It's funny how often the same scenario ping pongs back and forth. One week Democrats will have good news and Republicans will panic. One or two weeks later Republicans will get good news and they'll celebrate while Democrats panic. Seriously we've done this dance five or six times already.
As an ultra MAGA patriot I'm enjoying the nice vibes. But it's the same 50-50 race as 1-2 weeks ago when Democrats were gloating about imminent victory and 1-2 weeks before that when Republicans were hyped up on strong polling, etc.
I’m from the other side of the spectrum but I wanted to echo your sentiments. Feels like this whole thing is a coin toss and has been for weeks. If there is a polling miss of some kind its probably hidden in a way that we won’t know until the 6th. Maybe we’re in for 2016 again, maybe we’re gonna see something the other way, maybe the polls are bang on. Who knows?
On an unrelated note, since you self described as a MAGA true believer I had a question I’ve been wanting to ask but haven’t had the chance too. Before I dive in though I do want to caveat that I am not trying to persuade you. There isn’t a gotcha here. I just want to understand.
What Trump policies are you really passionate about?
I see plenty of posts about people who seem to come from the “own the libs” type of view but not many people who say “Trump will enact XYZ Policies that will be net better for me / the country”.
I'm Catholic and banning abortion is my number one priority. Obviously Trump isn't going to sign an abortion ban, but I'm grateful for the judges he appointed and I appreciate the issue being returned to the states where we can actually reform our abortion laws for the first time in 50 years.
My second biggest priority is immigration. Biden and Harris haven't done anything to stem the tide of illegal immigration even though it creates an electoral liability for themselves. I think it's wrong to flood a bunch of foreigners into someone's town and call them racist for complaining. I want them all deported and I believe Trump will do it.
Thanks for the interesting addition to the thread.
Two points:
1) Border crossings at the end of the Trump admin were suppressed because of the pandemic era imposition of Title 42 restrictions (that nearly shut the border down as the result of the "public health emergency"). The pandemic eventually ended and the restrictions needed to be removed, and the provisions of the "normal" asylum law took effect. This is really a problem congress needs to fix.
2) The problem with abortion law is that it's a lot more complicated than restricting elective abortions. My wife had severe miscarriage several decades ago (the kind where the anesthesiologist asked her the next day if she had seen the light while she was dead - the kind where the OB-GYN said "don't call an ambulance, just put her in the car and blow your horn when you drive through red lights"). If the doctor had to consult with a lawyer before starting, I'm convinced she would have died. Saving my wife, and my young daughter's mother, was the easiest decision I ever made (she was unconscious at the time)
Border crossings were down before the pandemic hit. In Fiscal Year 2019, the year with the most border encounters under Pres. Trump, the number was 977,505. In FY 2021, the year with the LEAST encounters under Pres. Biden, that number is 1,734,686 and that's with Title 42 in place!
It's cell phones, man. They reached the jungles of northern South America in the late teens and people saw pictures of stuff on them that they had NO IDEA existed. Like all enterprising people, some of them said, "I want THAT!" And so they came and of course, since things haven't much changed in northern South America, they keep coming. And they will keep coming no matter how high you build that wall and how many people you eject. It's a choice for them between starving or being beaten to death by Maduro's thugs or maybe making it past the Migras. If Republican business owners weren't hiring illegals like there's no tomorrow, they wouldn't come.
But of course that would absolutely crash the food processing industry and the "kitchen" in all the restaurants except the hoity-toity ones that "Libs" patronize.
Title 42 (and prior sending back, that court struck down) put in place by Trump, was creating “encounters” by cycling same people crossing over & over.
You saw that effect under Trump (with the 100K/month peak), but it didn’t have time to build to the crescendo (early Covid was huge movement disruption, & our 2020 economy mess was anti-motivation).
Of course as economy picked back up here (and a lot of countries were in weaker conditions, absolute & relative) motivation returned, plus pent up demand to emigrate.
What it comes down to is Trump spent 4 hrs of posturing while NOT addressing the issue materially.
And his actions spring 2024 suggest why. He doesn’t want it fixed, he wants it a GD mess to use the existence of disorder as a political argument.
When there was legislation in the works to systematically address the issue in a meaningful way he openly killed it via orders sent to GOP Congress members
Get your facts straight, then distort them as you please. 1) There wasn't a single month during the Trump admin. that saw 100K encounters a month, with Title 42 in place. 2) Based on your arguement the numbers should have dropped after biden ended Title 42 in May of '23. However the month with the most encounters on record was Dec. of '23, 7 months post Title 42, with the months before and after being record high as well. 3) The legislation you refer to would have been meaningful to Democrats in that it would leagalize 1.5 Million illeagal crossings a year (excluding unaccompanied minors) which means 6M new voters every 4 years. Trump did the most he could without congress, shut down the gov. over border security funding and instituted remain in Mexico which was the backbone of his success. The numbers don't lie, go check them out.
On abortion, what are your thoughts on the fact that a ban will not stop abortions from occurring? Rich people will have safe abortions and some poor people will die or be seriously injured by unsafe abortions. So fetuses will continue to be stopped from developing and some number of actual people will lose their lives. How do you reconcile those facts?
