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Post subject: Re: Election 2024: The Old Men and the Senility
Posted: Fri March 08, 2024 3:48 pm
Looks Like a Cat
Joined: Wed April 20, 2016 7:11 pm Posts: 14326
_________________ "The fatal flaw of all revolutionaries is that they know how to tear things down but don't have a f**king clue about how to build anything."
Post subject: Re: Election 2024: The Old Men and the Senility
Posted: Fri March 08, 2024 9:55 pm
Looks Like a Cat
Joined: Wed April 20, 2016 7:11 pm Posts: 14326
Those who describe his presidency as an encore are correct
_________________ "The fatal flaw of all revolutionaries is that they know how to tear things down but don't have a f**king clue about how to build anything."
Not for the abortion angle…but because of how it reflects a specific issue with polling that is unique to this era.
This district is <55,000, so very little external polling was done. Instead, all of the polling was internal contract work…which is usually much more granular and exact than external polling is.
Lands, the Democrat who flipped the seat, had internal polling that showed her with a slight 3 point lead (meaning her indicated advantage was small enough to be within the margin of error). Powell, the Republican, had internal polling that showed him with an 11 point lead….plausible, given the district.
And this discrepancy is actually why we get to know what the internal polling said.
Usually we wouldn’t get to see those numbers. But since there was no independent polling being done, and every campaign wants to be the one to write the narrative, the wide discrepancy between the results of the two candidates’ internals became a topic of public debate. Lands used her numbers to indicate momentum. Powell’s campaign mocked the idea of a previously-failed Democrat candidate in a red district claiming to have the advantage…and he approached his campaign like someone who is very confident in his numbers.
Yeah, so….Lands won by 25 points.
That’s a massacre. In a district that voted Trump twice.
Now, neither team’s polls got it right…but Powell’s internal numbers were off by 36 points! Thirty six! Holy shit.
One of the curiosities to me in 2022 was the uncharacteristically bad polling work done by some of the groups that Republican candidates rely on for their internals. Trafalger, for example, missed the boat completely (but is still getting contracts). Most of the public pollsters who most badly predicted in Republicans’ favor were the ones who were also getting internal polling contracts from them.
In other words, the party seems to be increasingly taking the Donald Trump approach to its polling work: hire only the people who tell you what you want to hear, until all of the people around you start telling you what you want to hear.
And this polling work produces external outputs, too, meaning they directly effect the national polling averages.
Here’s a snippet from 538’s autopsy of polling in 2022, where they evaluate pollster accuracy in that election:
Quote:
Meanwhile, the bottom of the list features quite a few Republican-affiliated pollsters that systematically overestimated the GOP in 2022: RRH Elections, InsiderAdvantage, co/efficient, Moore Information Group.14 But the most famous of these is probably Trafalgar Group, a pollster whose methods are notoriously opaque but that played a significant role in shaping the ultimately untrue narrative that a “red wave” was building with its 37 (!) qualifying pre-election polls.
And a snippet from a NYT article about polling in 2022:
Quote:
Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, had consistently won re-election by healthy margins in her three decades representing Washington State. This year seemed no different: By midsummer, polls showed her cruising to victory over a Republican newcomer, Tiffany Smiley, by as much as 20 percentage points.
So when a survey in late September by the Republican-leaning Trafalgar Group showed Ms. Murray clinging to a lead of just two points, it seemed like an aberration. But in October, two more Republican-leaning polls put Ms. Murray barely ahead, and a third said the race was a dead heat.
As the red and blue trend lines of the closely watched RealClearPolitics average for the contest drew closer together, news organizations reported that Ms. Murray was suddenly in a fight for her political survival. Warning lights flashed in Democratic war rooms. If Ms. Murray was in trouble, no Democrat was safe.
A similar sequence of events played out in battlegrounds nationwide. Surveys showing strength for Republicans, often from the same partisan pollsters, set Democratic klaxons blaring in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Colorado. Coupled with the political factors already favoring Republicans — including inflation and President Biden’s unpopularity — the skewed polls helped feed what quickly became an inescapable political narrative: A Republican wave election was about to hit the country with hurricane force.
Democrats in each of those states went on to win their Senate races. Ms. Murray clobbered Ms. Smiley by nearly 15 points.
The fact that question is even being asked is the real fascinating result here
There was significant violence after the last 2 elections so it's not surprising.
_________________ "The fatal flaw of all revolutionaries is that they know how to tear things down but don't have a f**king clue about how to build anything."
Post subject: Re: Election 2024: The Old Men and the Senility
Posted: Thu April 04, 2024 12:30 pm
Looks Like a Cat
Joined: Wed April 20, 2016 7:11 pm Posts: 14326
B wrote:
Bi_3 wrote:
There was significant violence after the last 2 elections so it's not surprising.
False equivalence.
_________________ "The fatal flaw of all revolutionaries is that they know how to tear things down but don't have a f**king clue about how to build anything."
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