2024 Pre-Election Political Polls | POLL - Trump would have had 7 point lead over Biden

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superrific said:
1. That runs counter to my intuition. I was thinking that late breaking voters would break to Trump, because often "undecided" voters at this stage in the campaign aren't really undecided. They're just uncomfortable with their choice.

BUT

2. I don't think the math works there. It implies that Kamala was losing a month ago but has been gaining ground. That's not the story I've seen in any poll. So either there's some statistical process I'm not appreciating, this cross-tab is FOS, or people been lying to pollsters.
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I don't know. I think "undecided" voters might very well break for Harris as they hear more batshit crazy bilge coming from Trump. I can't imagine folks hearing about the size of Arnold Palmer's schlong are going to rush out to vote for Trump at the end.
 
BurtoniumAD said:
I think this is right and I also think it's fairly unlikely there will be a major mistake. I think her campaign has been incredibly smart, including not doing press with a disingenuous media, which has really only downside (even if it's minor).

I do not expect a scandal as she has been running for office forever and the vetting has already occurred (unlike JD Vance). I think she needs to hold serve on the debate, but even if she doesn't do great, I don't think it really impacts her except on the margins for people who were most likely not going to vote for her anyway.

I do think it will get darker from the Trump side for the remainder of the cycle namely because nothing they are doing is sticking on her right now. She is brushing him off and not engaging directly with anything from him, which is his only hope.

If she pummels him in the debate, I think this thing is over, because A) he will melt down for the remainder of the cycle B) Early voting will be weeks after it and C) she will continue to pick up new voters.

My take: 25% chance Trump ekes out a win; 25% chance Harris ekes out a win; 50% chance Harris wins big.

This is not 2016 or 2020 - since then, Dobbs has been overturned, January 6th has occurred and despite polling, Trump's appeal has waned considerably and if you read through the focus group info, most people are just tired of his act and he really has no other game to play. The fact that both she and Walz have positive net favorability and both Trump and Vance are very net unpopular just furthers this.
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I still stand by this months later, with maybe more a likelihood she wins big. We'll see after the election, but I think the polling is tighter than what will happen. Trump is physically and mentally crumbling, there is no GOTV infrastructure, he's running a right-wing online only campaign and he's relying on same store sales that wasn't enough the last time and has closed some of those stores since 2020 (defections to Harris, people tired of him, etc.)

I think the Trump "magic" myth is just that - he has a fervent base, but it's not enough and everything he and the campaign have done is repel non-base voters. The reasons I think this election is very, very different than 2016 & 2020 are Dobbs & Jan.6. I don't think people realize how much damage he did with a decent number of reliable Republican voters with January 6th - only MAGA is on board with that and Dobbs has really enraged and motivated women voters and younger voters. While I understand folks should not rely on the young vote, Harris's campaign is running the same playbook with them as Obama did (with Plouffe leading both) and they absolutely will be a factor in this election.

I understand the anxiety when folks see the polling, but polling is just one factor. The bad thing about 538 & Nate Silver is that it made polling seem like the only predictive metric and it's not the case. Small donor donations, GOTV and maturity of the campaign, money in the bank are also just as important. Harris is pummeling Trump on of those fronts.

I think polling will need to be treated differently going forward - there is so much different these days than traditional elections. National media doesn't matter nearly as much as it used to and my take is that polling is like that. I'm a baseball guy and I look at polling like Wins in pitching. It used to be the barometer of what made a good pitcher, but Wins were only one aspect and not necessarily predictive of the pitcher's effectiveness. WHIP, ERA, Batting Average against are equally, if not more important.

And definitely pay zero attention on the betting market as the Thiels of the world are simply throwing a ton of money in there to make it look like not only a Trump win, but a blowout. Like I said, everything in the campaign is a right-wing online only strategy.
 
Paine said:
Yeah, I had that same thought after I posted it. I actually found some precinct level results for Wilson in 2020, but only for the city.

Unsurprisingly, the eastern city precincts were blue and the western ones red, more or less. Couldn’t find any precinct data for any county precints. Saratoga’s population is majority Black though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually voted Biden in 2020.

Regardless, LosPollosHermanos made an assumption about me that wasn’t true. And I still think there is a smug liberal attitude about country people, Black or white, just being anti-gay and trans that isn’t necessarily true. More so just that they aren’t exposed to it as often and may not understand.
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I'm from Richmond County bro. I think you're just trying to get triggered over something. I know what I see there and it's not tolerance.
 