On illegal immigration, are your prepared for the cost increases that would follow the loss of relatively cheap labor? Are you rich enough that that won't matter to you?
I don't believe costs would significantly rise due to mass deportations. But I'd accept a tradeoff of higher prices. And I don't think we should build our economy off near slave wages.
Nobody enjoys getting an abortion. 63% of women say they wouldn't get an abortion if finances weren't a consideration. Some men and women will pay for an abortion no matter what the law says, they just don't care. Some people will never get an abortion no matter the circumstance. But most people are in the middle. If abortion is inconvenient, a certain percentage of people who would otherwise have gotten an abortion will just go through with the pregnancy out of sheer inertia. Pro lifers can increase this percentage by promoting resources and clinics that provide financial and material assistance to pregnant women.
Yes, I agree that most care. I remember seeing a documentary where a woman was having her third abortion and she was still crying. But, I also saw a professional woman in the same documentary that wanted us to believe that she didn’t care at all and she succeeded in convincing me. She made my skin crawl, but I know she is an exception.
There is a strong progressive argument against illegal immigration. It’s immoral for the dangerous routes and it poaches labour from poorer countries. How can you rebuild if your brightest leave for the us to become taxi drivers?
If the supply of low-skill, low-pay labor drops, it's going to heavily impact the price of products that depend on that type of labor... right?
And we'd also have to deal with the cost of mass deportation itself. This would be the largest law enforcement action ever in the US. We don't have the staff to do it. The government would need to hire an army of new people in order to do it. We're talking about tens of billions of dollars here, an enormous expansion of domestic investigative and law enforcement bodies.
And even if we did do it successfully, the result would be the government kicking down the doors of people who live with their American citizen friends and family, who are generally law-abiding (crime stats indicate they commit fewer crimes on average than people born in the states if you set aside the border violations themselves... this is because of the threat of deportation, which should be used in the case of serious offenses), who stimulate the economy if only through local demand. And then removing these people, separating them from (in many cases) American citizen family members, creating millions of 0 or 1-parent households. And this isn't me even asking for sympathy for these people: 0 and 1-parent poor households statistically produce citizens that... have much more trouble integrating in our society.
Trump's proposed policy on this issue, if it is serious, will be devastating. He's asking you for money now... to effectively pay for robbing you down the line.
The only place where Trump ever had some semblance of a point was on the solidity of the border itself. We need to (if only for national security reasons) know who is going in and out. We should fund a "border bill"... but it's not going to be a wall that extends through the Sonoran desert, which (again, even if we did make the mistake of paying for it) wouldn't work as well as more efficient solutions. Any serious progress toward something like that was scuttled earlier this year alongside the 2024 border bill.
The deportations would start with the worst criminals: the drug dealers, murderers rapists etc. Ironically, hyperbolic liberal coverage of how criminal aliens are being "mistreated" will be the best deterrent for future border crossers. The DoJ would also crack down on companies hiring illegals. With no opportunity to get jobs and no more federal benefits many illegals would self deport, similar to what happened in 2008 during the Great Recession. Another easy fix is reimplementing the Remain in Mexico policy for asylum seekers. Illegals can't disappear into the country if they're stuck in Guadalajara waiting months if not years for their asylum hearing (which will be rejected under a trump administration). The "temporary" in TPS will be emphasized and the 300,000 Haitians flown in under the Biden Harris administration will be sent back.
Abortions have increased since the Dobbs decision. For people interested in reducing the number of abortions in the country, the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has been a colossal failure. There are more abortions now, and pro-life politicians like Trump are backing away from their positions.
I am not sure the best approach to reducing abortions, but it probably starts with a better education system and more support for new mothers/families.
I donated my $1200 Covid check to a crisis pregnancy center in 2020. And when my home state NC passed a 12 week abortion ban in 2023, they allocated $160 million over five years to assist pregnant women. My pro life friends hold diaper drives for Mother's Day, Christmas, etc. Not to say more can't be done, but the pro life is determined is to meet that challenge and has made concrete financial sacrifices to do so over the years.
Abortion rates were rising before the Dobbs decision, a reversal of a 20 year decline. This is due to the proliferation of the abortion pill and the FDAs relaxation of regulations of the abortion pill in 2016 and 2021. A good example is Tim Walz's Minnesota. In 2022, the Minnesota abortion rate increased 20%. Half of this increase was due to an 80% increase in out of state residents traveling to MN for an abortion. But the other half of the increase was due to a 20% increase of in-state residents getting abortions.
“I think it's wrong to flood a bunch of foreigners into someone's town and call them racist for complaining.”
See, this is the wild re-imagining of reality that points to bigotry.
Town puts in a huge effort to try re-ignite industry in their long shrinking town.
Lots of people, including legal migrants, starting under Trump(!), move to a town creating boom town issues.
Neo Nazis see it as a great opportunity to show up & spread rumour propaganda. Some locals fall for that, mistakenly accuse & echo the rumour. Trump unhinges in front of 68 million TV viewers screaming & embellishing the Neo Nazi propaganda. His VP repeats it on TV, knowing it to be untrue (Trump probably doesn’t even know it’s untrue, not that he gives a damn). None of that is helpful to anyone in the town, is actually quite harmful to them. Even the “right” residents.
