GET OUT: US politics November 2020

if anything Silver will be in the greatest demand ever over the next while, as the counts really fill out in various places and it becomes possibly to articulate with greater precision What The Polls Missed, etc. there might even --- and i don't have a probability on this --- be demand for postmortem election takes on What Happened and What Went Wrong. imagine!

i've been too overwhelmed with everything to look into the polling errors this cycle. there's always some speculation that there is a small group of total racists who are too cowardly to say they support trump in a poll, but then pull the lever for him (or poke the touchscreen or seal the envelope).

but is it something else? systematic sample-selection issues?

- the "shy trumper" is real after all.
- turns out some minorities are fascists (contrary to many folks, I don't think this is necessarily dem's fault)

Polling was pretty spot-on in the midterms. When Trump is on the ticket, all the models go haywire, for some reason.

oh and "more turnout will always help dems!" is wrong, because most of the people who didn't vote before are even dumber than the population in general

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IXaFLHN1n4

idk if the shy Trumper thing is real, it certainly wasn't in '16 or '18 so why would it be now? would think if anything these people are more emboldened and loud

my guess for the main source of the polling error is the high turnout, I think having some 15 million additional voters causes some weird things to happen

also the assumption that "Covid will hurt Trump" is exactly backwards, rather it should've been looked at as "Covid is out of control because there are so many Trump voters"

Which is why I couldn’t believe Wisconsin would break toward Biden until the count was complete.

Xpost to sarahell, no, but a lot of DSA cultist types are there. Jacobin is a trash publication for young college-educated whites who didn't care about politics or policy before Trump.

just imagine, liberals becoming radicalized by life under a fascist

I'm no jacobin fan but would you prefer they never started

Polling was pretty spot-on in the midterms.

Yep, this -- people have already forgotten that the polling aggregators correctly saw huge Dem gains in House in 2018 that most people were skeptical of until it actually happened. I do think there's some truth to the idea that Trump on the ballot creates fundamentally different political conditions that "normal polling" isn't equipped to handle.

bright days ahead for this future member of congress pic.twitter.com/iB3ij03vhr

— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) November 5, 2020

no, but a lot of DSA cultist types are there.

Oakland is really a special place ...

also the assumption that "Covid will hurt Trump" is exactly backwards, rather it should've been looked at as "Covid is out of control because there are so many Trump voters"

― frogbs, Thursday, November 5, 2020 12:30 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah i had a friend who was legitimately worried about wisconsin because he believed high covid cases was correlated with high levels of trumpiness

that WI Biden +17 poll is gonna really have to be studied, that's gotta be the most inaccurate a high quality poll has been that close to the election

I thought we'd be solidly Biden given the state supreme court result from April but then I remember that Scott Walker only lost by a handful of votes, and that guy wasn't really liked by anyone. even the chuds disliked him for all the union-busting crap.

oh and "more turnout will always help dems!" is wrong

Any new ideas about turnout from 2020 are going to be kind of valueless, turnout is huge partly for "people care a lot" reasons but partly because once you accept you need to vote by mail this year, it turns out voting by mail is really convenient and easy and that probably boosts turnout a lot! But obviously scrambles any historical relation between turnout and results.

Really interesting to wonder how much of the vote will come in by mail in 2022, now that people (like me) who'd never done it before have done it once.

- turns out some minorities are fascists (contrary to many folks, I don't think this is necessarily dem's fault)

― Dan I., Thursday, November 5, 2020 12:27 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i don't know about that. i think more studies are needed to look into what these voters' reasoning was. bluntly, i think it is very possible that they did not believe trump was a white supremacist.

I don't believe in the "shy Trump voter" anymore, or at least in any significant number--four years ago, yes, but they don't seem particularly reticent anymore. This is a longshot, but I wonder if Trump voters intentionally lie with pollsters just for the hell of it. If you have nothing but contempt for normalcy--e.g., polls as a reasonably accurate gauge of what will happen--and want to be as disruptive as possible, why wouldn't you?

I remember the early Post-Ghost Ship discussions re activism and ... okay I am not gonna shit-talk people that probably only me & table know/know of

there was so much noise circulating around this guy, he became a rorshach test. he's in many ways the worst human being i have ever encountered but i don't think all of his voters share all of his vices.

i think that's possible too, clemenza. but the story of this election is that he expanded his support outside his white male base, which shrunk. so like, it's not just boogaloo boys voting for him or whatever.

I think the main problem with polling is that nobody wants to answer the phone and talk to a stranger, now that it's a choice. I certainly don't.

oh and "more turnout will always help dems!" is wrong, because most of the people who didn't vote before are even dumber than the population in general

This is also why I'm suspicious of the line of argument that goes "lure non-voters in with new ideas."

We had the highest turnout since 1900 - like, literally since the century before last. And it gave us this.

