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

[TarHeelGrad]

And that's why I didn't post any studies. There was never going to an be applicable study. People don't want to hear anything if they already disagree with it. I've played this game before.

Do you see that little line at the top of your computer screen that says www .zzlpolitics.com/...? Go ahead and click on that twice really fast. Then type in www.google.com. You'll see this amazing tool come up on your computer screen and in the middle there'll be a place where you can type any question you have. Go ahead and type in accuracy of polling versus prediction markets and you can click on any of those links to your heart's content to determine if you think prediction markets are better than polling data.

If you have any trouble, reach out to your granddaughter.

Translation: I made an off-the-cuff remark, struggled to back it up and tried to force other people to do the research for me, and finally found a study from almost 20 years ago that is pretty irrelevant.

 

[nycfan]

(cont'd)

"... Bonier also said that based on his firm’s modeling, he was seeing bright spots for Democrats in Michigan and Wisconsin—states that don’t break down early voting totals by party.

In North Carolina, where early voting started Thursday, the partisan split among voters so far has been evenly divided. Democrats had more of an advantage in 2020. The state is seen as a must-win for Trump, but Harris’s campaign has invested heavily there.

“Looking at who is showing up, I would say Republicans should feel good and Democrats may have some work to do,” said Michael Bitzer, a professor at Catawba College who closely tracks early voting.

... So far, those voting early have skewed heavily to older voters. Nearly half of early votes so far are from voters older than 65, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. Only 5% of voters ages 18 to 25 have cast early ballots, the data show.

A new Suffolk University/USA Today national poll of 1,000 likely voters found that of those respondents who had already voted, Harris leads Trump by 63% to 34%. "

NOBODY KNOWS and everyone is trying to extrapolate from available data and past polling errors.

 

[Macksbrownies]

I look at it as the more republicans voting early the less voting on Election Day. You cannot convince me that McFascist will end up with more votes than he did in 2020.

 

[aGDevil2k]

Harris will win with women, heftily.

What I heard some experts say, and what I am seeing in these early voting numbers, too, is not focused on the D vs R turnout, but % of votes by women vs by men. There is no rhyme or reason for a gender turnout discrepancy other than motivation. This isn't 1890 (sorry Trump) when many women were not working. So it does seem there may be a big enthusiasm gap in genders. And if that materializes, the polls will end up very, very wrong. If they model similar turnout by gender, but women turn out 5-10% higher than men, it could lead to a rather big win for the good gals

 

[nycfan]

I look at it as the more republicans voting early the less voting on Election Day. You cannot convince me that McFascist will end up with more votes than he did in 2020.

I mean, the US population has increased by a meager amount (about 1.2% total) since 2020, so even if we have a repeat by percentages of the Biden election, Trump would end up getting more votes.

 

[aGDevil2k]

I look at it as the more republicans voting early the less voting on Election Day. You cannot convince me that McFascist will end up with more votes than he did in 2020.

They have been pushing early voting big time for the last 4 years. So yeah it should be changing to less of a partisan split

 

[nycfan]

Harris will win with women, heftily.

What I heard some experts say, and what I am seeing in these early voting numbers, too, is not focused on the D vs R turnout, but % of votes by women vs by men. There is no rhyme or reason for a gender turnout discrepancy other than motivation. This isn't 1890 (sorry Trump) when many women were not working. So it does seem there may be a big enthusiasm gap in genders. And if that materializes, the polls will end up very, very wrong. If they model similar turnout by gender, but women turn out 5-10% higher than men, it could lead to a rather big win for the good gals

Yes, I'm thinking that is a canary in the election coal mine, but as noted in a previous post, the percentage of female voters and the female turnout by state in 2020 varied pretty widely. So if you see women representing 55-56% of the Georgia or North Carolina vote, that is NOT an improvement over 2020, but if you saw that number in Nevada or Wisconsin it would be a HUGE increase in female voters from 2020.

 

[nycfan]

GIFT LINK --> https://www.wsj.com/politics/electi...7?st=A7rX9P&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

This article has interactive graphics at the link above.

​

College Divide Erodes Democrats’ Support From Black and Hispanic Voters​

GOP makes inroads in neighborhoods with lower education levels, while Democrats gain in highly educated areas, WSJ analysis shows​

"... In six key swing states, support for Joe Biden among Hispanic communities with low levels of college attainment barely budged from 2016. In similar Black neighborhoods, he lost ground.