I appreciate you taking the time to answer questions! Regarding the current administration not doing anything about the border: what about the border bill Trump sunk?
I don't believe Biden or Harris want to stop the illegals from coming. I think they just want to appear like they're doing something because their border policies are unpopular. The immigration bill says that once 5000 illegal crossings a day are averaged for a week, the border is shut down. I think the border should be shutdown against any illegals coming over... after all that is what the current law already says. Put another way, the bill doesn't obligate the government to do anything so long as "only" 1.5 million illegals cross in a year. Meanwhile the asylum officers hired by the bill would have conveniently given illegals legal status.
Seriously why at eyiu guys so slow to catch up with the facts? Border crossing have gone way down the last few months. Isn't that what everyone wanted? So why do you keep insisting it's out of control?
I was in the middle of typing this, couldn't have said it better myself. It bothers me that both Trump and J.D. didn't mention this at their debates (though chances are they would have been fact checked).
It’s disturbing that the idea of checking facts is problematic for Trump and Vance. If they are stating the facts, fact-checking will support, not harm them. No? Are you suggesting they should be able to say anything they want and no one should question whether it is true?
They did nothing about the border for 3.5 years, even repealing Trump's measures. The bill was an election year stopgap. But for the commenter you are responding to, it sounds like he's voting to have a tough stance on the border during all 4 years - not just election years.
IKO SAYS - Neophyte is RIGHT!!!....But to say they did nothing on immigration is wrong... THEY ENCOURAGED IT, by issuing 72 executive orders int he first three weeks of Biden's horrible presidency: 1) Stop construction of border wall on DAY ONE - that says something right there, 2) Stopped "Remain in Mexico" by executive action, which allowed millions to enter the US and roam free, 3) Loosened the definition of asylum, so that ANYONE could come into the US, 4) Stopped deportations to lowest level EVER, 5) Continues to FLY INTO THE US 30,000 "parolees" into the US each month distributing them to many RED States in an obvious horrid scheme to dump illegals into unsuspecting communities WITH NO PLAN, that have NO MONEY to help them - NOR SHOULD THEY!!!!
No they are not - they are mad about 20mm illegals in the uS roaming free, using our resources and violently beating and raping women like Laken Riley in Georgia...she was a college student on a jog who was raped and then had her skull bashed in my an illegal from Venezuela who had already been arrested and let go - THAT DID NOT NEED TO HAPPEN, CHAD!!!!
This is a site devoted to statitstical probability and its uses. Do you honestly believe that a single rape attack in Georgia is some sort of calamity? For the nation I mean. Of course it was a calamity for Ms. Riley and the attacker should be punished severely and THEN ejected after he completes his sentence.
But one rape in a nation of 330 million people is about as statistically insignificant as how many crickets you hear on the evening of September 22 and what they say about the coming winter.
You're one of those clueless LIBERAL mormons that won't acknowledge a problem until you or your family are mugged, raped or killed by an illegal...WHAT A COMPLETE HAPLESS FOOL YOU ARE...
What do you think about Trump trying to steal the 2020 election? I just can't get over this on any level. There are a variety of reasons I wouldn't vote for Trump whether it's the non-stop lies that genuinely hurt people (like lying about the aid that is available during disasters), telling Republicans not to pass the border bill because fixing the border crisis before the election will help the Democrats, threatening to jail critics and shut down news organizations, engaging in criminal activity like rape and fraud, and a variety of other reasons.
However, trying to steal an election is worse than any of those. It undermines our very system of government. If he pulled that off, we literally would no longer be in a Republic and it was only his Vice President who prevented that from happening.
Now, it's unclear whether things would have righted themselves from there, whether at the Supreme Court or with the military but it's too close to seeing our 250-year experiment in representative democracy slip away.
The problem is that Trump didn't try to steal an election. His tactics were more aggressive than the norm, but Dems seem to forget the lawfare embraced during Bush v Gore, Abrams and Clinton's assertions of stolen elections, and Marc Elias running around lodging lawsuits everywhere that he can.
There was no attempt to 'steal' the election. There was no insurrection.
The problem is that Trump tried to steal the 2020 election. He called Raffensperger to "find" votes. He pressured Pence to not certify a free and fair election. He engaged in seditious conspiracy with the fake elector scheme. He propagated unequivocal lies about the election. He incited a mob that attempted an insurrection of the government and some of whom wanted to hang the Vice President.
Gore tried to get votes counted. Interestingly, had all votes been recounted, he would have won though he was only asking for a couple of counties to be recounted.
Clinton did nothing to try to steal the election. Nothing even close. She was angry about the Russia hack and all the unregistered foreign agents in Trump's campaign as all Americans should be.
I am voting for Trump, but I agree that Trump lied about the 2020 election and it was wrong to do so. Trump told people to go to the Capitol peacefully, but it is true that his overall lying is to blame for the riot. But, I don’t believe that he should be held legally responsible for it.
The “find votes” argument isn’t compelling for me due to the different interpretations of that. Alternate electors are not fake electors. There is actually a little precedent for it. Pressuring Pence is not a big deal and Pence did the right thing. That said, it was a nonsensical waste of time by Trump and his lawyers (he needs better lawyers). All there machinations was not going to change the fact that Biden won the election.
