2024 Political Polls

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aGDevil2k said:
Because Nate's model is wonky as Hell and this year, with 1 month into her campaign vs many months, he can't really adjust it to match up with a 3.5 month long campaign season
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I get that but common sense tells me if Harris has like a 95% chance of winning the popular vote and a 17% chance of winning the popular vote and losing the electoral college then her chances of losing the EC is really low.
 
politicalwire.com

Missouri Voters Poised to Overturn Abortion Ban

A new Saint Louis University/YouGov poll in Missouri found that 52% of voters supported the proposed constitutional amendment to overturn the state's abortion ban while 34% disagreed. The remaining 14% said they were not sure.However, the results also showed every Republican candidate, from Sen.
politicalwire.com politicalwire.com

“A new Saint Louis University/YouGov pollin Missouri found that 52% of voters supported the proposed constitutional amendment to overturn the state’s abortion ban while 34% disagreed. The remaining 14% said they were not sure.

However, the results also showed every Republican candidate, from Sen. Josh Hawley to Attorney General Andrew Bailey, with double-digit leads over their Democratic opponents ahead of the November election.”
 
nycfan said:
politicalwire.com

Missouri Voters Poised to Overturn Abortion Ban

A new Saint Louis University/YouGov poll in Missouri found that 52% of voters supported the proposed constitutional amendment to overturn the state's abortion ban while 34% disagreed. The remaining 14% said they were not sure.However, the results also showed every Republican candidate, from Sen.
politicalwire.com politicalwire.com

“A new Saint Louis University/YouGov pollin Missouri found that 52% of voters supported the proposed constitutional amendment to overturn the state’s abortion ban while 34% disagreed. The remaining 14% said they were not sure.

However, the results also showed every Republican candidate, from Sen. Josh Hawley to Attorney General Andrew Bailey, with double-digit leads over their Democratic opponents ahead of the November election.”
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Fox news did an absolute bang up job in destroying the country. Made these rural voters identify as Republican first, no matter what would actually help them or what they even believe
 
Enigma94 said:
It seems counterintuitive that Trump is favored in their current model but it gives Harris a 17% chance of winning the popular vote but losing the electoral college. I thought it was a virtual certainty Harris will win the popular vote, so how can she only have a 17% chance of winning that while losing the election and at the same time Trump be favored?
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It is not a virtual certainty that she wins the popular vote. The predictive models don't assign "virtual certainty" to anything but the most rock-solid scenarios at this stage in the cycle. It is accounting for contingencies, like the polls being wrong, or the polls moving unfavorably for Kamala, etc.

Part of the problem in our whole political discourse is that the phrase "Kamala [or Trump] is winning right now" is more or less meaningless. This isn't a football game; no points have been scored by either team. Fluctuation in the polls really doesn't mean all that much (which isn't the same thing as polls not meaning much). What we really mean by "candidate X is winning," is "if the election were held today, candidate X would likely win." But that doesn't really matter.
 
nycfan said:
politicalwire.com

Missouri Voters Poised to Overturn Abortion Ban

A new Saint Louis University/YouGov poll in Missouri found that 52% of voters supported the proposed constitutional amendment to overturn the state's abortion ban while 34% disagreed. The remaining 14% said they were not sure.However, the results also showed every Republican candidate, from Sen.
politicalwire.com politicalwire.com

“A new Saint Louis University/YouGov pollin Missouri found that 52% of voters supported the proposed constitutional amendment to overturn the state’s abortion ban while 34% disagreed. The remaining 14% said they were not sure.

However, the results also showed every Republican candidate, from Sen. Josh Hawley to Attorney General Andrew Bailey, with double-digit leads over their Democratic opponents ahead of the November election.”
Click to expand...
This is one reason, I think, that the ballot initiatives don't really make much difference for electoral outcomes. Essentially, the ballot initiative allows voters to strip off the part of the GOP candidates they don't like -- i.e. the crazed anti-abortion shit. So while the initiatives might drive turnout, they might also encourage some swing voters to flip -- feeling as though it's safe to vote for Bailey because Bailey can't f with their reproductive rights.

Of course, the problem is that these voters (most of them low-info) don't realize that their constitutional amendment will make no difference at all if there's a federal ban. They think they are securing their reproductive rights. We know they are not.
 
superrific said:
It is not a virtual certainty that she wins the popular vote. The predictive models don't assign "virtual certainty" to anything but the most rock-solid scenarios at this stage in the cycle. It is accounting for contingencies, like the polls being wrong, or the polls moving unfavorably for Kamala, etc.

Part of the problem in our whole political discourse is that the phrase "Kamala [or Trump] is winning right now" is more or less meaningless. This isn't a football game; no points have been scored by either team. Fluctuation in the polls really doesn't mean all that much (which isn't the same thing as polls not meaning much). What we really mean by "candidate X is winning," is "if the election were held today, candidate X would likely win." But that doesn't really matter.
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So does the model provide a statistical chance that Harris wins the popular vote? I understand virtual certainty isn't precise language. It just seems overwhelmingly likely that Harris wins the popular vote, so any model that gives her a 17% chance of winning it while losing the EC would naturally mean it's unlikely she loses the EC. But then he has Trump as the favorite to win the EC. Maybe I'm overestimating the chance Harris wins the PV?
 