Fairhill, a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood in North Philadelphia with low college attainment, is a clear example of the Democratic Party's eroding support. A northern section of the neighborhood, once a Hillary Clinton stronghold with 95% of the vote in 2016, swung 12 points toward Trump four years later.

Meanwhile, highly educated and heavily Hispanic parts of Queen Creek, a suburb of Phoenix in closely contested Arizona, swung toward Biden in 2020 by more than 10 points.

In Flint, Mich., one of the many small cities across the Midwest comprising the Democrats’ “Blue Wall,” Democratic dominance eroded in 2020. The GOP has made inroads in a Black neighborhood with low college attainment, where Democrats won more than 90% of the vote in 2016.

But a neighborhood in Marietta, Ga., a woodsy, well-educated suburb of Atlanta with a diverse population, swung hard toward Biden in 2020. ...

... This divergence around education in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods persisted during the 2022 midterm elections, the Journal found, and mirrors a familiar pattern among white voters, where educational attainment has become a political fault line."

 

[aGDevil2k]

Yes, I'm thinking that is a canary in the election coal mine, but as noted in a previous post, the percentage of female voters and the female turnout by state in 2020 varied pretty widely. So if you see women representing 55-56% of the Georgia or North Carolina vote, that is NOT an improvement over 2020, but if you saw that number in Nevada or Wisconsin it would be a HUGE increase in female voters from 2020.

But given there is even a bigger gender gap forming it could be substantial

 

[uncjhodges]

Yes, I'm thinking that is a canary in the election coal mine, but as noted in a previous post, the percentage of female voters and the female turnout by state in 2020 varied pretty widely. So if you see women representing 55-56% of the Georgia or North Carolina vote, that is NOT an improvement over 2020, but if you saw that number in Nevada or Wisconsin it would be a HUGE increase in female voters from 2020.

I think 56% of women in Ga would still be an improvement as women have continued to move democratic

AG beat me to it

 

[nycfan]

Texas lefties seem to be setting themselves up for disappointment but they certainly have the good vibes about the possibility of winning more local urban elections and beating Ted Cruz … I wish them good luck, of course.

 

[nycfan]

 

[superrific]

Again, this is where the race is. Kamala +2, +2.5 nationally. It hasn't budged. I mean, it doesn't matter to me if you want to keep posting polls, as many posters seem to like it, but the information:freakout ratio is not good. They are communicating nothing, and they just get liberals feeling freaked out. I would recommend people stop looking at these things.

 

[hedge]

No method of polling—by phone or online—emerged as the most reliable, leaving few clues for improving surveys.

Well hell, they should've just asked yellowjacket, he coulda told em that the betting markets are by far the most reliable way to accurately pick the winner of the election...

 

[tallheel95]

Again, this is where the race is. Kamala +2, +2.5 nationally. It hasn't budged. I mean, it doesn't matter to me if you want to keep posting polls, as many posters seem to like it, but the information:freakout ratio is not good. They are communicating nothing, and they just get liberals feeling freaked out. I would recommend people stop looking at these things.

Some of the freakout comes from the fact that +2 may not get the job done in electoral college math...

 

[lawtig02]

Some of the freakout comes from the fact that +2 may not get the job done in electoral college math...

Not to speak for super but I don't think that's his point. If +2 isn't enough under the revised polling models, then it's not enough and Kamala will lose. But it's not going to move to +4 or to +1 in the next two weeks. The spread has been shockingly steady for months now, which indicates everyone who will decide has already done so.

 

[lightbluenc]

Some of the freakout comes from the fact that +2 may not get the job done in electoral college math...

I think its still less about the +2 and more of where Trump's numbers lie. If he's at 46% or even 47% for that matter, then that is good. Even if Harris is at 48% there's still a percentage or three unaccounted for, and the hope is those fall for her as they did Biden in 2020, and Obama in 2012.

We don't have a Gary Johnson type candidate as we did in 2016, where Trump's 46% can actually get him the win.

 

[nycfan]

Some poor people in Georgia say they have no reason to vote, a decision that could sway election​

"... Linda Solomon, 58, said she and her daughter aren’t voting “ because nothing changes ” no matter who sits in the White House. “Why you gonna vote and ain’t nobody doing nothing?”

While Harris has excited Black voters in and around Atlanta, with its wealthier and better-educated electorate, interviews in Bibb County suggest voters living in far worse circumstances are not moved by the historic nature of her candidacy. Democrats won the county by a 2-1 margin in 2020, and Republicans are increasingly confident they can erode Democrats’ historic advantage of winning roughly 90% of all Black votes.