It was also wrong for the Democrats to lie about the 2004 and 2016 elections for years. The only difference is that Democrats were never called out for doing so in the mainstream media. I also thought it was wrong for Joe Biden to call Georgia election reform Jim Crow 2.0 to the point that it cost Georgia economically. This wrong was especially highlighted when a University of Georgia study found that the election reform did not suppress the black vote in any way. In fact, more black people voted and they found through polling that their voting experience was better than ever. For me, “Jim Crow 2.0” ranked up there with some of Trump’s worst lies. It was reprehensible and caused real damage to the people of Georgia.
The reason no one called Democrats out for the 2004 and 2016 elections is because no one knows what you're talking about. I do, since I've engaged in these discussions before, but no one else does, because someone said something some time, but never pursued it in the courts, never pursued it in the media, it just dropped and no one cared or bought into it, and the people who said it never tried to sell it, probably because no one was buying.
Yes, I thought those comments were irresponsible then, and I do today, and Trump completely obliterated the scale of what they did with what he did. Surely you see that? That's not irresponsibility, that's malice, or stupidity so deep that it should be disqualifying if the malice was not.
You know if any Democrat had done what Trump had done, you'd be apoplectic. Be honest. You can see the difference. There's a test, and you've already pointed it out - with the assertion of a stolen election, who was so moved to try and defend it by force? I guarantee to you, Dems would do the same if they had real reason to believe the votes weren't counted fairly.
And while I appreciate your fake concern for me and my fellow Georgians, I am much more concerned that the Georgia election board *is* trying to steal or invalidate my vote, and I will be watching like a hawk to make sure that doesn't happen. If the Georgia elections board cost the state economically, it's not Biden's fault. If you're using the midterms, when Trump wasn't on the ballot, as a gauge for how elections will be run with these rules, you know that's not intellectually honest, either.
Actually, Democrats enjoyed bringing up Ohio stealing the election from Kerry throughout the remainder of Bush’s presidency on outlets like CNN and never once did the anchor push back on that as being dangerous to democracy. Obama even joked that Democrats winning Ohio in 2008 would put a stop to what happened in 2004 (even though Obama had originally admitted in 2005 that he was certain that Bush would have won regardless).
In regard to Georgia, let’s see who wins. Will it be the administration that did real harm to Georgia through its “Jim Crow 2.0” lie or will it be Trump whose “Big Lie” did not harm Georgia in any way.
What does 'find votes' mean, exactly? You understand, that is a statement with many interpretations, right? I get it, you don't like Trump, but that's simply projection. He pressured Pence to not certify an election he believed was filled with irregularities -- because it factually was. The irregularities that were allowed in the 2020 election would have been mocked in any other country by our own government and, in fact, consistently and often is.
I agree that the fake electors scheme held no water legally. It was a stunt. It also doesn't rise to some sort of coup attempt.
I get it. You're a staunch Democrat. You believe what your side does is morally pure. But what you really are is a biased partisan tool.
Ah, the classic ad hominem when you've lost an argument.
Trump knew privately he had lost. He said as much to his own staff, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Cassidy Hutchinson, and Mark Meadows.
Both Republicans and Democrats overseeing the election process found no significant irregularities.
Giuliani and Powell were making outlandish claims about underage voters, votes being dumped, voting systems being manipulated, dead people voting, all of which were debunked. There were 475 total cases of *potential$ voter fraud in 2020. All 3 cases prosecuted in 2020 happened to be Trump voters voting twice because they thought that it was apparently easy to commit voter fraud. It's actually quite difficult as they found out.
Nah. You are speaking as a partisan, not as a neutral observer, and it is obvious that you are doing so. That's not attacking your argument because of who or what you are, that's attacking you for being what you are. I already dealt with your arguments independently. First off, maybe go look up what an ad hominem attack even is.
There were /massive/ irregularities. State voting laws were set aside. Mail-in ballots were gathered at an unprecedented rate. Law with regards to canvassing and signature verification was either ignored entirely, or changed last minute. Vote counting was performed under unusual circumstances in several states.
None of the above is debatable; those are facts. They are the sorts of issues the US Government regularly cites as 'irregularities' when excoriating other countries for their elections. Regularly.
You are trying to equate two people''s antics with what entire states (PA, WI, MI, etc) did to their own voting systems, often contrary to their own laws, in the name of an 'emergency.' Irregularities are not even necessarily illegal. They are just, as the definition of the word explicitly defines, irregular.
In short, you are proving to be exactly what I said you are; a partisan hack, trying to pretend the trite tripe you are spouting is factual when it is, in fact, partisan pablum.
I really don't understand people that get angry at articles like this. Or angry at how Nate adjusts and averages polls for his model in general. The model has no impact on who will actually win. Furthermore, Nate has a reputation that is on the line. He is trying to be as accurate as possible- he has no incentive to be partisan with his model.
Campaigns and supporters also have nothing to gain from having inaccurate data. Wishing for a polling lead before the vote is like caring more about the scores all through the game and not caring about the final score.
1) The leaks about the internal polls seem to be coming from the Democratic side (the WSJ article sourced somebody inside Tammy Baldwin's campaign and the Michigan poll was referenced by Elise Slotkin in a donor call).