LosPollosHermanos said:
I'm from Richmond County bro. I think you're just trying to get triggered over something. I know what I see there and it's not tolerance.
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Are you guys even arguing about anything? It is unquestionably correct that people in rural areas, especially in the south, are far more likely to be intolerant of different religions, ethnicities, genders, etc. than people in urban areas. This point is so well established that it's incontrovertible, even if it wasn't obvious to everyone who looks.

But at the same time, not all people in rural areas are intolerant. If a county has 50K people and 20% of them are tolerant, that's still 10K tolerant people and if that county is like other places in the U.S., the tolerant people are more likely to socialize with other tolerant people, and probably live near them too. There are few places in the U.S. where you couldn't have a liberal friend circle if you really want one. That doesn't change the fact that rural voters see themselves as the "real Americans" and that their old-fashioned ways are somehow sacrosanct and the way the world ought to be.
 
hedge said:
OK, gotcha. You're refusing to provide any evidence or data for a (rather bold) claim you've made. Good to know...
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Yep. Completely refusing to provide any evidence to an easily researchable and pretty well established claim.
hedge said:
So in other words, you haven't seen any study cited that backs up your claim that the betting markets are superior to polling in predicting the outcome of the election...
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No. In other words, let me Google that for you.
 
UNCMSinLS said:
I can't imagine folks hearing about the size of Arnold Palmer's schlong are going to rush out to vote for Trump at the end.
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So here's the thing. You and I can't imagine that. In related news, we would never consider voting for Trump.

I mean, I say the same thing quite often. "I can't imagine that doing a photo op at McD is going to improve his standing with voters." So I'm not chiding you. It's how we operate as humans. We take our own intuitions and perspectives; if we are open-minded and empathetic, we try to inform those perspectives with the thought processes of other people to understand how they think and feel, and then we make our decisions. But always, we can only really know our own minds. Everything else is an attempt at reconstruction, or perhaps modeling if you'd like to think along those terms.

The last few years of American politics has taught me that I just don't understand Trump voters at all. I cannot understand what goes on in their minds. The things that should make them doubt their fealty -- you know, things like Trump being indicted and convicted and begging the Supreme Court for immunity to his non-stop firehose of lies -- turn out to strengthen their devotion to that cause. Can you imagine wanting to vote for your guy even more because he was indicted under RICO to steal the election?

So while I still sometimes predict whether a Trump stunt will end up helping Trump, the reality is that liberals are bad prognosticators of MAGA sentiment.
 
gtyellowjacket said:
Yep. Completely refusing to provide any evidence to an easily researchable and pretty well established claim.

No. In other words, let me Google that for you.
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Well, I've googled plenty and also read some things that aren't popping off google. Because, you know, there are other sources of information even if you don't use them.

Political prediction markets were pretty good in the late 20th century. But they were also obscure, and those two qualities were related. Back when the only people betting on markets were political nerds and data journalists, they did a pretty good job of incorporating and processing the opinions of those knowledgeable people. And they had pretty good predictions.

But the problem is that the prediction market tends to reflect the average opinion of the bettors, not the marginal opinion. That's a hugely important difference. Stock markets reflect the marginal opinion; someone truly convinced that a stock is undervalued can keep buying more. That's not true of political markets, which often have a bet limit, and in the case of Polymarket, weird access rules. And if the markets reflect average opinion instead of marginal opinion, then basically they are just aggregators of the opinions of the people who take the trouble to bet with them. So that makes them incredibly susceptible to bias.

So as prediction markets have become more widely known, the average trader isn't a politics nerd, but a partisan. And since Pubs use these tools way more than Dems right now, they will give biased results. The betting markets were awful in 2022.

Comparing markets to polls is not the right way to do it. You would want to compare markets to forecasts, which aren't at all the same as polls (polls are the basis for forecasts). And my understanding is that forecasts beat polls quite handily, for the reasons cited above (and others).

Here are two links.

www.vox.com

Are betting markets the best way to predict an election?

Prediction markets have closely tracked Biden’s fate, but they have a long way to go as reliable indicators.
www.vox.com www.vox.com
 
gtyellowjacket said:
Yep. Completely refusing to provide any evidence to an easily researchable and pretty well established claim.