... Harris has focused on the middle class, and she has offered plans for small businesses and home buyers.

In places like Macon, that could prove a difficult sale. The clients at Mother’s Nest are not business owners or homebuyers anytime soon, and even Harris’ plan to take on grocery chains for price gouging doesn’t resonate with a population living in food deserts.

... AP VoteCast, a survey of both voters and nonvoters, showed that nonvoters in 2020 tended to be poorer, younger, less educated, unmarried and minorities. The data, collected by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, also found that among voters in 2020, 15% reported having a household income under $25,000 in the previous year, compared with roughly 3 in 10 nonvoters. Put those characteristics against a population of 27 million adults who live below poverty, according to the census, and the figures suggest that people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder probably make up a significant subset of all nonvoters.

... In 2020, the turnout of people eligible to vote in Georgia was 66.3%, nearly matching the national figure of 66.8%, according to the Center for Inclusive Democracy, with the lowest turnouts among Black and Latino voters.

... A majority of Bibb County’s 150,000-plus residents are minorities and over 60% are unmarried. Four in 10 are younger than 30 and nearly half have a high school education or less. The poverty rate is above 25%, more than double the state and national averages.

In interviews with dozens of single moms, grandmothers and some men, it was clear that the campaigns are not addressing their problems. ..."

Some poor people in Georgia say they have no reason to vote, a decision that could sway election

There are more than 47,000 people in Bibb County, Georgia, about 80 miles south of Atlanta, who are eligible to vote but don't. That's four times the number of votes that President Joe Biden carried the state by in 2020.

www.pbs.org

-----

This is not a new development. Before I went to law school, I worked for a community-based service program at UNC (among other jobs) back in the early 90s and nothing I read here sounds any different from the common conversations then.

It's a vicious cycle, though -- the poor are least likely to vote and politicians frame their campaigns around what reasonably LIKELY VOTERS want, with the biggest pool of likely voters being the middle class (though the most certain to vote being the wealthy and elderly). And in a way, these folks aren't wrong about limitations on how their life might improve depending on who is in the White House, though they often may not appreciate how things could get even worse depending on who is making policy decisions (not that "things could be a whole lot worse" is a worthy political pitch).

 

[superrific]

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.

1. I think there is a pretty solid consensus that today's prediction markets are worse than forecasting models. That's not a law of nature; better prediction markets could yield better information. Most of the positive evidence for prediction markets comes from decades ago; our recent experience is that prediction markets don't work very well for reasons I've already outlined in some detail.

2. If a person is comparing polls to prediction markets, then obviously the prediction markets will do better because polls are not predictions. Polls are snapshots. That doesn't make prediction markets good. It just means that the analyst is lazy. Comparing a snapshot to a prediction is ridiculous.

3. 538 tried to have that honest discussion a few years ago. I don't think I was convinced by it, but it wasn't unreasonable.

Basically, what they did was test their predictive ability by evaluating all of their predictions -- including the sports predictions that the site used to make. They treated an election forecast as a stream of serial individual forecasts from start to finish. And they tried to see if something they predicted to be 75% likely would in fact occur 75% of the time.

Unsurprisingly, they came out with pretty good results. I question the mash-up of sports and politics. Sports predictions are much easier than political predictions. There are many fewer variables. But it's also true that expanding their sample size is a good idea, so you know, it's hard to assess. I'm also not sure about the election forecast as a series of individual forecasts. They weighted it down in some way so that, say, the presidential election forecast didn't swamp all the other forecasts by virtue of being 300 forecasts in a row. I also don't remember if it was only a binary outcome being measured. I think it was.

I also am skeptical of the serial forecast approach, but that's a long discussion.

4. Ultimately, I think the problem is epistemic rather than statistical (and you might be making that point as well). Suppose the model gives candidate A a 90 % chance to win on September 1. By September 15, something happened and the probability goes to 60%. I don't think this should be equivalent to two predictions of 75%. Now, the question is whether the "something happened" should be held against the 90% estimate. On one hand, you could say that it should -- after all, it's trying to make predictions. But the result is that the model builds in tons of uncertainty, and that dilutes its usefulness. Indeed, the models just won't predict 90% in August unless the race is truly out of control.