2. The latest batch of swing state polling seems to be pretty good for Trump, so that is at least consistent with the narrative that Harris is doing worse in more recent polling compared to the past.
At this point it's all Sherlock Holmes stuff though, so I wouldn't get too excited about it.
EDIT:
Oh yeah, 3. is that the betting markets seem to have swung back to favoring Trump at the current moment.
I was disappointed that Nate didn’t address the Slotkin and Baldwin examples, neither of which fits well in the narrative of his article. That said, I did appreciate the points and examples that he provided from the “other side” of the debate about internal polling. While Nate makes some valid points and provided some good examples, the desire to pick a side and then generalize the other side to fit his narrative is one of the weaknesses of this article.
In an earlier post this week, he pointed out that democrats seem to enjoy a bit of freaking out, and think it helps their fundraising to be able to yell “we’re gonna lose if you don’t help us!!!!!!!”
They certainly do think that it helps their fundraising to talk about how much danger they're in. And, frankly, I find that to be a rather striking change. I don't recall Obama's fundraising appeals ever sounding like that. I don't recall Biden's own fundraising appeals ever sounding like that. The more typical pattern is that politicians want to project confidence at all costs.
On the micro-level, the Harris campaign probably knows what it's doing. They can surely test different appeals and see which ones rake in the most cash. But I have to wonder if they're overdoing the whole "we're in such terrible danger" thing. The message is bound to leak out from potential donors to ordinary voters, and it won't get them to associate Kamala Harris with confident leadership.
This could be one of the reasons that Dems have had a bad "vibes" week beyond anything visible in the data.
It occurred to me that Slotkin and Baldwin are both worried about the presidential race. Senate results are highly sensitive to who turns out just like every other election. Trump topline people (for that matter Harris people too) are probably voting straight line R and D and mostly not caring that much about individuals in the elections below the topline. So Senate poll results have limited usefulness if the actual voters skew in one direction or another. Scaring the electorate into greater turnout for your side would seem to have advantages if it works, and if excitement seems to be an issue. Whether it works or not is the rub.
I tend to think that if people aren't fired up about Trump already, they aren't going to be highly sensitive to worrying by Slotkin or Baldwin.
You know the Harris campaign is in big trouble when they have to trot out Obama, who actually pleads with black voters to vote for Harris strictly because of the color of her skin. After the Colbert softball interview with Harris, she seemed to have a brain freeze when she was asked a very simple question about how her economy plan would differ from that of her current administration. Instead of giving a normal response, she went into her usual affirmative head nodding, hand gestures & talked about aspirations & joy of the American people. I can't figure out how joy & aspiration answers this simple question. Raising taxes causes jobs to be lost. The very basic idea that Harris seems to not be unaware of. I have said it before & will say it again. This woman is not fit to be the leader of the greatest Country in the free world. You may not like Trump's personality, but with him, you know our Country was much more prosperous & safe, when he was in office. Ask yourself this question = Who would you want in office when the world is on the verge of World War 111? Trump or Harris? I think the answer is a no-brainer. The sportsbooks seem to agree that Trump is gaining all the momentum, as the odds are shifting greatly in his favor. He went from a 6.5 point underdog a month ago to a 6.5 point favorites as of 10/11. No surprise here. Have a great weekend.
Well, that's me told, as the British say. I much like Nate's post on internal polling, a subject I've been interested in lately from the point of view that these are the men behind the curtain, the Oz Great and Terrible. However, those dramatic (bad) numbers leaked from the Romney internals AFTER the race was lost disabused me that there is a magic fraternity of pollsters who really know what's going on.
In summary, as I understand the post, 1) If we hear about an internal poll before the election, it's almost surely spin, propaganda. They are telling us because there is persuasive power in the cachet that internal polls do have as secret insider knowledge, so it spins us better.
2) Internal polls usually have different motivations than we do. We want to know who will win, but they want to know where to put the money.
3) What good is Truth anyway? "Correct" internal polls may demoralize the candidate and campaign bigshots, and what good would that do? They still have to run the race and they know what path they have to take: whatever internals say, they still do have to win Pennsylvania, and that's true for both campaigns. Better avoid all the upset and just bias the heck out of the polling reported to the candidate. A happy candidate is still fighting.
Okay, I'm persuaded that internal polling is not after all done by magic shamen who actually do know how to play this polling game. Darn.
And don't just long the current data. Long the previous data too, which shows that Trump's vote share is consistently underestimated in the polls by a few points. Short the vibes that say “Oh, the pollsters must have fixed it by now!”.
But by all means, don’t long the data that Democrats did better in ‘22 and ‘23 than polling or vibes suggested. As a Harris supporter, I’m pleased with Trump’s internal polls released today - because if you think Trump’s internal polls are spot on (or maybe even underestimating him, given “past data”?) you are more of a vibes guy than you’d care to admit.
Trump wasn't on the ballot in '22 or '23. Republicans used to be the party of conscientious elites, which gave them a boost in midterms. Now Democrats are the party of conscientious elites. So '22 and '23 went exactly as a data-oriented observer would expect.
Of course you can decide the ‘24 electorate will be the same as ‘20, or ‘16, much as you can decide that past polling errors predict future ones. But that’s just vibes. Just to ruin the vibes a little, at least as far as comparisons to ‘16- there are far fewer undecideds this year- fewer than in ‘20 too. And a 49-48 lead is not the same as a 46-45 lead. I remain cautiously- very cautiously-optimistic.