No. In other words, let me Google that for you.
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You've spent more time replying to requests asking for a single link than just actually providing one. Why even bother making a claim without showing your work?

I mean we get the laziness and lack of transparency, but still, put forth a little effort.
 
superrific said:
So here's the thing. You and I can't imagine that. In related news, we would never consider voting for Trump.

I mean, I say the same thing quite often. "I can't imagine that doing a photo op at McD is going to improve his standing with voters." So I'm not chiding you. It's how we operate as humans. We take our own intuitions and perspectives; if we are open-minded and empathetic, we try to inform those perspectives with the thought processes of other people to understand how they think and feel, and then we make our decisions. But always, we can only really know our own minds. Everything else is an attempt at reconstruction, or perhaps modeling if you'd like to think along those terms.

The last few years of American politics has taught me that I just don't understand Trump voters at all. I cannot understand what goes on in their minds. The things that should make them doubt their fealty -- you know, things like Trump being indicted and convicted and begging the Supreme Court for immunity to his non-stop firehose of lies -- turn out to strengthen their devotion to that cause. Can you imagine wanting to vote for your guy even more because he was indicted under RICO to steal the election?

So while I still sometimes predict whether a Trump stunt will end up helping Trump, the reality is that liberals are bad prognosticators of MAGA sentiment.
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I agree that the rationales of MAGA voters are unknowable. However, I suspect that many truly "undecided voters" at this point are likely electoral cicadas who pay little attention to politics until the month before a presidential election. Opining on the length and circumference of Arnold's love club is unlikely to sway most of these once-every-four-years voters (unless, of course, they're into that kind of "locker talk").
 
Back to turnout. So far, turnout looks good for liberals, I think. Here are the three points that stand out to me:

1. Turnout among black voters is so far at 12.5%; among whites it's 14.5%. In 2020, white voters turned out 11 points more than black voters (79-68). I don't think it's useful to compare early returns with early returns in 2020 because of the pandemic.

2. Turnout among women and men are running about equal, with women slightly in the lead. In 2020, women turned out about 3 points better than men. But there are so many more female voters. In 2020, women cast 50.1% of the votes against 42% of men (with 8% "undesignated" -- I'm going to guess that a big chunk of undesignated are trans and God I hope they are voting for Kamala). IOW, it's better in NC to be winning with women.

3. Turnout among Dems so far is slightly better than Pubs. Since there are more registered Dems than Pubs, that leads to a 20K lead for Dems at the moment. And independents are turning out considerably worse than either (only 10%).

That said, we don't know how many of those Dems are votes for Trump. My guess is that if Trump is doing better with black voters, he's doing better with Dem voters than in the past. And of course indies are still the biggest overall group.

So from a top-level perspective, it seems to me that early voting is favoring Kamala ever so slightly -- but it's also true that these numbers are pretty close to meaningless. I've said they were completely meaningless; with over 13% turnout already, they now have a non-zero salience in my view. But not very much salience.
 
CallMeTyler said:
You've spent more time replying to requests asking for a single link than just actually providing one. Why even bother making a claim without showing your work?

I mean we get the laziness and lack of transparency, but still, put forth a little effort.
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He doesn't put forward any efforts in forming opinions, so why should he when broadcasting them?
 
superrific said:
While that's true, it's also to be expected during a partial realignment. There are probably also a lot of Dems voting for Trump (esp if the polls about black voters are to be believed). I'm not sure this means very much.
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Another for what it's worth to add to that. Black males traditionally have the lowest turnout of any group. I think that might be numbers and percentage. A big percentage gain is not a big numerical gain.
 
treblkickd said:
I did just google this and the published research that came up contradicts the claim that betting markets are better predictors than polls.
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I'm going to need to see the study. Here is one of the studies that folks weren't able to find.

"Here, we present evidence that prediction markets outperform polls for longer
horizons. .. The market is closer to the eventual outcome 74% of the time. Further, the market significantly outperforms
the polls in every election when forecasting more than 100 days in advance. "

 
gtyellowjacket said:
I'm going to need to see the study. Here is one of the studies that folks weren't able to find.

"Here, we present evidence that prediction markets outperform polls for longer
horizons. .. The market is closer to the eventual outcome 74% of the time. Further, the market significantly outperforms
the polls in every election when forecasting more than 100 days in advance. "

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Seriously? 2008? In modern politics and polling that is ancient history. The media is nothing like it was then nor the malignancy of the Magats.
 
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