I don't know how you're going to find non-voters who are people of good will and good sense, but who just haven't happened to be engaged with politics up to this point.

Everybody knew the players. Everybody knew the stakes. Not everyone obsessively follows tariffs and fiscal policy, but... come on, man. There is not a vast untapped source of votes.

The people who don't vote want to not vote.

what is weirder about this election versus 2016 is that he no longer had a coherent platform. (in 2016, he was going to bring manufacturing back and close the borders; in 2020, he was running on pure contempt and the notion that he had been treated very unfairly).

If you lied, you might be risking depressing turnout for your own side, but maybe that'd be a trade-off with the possibility of inspiring complacency on the other side. Otherwise, I have no idea why polls were so wrong.

The people who don't vote want to not vote.

this is too massive a group to generalize about in this way imho

538 only forecasted 14 states with a +/- 2 spread margin of error.

(538 had WI as +8 Biden fwiw, not sure where that +17 number is coming from?)

people might have gotten really annoyed with liberals. could have been that simple.

even if that statement were true for a majority, it might be true for completely different reasons (self xxps)

if you asked Trump voters "is he a white supremacist" 99% of them would say no

more likely people have different thresholds of what racism is and when they hear a person speaking bluntly in ways that are indeed racist but also have a ring of truth to it (to them) it doesn't really scan as disqualifying to them, in fact harping on it constantly is the thing that's really gonna turn them off. for example Trump starting his campaign going after Mexicans, so easy for people to go "come on clearly he's not saying ALL Mexicans are rapists, some of these illegals really are bad people, you're intentionally misinterpreting him, I'm sick of the political correctness and virtue signaling, etc etc"

Incumbents don't often lose though, right? This dimwit looks like he's about to.

I think we need to distinguish between Trumpers and Trump voters. The 1st are loud about their love for Trump; the latter are much less engaged and could possibly - POSSIBLY - not want to be associated with frothing Trumpers and thus be reticent to express support for him.

sorry if you get tempbanned for posting that tweet frogbs

I don't know how you're going to find non-voters who are people of good will and good sense, but who just haven't happened to be engaged with politics up to this point.

thing is, not all non-voters are equal. And some of that inequality feeds the non-voting. If the electoral college went away and things were actually determined by the popular vote, you would probably see some shift. In some ways, I feel this feeds into the centrism of the Democratic Party, and a bunch of anger and resentment on the parts of "disenfranchised" progressives in California, Mass., NY that the Party cares less about because their states are already blue

I don't believe in the "shy Trump voter" anymore, or at least in any significant number--four years ago, yes, but they don't seem particularly reticent anymore. This is a longshot, but I wonder if Trump voters intentionally lie with pollsters just for the hell of it. If you have nothing but contempt for normalcy--e.g., polls as a reasonably accurate gauge of what will happen--and want to be as disruptive as possible, why wouldn't you?

Trump, and by extension, his voters, really really love being up in the polls, it's why every time Trump got a somewhat decent looking poll from Rasmussen he'd crow about it for days. remember Trump being up makes libs feel bad so why wouldn't they try to boost his standing?

(538 had WI as +8 Biden fwiw, not sure where that +17 number is coming from?)

was just one poll that was immediately recognized as an outlier, but it did come from a high quality pollster

people don't just get "annoyed with liberals" by themselves, people get "annoyed with liberals" because e.g. Joe Rogan tells them to xposts

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Inbox: an all-caps statement from the president. pic.twitter.com/wI54sELjTB

— Josh Wingrove (@josh_wingrove) November 5, 2020

Frogbs otm

well, i think it's even simpler. the average person is terrified by political correctness. they do not want to lose their job and reputation because they said something considered taboo. so they sympathize with trump when he is getting flayed for stuff he says. maybe they think that if he absorbs all this anger, then they too could be spared, like some form of mystical displacement. (the jesus theory).

liberals are annoying tbf

Anyone who says "I'm tired of this PC stuff" is probably a racist fwiw

Simon re nonvoters - please tell us more about this allegedly large and diverse group and what will work to reach and motivate different segments of it, would love to hear some ideas and subscribe to a newsletter about them

(tbc leftists are more annoying)

RIP graceful concession speech

everyone who is politically engaged is annoying, with the possible exception of angela davis.

people might have gotten really annoyed with liberals. could have been that simple.

relatable

(xposts) That's a good counter-argument. But to be so off in so many states, or to get things like that +17 poll in Wisconsin--I mean, I know about outliers and margin of error and all that, but +17???--I don't get it.

Statement from the President:

IF YOU GIVE A MOUSE A COOKIE...

bullshit treeship, all that stuff ("average person is terrified by PC") is the right wing party line that has been pushed so often that it has become "common sense", like so much right wing BS before. Your average person agrees with PC things (respects gay rights for example)