I'm neither optimistic nor pessimistic because I'm an impartial foreign observer who's just interested in the stats and the human psychology of how people engage with the stats.
Fair enough. I’d say lucky you, but I don’t know where you’re from. Much like Nate described, we Democrats are an angsty bunch. Plugged in but honestly can’t wait for Nov 5, or whatever date past that when this election is decided.
Good point --- there are indeed a lot fewer undecideds this election than in 2016 when the Trump phenomenon was all new and bewildering. Today I've seen headlines that some analysts are backing out of the "get the undecideds!" motif and switching to something else, such as "chase down the people who won't vote if it rains!" They are calling them "low-propensity voters." But they aren't undecided.
I never claimed certainty. But yes, any evidence should make a foxy Bayesian adjust his priors, even just a little. There's no magic number where you flip a binary switch from “This is meaningless” to “Now I am certain”. You just keep accumulating information and gradually adjusting your priors.
Cute, but yeah ---- it's a lot more data than no elections. I suppose that was your point about an N of two not being much; true, but it's more than zero.
Vibes are probably an effort to get to information about fundamentals (like suddenly there are more Republicans than Democrats registered --- that's important!). If polls aren't worth much, vibes are a fall-back position.
That doesn't follow. There's no evidence that direction of current polling error can be predicted by past polling error, and there's a plausible reason to think it can't (pollsters accounting for sources of past error).
Not really addressing the points brought up against you by journalists. Just anecdotes and not data. These polls are more extensive and better funded than the numbers this site uses, this is not addressed. Just conjecture that they're 3 points toward their own candidate and that all leaks are a conspiracy somehow so therefore that somehow also matters. Hey guess what, the polls you use were overestimating Clinton by around 4 and Biden by around 6 at this time in those elections, that's data, are you shifting the results from your public polls by 5? lol, I don't think so.
Mark Halperin wins this round.
And I would say, a more effective defense would simply be to say, yeah those polls are better funded than the polls we use, but we don't have access to them so we don't worry about them. And that they're polls, and polls are ultimately still just polls, they can be wrong even if they're higher quality data. That would be a lot better defense.
My friend, you're out of your league. But for demonstration purposes, let me show you what a person actually educated in these topics would destroy your attempted points with:
1. And you have proof of this conjecture, where?
2. And you have proof of this conjecture, where? And you have proof that you would be able to critique professional pollsters better than the professional pollsters themselves, where?
I'm not talking to the fans, every comment I make on this site is only aimed at people on my level, people who actually have some mastery over these topics academically and professionally.
"...every comment I make on this site is only aimed at people on my level, people who actually have some mastery over these topics academically and professionally."
Its very impressive that you were able to make comments on this site while also being wedged so far up your own ass. And they call liberals elitist...
Oh I was saying you were elitist, not me. I know I'm just a simple plebian who cannot dream of being on the same level as a patrician such as yourself.
I will now go cry harder. Thank you for taking valuable time out of your day to grace me with guidance, no doubt derived from all that academic and professional mastery you have.
Question: can campaigns get way more accurate data with less MOE just by increasing the sample size? I'd think if I had 1 billion dollars like the Harris campaign, I'd be able to get like 5x the sample size of public pollsters.
Once you get much past 1000 in your sample size (assuming you have a truly random sample across the population you are interested in), you quickly hit a wall of diminishing returns (statistics are often surprising). When you see larger sample sizes, it's usuallt because someone is interested in sub-populations.
Yehbut ---- she still needs to secure Pennsylvania. Maybe accuracy isn't so important to campaigns: it's we who want to know who is going to win. The campaigns know the path they have to try to take.
First thought when seeing this post was how quick off the mark NS was. A post reporting interesting internal polling was only six down. The poster had heard about bad internal polling from a GOP 'friend'.
Second thought was the old saw that its hard to convince a person of a fact if his income depends on it not being true. I think there may be a tiny bit of this behind Nates views.
But, I think he is right that any internal polling we hear about BEFORE THE ELECTION is most likely a strategic 'leak'. I remember hearing after Clinton's loss to Trump that Dems' internal polling for Michigan was forecasting the bad news weeks before the election.
I don't think campaigns are so tightly disciplined and locked down that an unintended leak is impossible. I think Nate underestimates human nature and the urge to drop a juicy titbit of the 'You didn't hear this from me but...' type.
Right, I know what you mean about the Michigan bad news internal polling only leaking correctly AFTER the 2016 election. That was the case, too, about the Clinton campaign internal polling that caused them to cancel the fireworks to celebrate breaking "the last glass ceiling" the week before the election. This story only came out after Trump had won. And in that case it was about resource allocation --- save the money. The best info about internal polls will only be available too late and as juicy stories.
My take is that in an election as close as this, everyone is looking at data or signals with their own, biased filters. Speaking for myself, I do not know how my own filters are constructed and where they are wrong. I do not know if I am being rational and objective or denying what is real.
Do you have any arguments to refute the individual points he’s making here?