Enigma94 said:
So does the model provide a statistical chance that Harris wins the popular vote? I understand virtual certainty isn't precise language. It just seems overwhelmingly likely that Harris wins the popular vote, so any model that gives her a 17% chance of winning it while losing the EC would naturally mean it's unlikely she loses the EC. But then he has Trump as the favorite to win the EC. Maybe I'm overestimating the chance Harris wins the PV?
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If the model gives a 17% of Harris winning the popular vote (PV) but losing the EC and you know that Trump is predicted to win 52% of the time and Kamala 48%, you can do the rest of the math...

Kamala win PV and EC: 48%
Kamala win PV but lose EC: 17%
Trump win PV but lose EC: 0% (Admittedly, this is an assumption, but it seems a safe one. If there are situations where Trump wins the PV but loses the EC, they'd have to be statistically very small)
Trump win PV and EC: 35%

So, Harris would be projected to win the PV 65% of the time.
 
Enigma94 said:
So does the model provide a statistical chance that Harris wins the popular vote? I understand virtual certainty isn't precise language. It just seems overwhelmingly likely that Harris wins the popular vote, so any model that gives her a 17% chance of winning it while losing the EC would naturally mean it's unlikely she loses the EC. But then he has Trump as the favorite to win the EC. Maybe I'm overestimating the chance Harris wins the PV?
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You are. But again, this stuff is counter-intuitive, and I'm not sure it makes that much sense if you think about it enough.

I don't have the numbers in front of me because it's paywalled, but I'm guessing that the model has Kamala about 60% to win PV, maybe a little higher (there is a chance that Trump could win PV and lose election, though it's unlikely). But an unknown % of Trump's 40% might just be from temporal uncertainty. That is, something could happen between now and election day. Maybe Kamala dies. Maybe it comes out that the bear RFK dumped in Central Park was actually killed by Kamala after she had sex with it. Or maybe the economy crashes.

Accounting for those contingencies is sort of different than accounting for the possibilities that the polls are wrong, or that random chance produces certain outcomes. It's more like this, I think: [we don't know that much before Labor Day and thus all estimates should be discounted] * [the polls might be wrong or the votes in the tossups all go Trump's way]. Nate's statistical models multiplies those terms together to spit out a single percentage, but I think they are analytically distinct concepts and that's what confuses people.
 
Thanks to Snoop and Super for the analysis. It doesn't seem very helpful to use a model that assumes a 60-65% chance that Harris wins the popular vote. I understand there are externalities that can occur and must be accounted for in a statistical model, but I just can't give any credence to a model with that low a chance.
 
aGDevil2k said:
When Texas starts to turn blue (and it will happen), that's when the National Popular Vote compact will pick up steam. the GOP will be FUBAR without NY, Texas and California, so then they will want to act to go to the popular vote
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They would lose more with the popular vote than they do now.
 
Enigma94 said:
Thanks to Snoop and Super for the analysis. It doesn't seem very helpful to use a model that assumes a 60-65% chance that Harris wins the popular vote. I understand there are externalities that can occur and must be accounted for in a statistical model, but I just can't give any credence to a model with that low a chance.
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Well, you are assuming that she will win the popular vote. And maybe she will. But the whole point of using a model is to correct for biases in your assumptions. It might seem like Kamala is a slam dunk to win the popular vote . . . but if the polls are saying that the race is within 3 points nationally, and the polls are correct within their MOEs, then 65% would be a decent estimate of the probability. It might seem wack to you, but that's probably because it would seem wack that Harris was only up by 3 in the polls.

Again, I think a big part of the problem is the nature of the probabilistic estimate. Maybe it will help to use a concept from finance: risk versus uncertainty. Risk is considered to be variance that you can measure. Uncertainty is variance that you can't. For instance, a BB team down by 8 with 2 min to go has (IIRC) about a 10% chance of winning if they have the ball. So the winning team has a 10% risk of losing. Uncertainty would refer to the possibility that, say, someone slips a roofie into the winning team's gatorade and suddenly the players all get super groggy. That possibility is, we hope, extremely remote. But if you add up the all the remote possibilities, they could amount to something significant.

To build on this example, I remember watching the ESPN gamecast of a UNC-Duke game in 2020, the year the NCAA tourney got cancelled. The year we were awful because of injury and underperformance. I don't remember which game (I really don't remember that season much at all), but in one of them, UNC was up big on Duke in the second half. Like 20 points maybe. The gamecast said that UNC's chances to win were 99.5%. I told my wife that a UNC victory was actually a coin flip, because what the gamecast didn't know was 1) the ability of that team to self-destruct; and 2) the refs would often intervene for Duke in the waning minutes of a close game. Those factors would fall under the rubric of uncertainty. We don't know how to quantify the chance that the players would lose their collective minds, but it must have been significant because we did in fact lose.

So again, the 65% estimate includes both risk and uncertainty. It's counter-intuitive.
 
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