Trump for 4 years, we basically had Harris for 4 years. We are not China or Venezuela. Everyone relax and figure out how to focus on similarities rather than difference. One Love!

ericmcer 10/27/2024||

Pretty low chance of that happening haha. The one similarity I see between both parties is they both have a ton of money in the stock market and so do the corporations that lobby them. So my political stance is to keep following their investments because they have both shown a willingness to do backflips to keep everything moving up.

whimsicalism 10/27/2024||

low chance of what happening? us being okay/still living in a democracy 4 years from now?

i would take the other side of that bet - ie. i believe that we will still be in a democracy 4 years from now.

GiorgioG 10/27/2024|||

More like, they're both equally shitty for the average person. We should focus on how little they've done collectively for the people. If people would just stop registering as one or the other they might be a little more objective about how shit they both are.

PaulDavisThe1st 10/27/2024||

You sound like my son.

Who didn't have much of an answer when I asked him who it was that enacted Medicaid, which paid for the major surgery his son needed when he was born that the parents could not possibly have paid for. He also didn't have much of an answer when I asked him who constantly wants to nibble away at Medicaid, as a testimony to their fundamental opposition to such a "safety net".

The Democrats have lots and lots of problems, including deference to the rich and corporations. But for all their failings, they have consistently attempted to make the lives of regular people a little bit better and sometimes even succeeded.

GiorgioG 10/27/2024|||

The problem is we are not holding both parties accountable for not doing their jobs. They have stopped working together. That is a total failure. They all should be fired by all objective measure of doing your fucking job. Those of us who share some ideals with both parties have nowhere to turn. Having said that I can’t in good conscience vote for republicans this cycle. The democrats have finally seen the light and stopped highlighting some of their more polarizing agenda items, while the republicans just continue to double down on the extremism.

PaulDavisThe1st 10/28/2024||

Parties don't have jobs in government. Elected representatives do. I don't believe that working together is necessarily a part of the job, though it can be productive and even nice when they do.

If you have nowhere to turn, start a new party, instead of imagining that the role of the existing parties is to cater to your particular political outlook. And yes, that won't work, so first work to change the electoral system.

GiorgioG 10/27/2024|||

Herein lies the problem, I want single payer healthcare, I don’t think guns are a problem on their own. I think we should have safety nets, but they shouldn’t be long term handouts. Both parties spend like drunken sailors whether it’s on social programs or the military. Our two party system is fucked.

PaulDavisThe1st 10/28/2024||

Sure, our two party system is fucked.

That doesn't imply that both parties are fucked, nor that even if they are both fucked, that they are both fucked in the same way.

If you want a different electoral system (great idea!), argue for that rather than this silly both-sides nonsense.

lukev 10/27/2024||

Except for the 20 million people Trump says he's going to deport. No love for them.