I mean I’ll admit that it’s plausible that the chatter about internals is actually real, but everything Nate said here makes sense and it’s also plausible that it’s all a smokescreen as part of either or both campaigns’ strategies.
It’s like Nate basically said: without actual access to the full population of both campaigns’ internals to perform the sort of statistical analysis he does with largely public polls, there’s no way of knowing for sure what story the internals are really telling, and if the current “vibes” shift is really signal or merely noise. The most logical approach is therefore to stick with the conclusion that the hard data we do have is still telling us (that the race is still the toss-up it has been), until said hard data actually changes enough to conclude there’s been a genuine shift.
It's funny how often the same scenario ping pongs back and forth. One week Democrats will have good news and Republicans will panic. One or two weeks later Republicans will get good news and they'll celebrate while Democrats panic. Seriously we've done this dance five or six times already.
As an ultra MAGA patriot I'm enjoying the nice vibes. But it's the same 50-50 race as 1-2 weeks ago when Democrats were gloating about imminent victory and 1-2 weeks before that when Republicans were hyped up on strong polling, etc.
I’m from the other side of the spectrum but I wanted to echo your sentiments. Feels like this whole thing is a coin toss and has been for weeks. If there is a polling miss of some kind its probably hidden in a way that we won’t know until the 6th. Maybe we’re in for 2016 again, maybe we’re gonna see something the other way, maybe the polls are bang on. Who knows?
On an unrelated note, since you self described as a MAGA true believer I had a question I’ve been wanting to ask but haven’t had the chance too. Before I dive in though I do want to caveat that I am not trying to persuade you. There isn’t a gotcha here. I just want to understand.
What Trump policies are you really passionate about?
I see plenty of posts about people who seem to come from the “own the libs” type of view but not many people who say “Trump will enact XYZ Policies that will be net better for me / the country”.
Thanks in advance.
Appreciate the question.
I'm Catholic and banning abortion is my number one priority. Obviously Trump isn't going to sign an abortion ban, but I'm grateful for the judges he appointed and I appreciate the issue being returned to the states where we can actually reform our abortion laws for the first time in 50 years.
My second biggest priority is immigration. Biden and Harris haven't done anything to stem the tide of illegal immigration even though it creates an electoral liability for themselves. I think it's wrong to flood a bunch of foreigners into someone's town and call them racist for complaining. I want them all deported and I believe Trump will do it.
Thanks for the interesting addition to the thread.
Two points:
1) Border crossings at the end of the Trump admin were suppressed because of the pandemic era imposition of Title 42 restrictions (that nearly shut the border down as the result of the "public health emergency"). The pandemic eventually ended and the restrictions needed to be removed, and the provisions of the "normal" asylum law took effect. This is really a problem congress needs to fix.
2) The problem with abortion law is that it's a lot more complicated than restricting elective abortions. My wife had severe miscarriage several decades ago (the kind where the anesthesiologist asked her the next day if she had seen the light while she was dead - the kind where the OB-GYN said "don't call an ambulance, just put her in the car and blow your horn when you drive through red lights"). If the doctor had to consult with a lawyer before starting, I'm convinced she would have died. Saving my wife, and my young daughter's mother, was the easiest decision I ever made (she was unconscious at the time)
Border crossings were down before the pandemic hit. In Fiscal Year 2019, the year with the most border encounters under Pres. Trump, the number was 977,505. In FY 2021, the year with the LEAST encounters under Pres. Biden, that number is 1,734,686 and that's with Title 42 in place!
It's cell phones, man. They reached the jungles of northern South America in the late teens and people saw pictures of stuff on them that they had NO IDEA existed. Like all enterprising people, some of them said, "I want THAT!" And so they came and of course, since things haven't much changed in northern South America, they keep coming. And they will keep coming no matter how high you build that wall and how many people you eject. It's a choice for them between starving or being beaten to death by Maduro's thugs or maybe making it past the Migras. If Republican business owners weren't hiring illegals like there's no tomorrow, they wouldn't come.
But of course that would absolutely crash the food processing industry and the "kitchen" in all the restaurants except the hoity-toity ones that "Libs" patronize.
That's what remain in Mexico was for. By all means come in leagally or don't come.
Also I challenge you to get out of a room with four brick walls and no windows or doors... behold the power of physical barriers!
Title 42 (and prior sending back, that court struck down) put in place by Trump, was creating “encounters” by cycling same people crossing over & over.
You saw that effect under Trump (with the 100K/month peak), but it didn’t have time to build to the crescendo (early Covid was huge movement disruption, & our 2020 economy mess was anti-motivation).
Of course as economy picked back up here (and a lot of countries were in weaker conditions, absolute & relative) motivation returned, plus pent up demand to emigrate.
What it comes down to is Trump spent 4 hrs of posturing while NOT addressing the issue materially.
And his actions spring 2024 suggest why. He doesn’t want it fixed, he wants it a GD mess to use the existence of disorder as a political argument.