And the second question, which I think is philosophical, is what we consider good performance. Suppose there's a model that has A's chances hovering around 60% for three months. At the very end of the election, there's an event that pushes A's chances to 70% and A wins. Suppose there's another model that builds in less uncertainty. It has A's chances at 30% for all of August, September and most of October. Then, after the event, this model says that A is 85% likely to win. Why do we care if it had A at 30% in August? The thing that propelled A hadn't happened yet. Isn't the 85% figure what we really care about?

I think this is one of those instances where Nate & Co decided they needed to measure their performance (a good instinct!), but the only way they could figure out how to do a measurement that isn't absurd is this serial approach, so the phenomenon that I'm sure you encounter a lot -- we measure what we can, and then we interpret what we have measured -- probably applies here. Is a bad measurement better than no measurement?

 

[superrific]

Some poor people in Georgia say they have no reason to vote, a decision that could sway election​

"... Linda Solomon, 58, said she and her daughter aren’t voting “ because nothing changes ” no matter who sits in the White House. “Why you gonna vote and ain’t nobody doing nothing?”

While Harris has excited Black voters in and around Atlanta, with its wealthier and better-educated electorate, interviews in Bibb County suggest voters living in far worse circumstances are not moved by the historic nature of her candidacy. Democrats won the county by a 2-1 margin in 2020, and Republicans are increasingly confident they can erode Democrats’ historic advantage of winning roughly 90% of all Black votes.

... Harris has focused on the middle class, and she has offered plans for small businesses and home buyers.

In places like Macon, that could prove a difficult sale. The clients at Mother’s Nest are not business owners or homebuyers anytime soon, and even Harris’ plan to take on grocery chains for price gouging doesn’t resonate with a population living in food deserts.

... AP VoteCast, a survey of both voters and nonvoters, showed that nonvoters in 2020 tended to be poorer, younger, less educated, unmarried and minorities. The data, collected by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, also found that among voters in 2020, 15% reported having a household income under $25,000 in the previous year, compared with roughly 3 in 10 nonvoters. Put those characteristics against a population of 27 million adults who live below poverty, according to the census, and the figures suggest that people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder probably make up a significant subset of all nonvoters.

... In 2020, the turnout of people eligible to vote in Georgia was 66.3%, nearly matching the national figure of 66.8%, according to the Center for Inclusive Democracy, with the lowest turnouts among Black and Latino voters.

... A majority of Bibb County’s 150,000-plus residents are minorities and over 60% are unmarried. Four in 10 are younger than 30 and nearly half have a high school education or less. The poverty rate is above 25%, more than double the state and national averages.

In interviews with dozens of single moms, grandmothers and some men, it was clear that the campaigns are not addressing their problems. ..."

Some poor people in Georgia say they have no reason to vote, a decision that could sway election

There are more than 47,000 people in Bibb County, Georgia, about 80 miles south of Atlanta, who are eligible to vote but don't. That's four times the number of votes that President Joe Biden carried the state by in 2020.

www.pbs.org

-----

This is not a new development. Before I went to law school, I worked for a community-based service program at UNC (among other jobs) back in the early 90s and nothing I read here sounds any different from the common conversations then.

It's a vicious cycle, though -- the poor are least likely to vote and politicians frame their campaigns around what reasonably LIKELY VOTERS want, with the biggest pool of likely voters being the middle class (though the most certain to vote being the wealthy and elderly). And in a way, these folks aren't wrong about limitations on how their life might improve depending on who is in the White House, though they often may not appreciate how things could get even worse depending on who is making policy decisions (not that "things could be a whole lot worse" is a worthy political pitch).

This is PRECISELY the reason that the filibuster is awful. The filibuster makes it so change comes very slowly. It also obscures accountability, because people blame the WH for not making things better when the real problem is that it takes 60 votes to do anything. We need change to offer clarity. Let the Pubs repeal Obamacare and see what happens. If it turns out to be a disaster, then everyone will know, the Pubs will lose the next election, Obamacare will be restored and the Pubs lose everyone's trust. That seems like a hard trade in the short term but in the long term it's important. It would keep our political parties honest. It would also lead risk-averse legislators toward bipartisanship, because nobody wants to be solely responsible for a failure or left out of a success.

It's easy to say, "well, that's why the filibuster exists, to serve the needs of the wealthy who control the legislators" and I don't know if that's entirely wrong. But it's also true that the filibuster is an extremely inefficient and imprecise way of doing that, so it surely wouldn't be the first choice of the wealthy. I think it might be better explained as a strategy for legislators to increase their fund-raising, and certainly it's an option to think of it as not the wealthy clinging to power but average white people clinging to their relatively high status relative to minorities.