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

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As time wears on, I just have a sinking feeling that this isn't going to break our way. With Fox News and X in Trump's corner (and all the mis/disinformation that comes with those platforms), plus a woman candidate... I just don't see how this is going to end well.
 
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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Let me speak to just one part of this. I definitely think that the indictments have only further polarized Trump in both directions - as in, they’ve made people who hate him even more repulsed by him, while at the same time strengthening the loyalty to him from his supporters.

As someone who has a lot of Trump supporters in my circle, this makes sense to me. The main appeal of Trump is that he’s a Washington outsider who the folks in the “swamp” cannot stand, and they’ll do anything to make him go away. So Trump being prosecuted for these crimes (crimes he would never be prosecuted for unless he was running for reelection) is only going to make his supporters double down and support him more. The whole thing reinforces their perception that he’s a political outsider and that the political machine has no bottom when it comes to trying to get rid of him.

Basically, Trump’s whole legal mess encourages both his supporters and his haters to strengthen their conviction in how they feel about him.
 
Tom Bonier interview from 4 days ago. His firm gets its voter registration data and early voting data from close relationships with the DNC and the individual state parties. He’s someone to pay attention to.

Bonier joins at 13:30
Ruben Gallego (senate AZ) at 43 mins

 
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Duke Mu said:
Skewed toward white men...

Trump's hurricane bump caused by disinformation coupled with reduced Kamala and Walz visibility is being undermined by his continued instability and Kamala's surge in rallies and interviews..
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Hurricane bump?? Lol
 
tallheel95 said:
As time wears on, I just have a sinking feeling that this isn't going to break our way. With Fox News and X in Trump's corner (and all the mis/disinformation that comes with those platforms), plus a woman candidate... I just don't see how this is going to end well.
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You sound like me
 
My wife and I welcomed a new baby girl so I’ve been stretched a little thin and not following the race as closely. Saw a lot of doomsday posts on this thread so I was looking around some, and I’ll admit I didn’t realize that Trump is ahead in the RCP average for every single swing state.

Georgia: Trump +1.8%
Arizona: Trump +1.6%
Michigan: Trump +1.2%
Nevada: Trump +0.8%
Pennsylvania: Trump +0.8%
North Carolina: Trump +0.5%
Wisconsin: Trump +0.2%

Question for the board - who wins the election if Trump wins Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina and Pennsylvania but Harris wins Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin? Would Pennsylvania be the tipping point state in that fact pattern and thus Trump would win?
 
tallheel95 said:
As time wears on, I just have a sinking feeling that this isn't going to break our way. With Fox News and X in Trump's corner (and all the mis/disinformation that comes with those platforms), plus a woman candidate... I just don't see how this is going to end well.
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It's just because you think it shouldn't be close. And it shouldn't. So the fact it's not even a sure thing makes it really really depressing.

But that's not the same thing as her not having a great shot to win
 
HeelYeah2012 said:
My wife and I welcomed a new baby girl so I’ve been stretched a little thin and not following the race as closely. Saw a lot of doomsday posts on this thread so I was looking around some, and I’ll admit I didn’t realize that Trump is ahead in the RCP average for every single swing state.

Georgia: Trump +1.8%
Arizona: Trump +1.6%
Michigan: Trump +1.2%
Nevada: Trump +0.8%
Pennsylvania: Trump +0.8%
North Carolina: Trump +0.5%
Wisconsin: Trump +0.2%

Question for the board - who wins the election if Trump wins Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina and Pennsylvania but Harris wins Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin? Would Pennsylvania be the tipping point state in that fact pattern and thus Trump would win?
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To be fair, there's only like two people who are posting doomsday stuff. The rest of us are as confident as ever :cool:. But yeah, Pennsylvania is the tipping point in the scenario you described. It's the difference in a 270-268 Democratic win and a 287-251 Republican win.
 
CFordUNC said:
To be fair, there's only like two people who are posting doomsday stuff. The rest of us are as confident as ever :cool:. But yeah, Pennsylvania is the tipping point in the scenario you described. It's the difference in a 270-268 Democratic win and a 287-251 Republican win.
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Gotcha. So basically if Trump wins the Sun Belt states, he only needs one of the blue wall states to win the election. Then where it gets complicated is if Trump loses a sun belt state or two but wins a blue wall state or two. I need to play around more with that “270 to win” website.

So with Trump leading in the consensus polling, I guess your confidence comes from some combo of a) some biased Republican polls are included in RCP, and b) maybe the pollsters as a whole have over corrected after underestimating Trump in 2016 and 2020?

I read this board so that I don’t find myself in an echo chamber on the right, but now I’m wondering if by getting a good portion of my political news here it’s caused me to be in an echo chamber of the left and now I’ve been underestimating Trump’s chances too much.
 
CFordUNC said:
To be fair, there's only like two people who are posting doomsday stuff. The rest of us are as confident as ever :cool:. But yeah, Pennsylvania is the tipping point in the scenario you described. It's the difference in a 270-268 Democratic win and a 287-251 Republican win.
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Flipping either NC or GA would also change the winner in that scenario.
 
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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I just read through a few things that popped up, and what I saw was no clear consensus - some papers seem to argue that betting markets are better predictors (e.g., your link, and this), others argue that they are worse (example, example), some argue that it's unclear what performs better (example) or that they contain the same information (link). So in short, I don't see how any sensible person could survey that literature and come to the conclusion that betting markets are more accurate than polls.

As someone who's career is built around figuring out ways to measure things robustly, one thing that has irritated me in the post-538 era (these poll-conglomerating "models") is that there is never an honest discussion about actual information content. Or to put it another way, what, if any, significance is there to someone's fancy model assigning 55% "probability" for one candidate to win? It doesn't take a fancy model to quickly assess that the range of plausible outcomes for the US presidential election has 2 possibilities. The simplest model one could build would then be a coin flip - in fact I've just constructed such a model! I even ran 10,000 simulations of the election, and guess what, it's a real horse race with Kamala Harris winning 50.7% of the time, and Trump winning 49.3% of the time. How in the world would one ever construct a statistical test to robustly show that my coin flip model is less predictive than the NYT or 538 or whatever simulator giving one candidate a 53% chance and the other a 47% change. Do you know how many elections for which you'd have to have actual data (results) to be able to distinguish in a statistically robust way that the NYT/538 models are fundamentally different from a coin flip? The answer is a lot, but we just get the one.
 
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