When there was legislation in the works to systematically address the issue in a meaningful way he openly killed it via orders sent to GOP Congress members
Get your facts straight, then distort them as you please. 1) There wasn't a single month during the Trump admin. that saw 100K encounters a month, with Title 42 in place. 2) Based on your arguement the numbers should have dropped after biden ended Title 42 in May of '23. However the month with the most encounters on record was Dec. of '23, 7 months post Title 42, with the months before and after being record high as well. 3) The legislation you refer to would have been meaningful to Democrats in that it would leagalize 1.5 Million illeagal crossings a year (excluding unaccompanied minors) which means 6M new voters every 4 years. Trump did the most he could without congress, shut down the gov. over border security funding and instituted remain in Mexico which was the backbone of his success. The numbers don't lie, go check them out.
Thanks for the reply, I appreciate the time and insight.
On abortion, what are your thoughts on the fact that a ban will not stop abortions from occurring? Rich people will have safe abortions and some poor people will die or be seriously injured by unsafe abortions. So fetuses will continue to be stopped from developing and some number of actual people will lose their lives. How do you reconcile those facts?
On illegal immigration, are your prepared for the cost increases that would follow the loss of relatively cheap labor? Are you rich enough that that won't matter to you?
I don't believe costs would significantly rise due to mass deportations. But I'd accept a tradeoff of higher prices. And I don't think we should build our economy off near slave wages.
Nobody enjoys getting an abortion. 63% of women say they wouldn't get an abortion if finances weren't a consideration. Some men and women will pay for an abortion no matter what the law says, they just don't care. Some people will never get an abortion no matter the circumstance. But most people are in the middle. If abortion is inconvenient, a certain percentage of people who would otherwise have gotten an abortion will just go through with the pregnancy out of sheer inertia. Pro lifers can increase this percentage by promoting resources and clinics that provide financial and material assistance to pregnant women.
They do care. You might disagree on their priorities, and their ultimate decision, but that doesn't mean they don't care.
Yes, I agree that most care. I remember seeing a documentary where a woman was having her third abortion and she was still crying. But, I also saw a professional woman in the same documentary that wanted us to believe that she didn’t care at all and she succeeded in convincing me. She made my skin crawl, but I know she is an exception.
There is a strong progressive argument against illegal immigration. It’s immoral for the dangerous routes and it poaches labour from poorer countries. How can you rebuild if your brightest leave for the us to become taxi drivers?
If the supply of low-skill, low-pay labor drops, it's going to heavily impact the price of products that depend on that type of labor... right?
And we'd also have to deal with the cost of mass deportation itself. This would be the largest law enforcement action ever in the US. We don't have the staff to do it. The government would need to hire an army of new people in order to do it. We're talking about tens of billions of dollars here, an enormous expansion of domestic investigative and law enforcement bodies.
And even if we did do it successfully, the result would be the government kicking down the doors of people who live with their American citizen friends and family, who are generally law-abiding (crime stats indicate they commit fewer crimes on average than people born in the states if you set aside the border violations themselves... this is because of the threat of deportation, which should be used in the case of serious offenses), who stimulate the economy if only through local demand. And then removing these people, separating them from (in many cases) American citizen family members, creating millions of 0 or 1-parent households. And this isn't me even asking for sympathy for these people: 0 and 1-parent poor households statistically produce citizens that... have much more trouble integrating in our society.
Trump's proposed policy on this issue, if it is serious, will be devastating. He's asking you for money now... to effectively pay for robbing you down the line.
The only place where Trump ever had some semblance of a point was on the solidity of the border itself. We need to (if only for national security reasons) know who is going in and out. We should fund a "border bill"... but it's not going to be a wall that extends through the Sonoran desert, which (again, even if we did make the mistake of paying for it) wouldn't work as well as more efficient solutions. Any serious progress toward something like that was scuttled earlier this year alongside the 2024 border bill.
The deportations would start with the worst criminals: the drug dealers, murderers rapists etc. Ironically, hyperbolic liberal coverage of how criminal aliens are being "mistreated" will be the best deterrent for future border crossers. The DoJ would also crack down on companies hiring illegals. With no opportunity to get jobs and no more federal benefits many illegals would self deport, similar to what happened in 2008 during the Great Recession. Another easy fix is reimplementing the Remain in Mexico policy for asylum seekers. Illegals can't disappear into the country if they're stuck in Guadalajara waiting months if not years for their asylum hearing (which will be rejected under a trump administration). The "temporary" in TPS will be emphasized and the 300,000 Haitians flown in under the Biden Harris administration will be sent back.
Abortions have increased since the Dobbs decision. For people interested in reducing the number of abortions in the country, the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has been a colossal failure. There are more abortions now, and pro-life politicians like Trump are backing away from their positions.
I am not sure the best approach to reducing abortions, but it probably starts with a better education system and more support for new mothers/families.
I donated my $1200 Covid check to a crisis pregnancy center in 2020. And when my home state NC passed a 12 week abortion ban in 2023, they allocated $160 million over five years to assist pregnant women. My pro life friends hold diaper drives for Mother's Day, Christmas, etc. Not to say more can't be done, but the pro life is determined is to meet that challenge and has made concrete financial sacrifices to do so over the years.
Abortion rates were rising before the Dobbs decision, a reversal of a 20 year decline. This is due to the proliferation of the abortion pill and the FDAs relaxation of regulations of the abortion pill in 2016 and 2021. A good example is Tim Walz's Minnesota. In 2022, the Minnesota abortion rate increased 20%. Half of this increase was due to an 80% increase in out of state residents traveling to MN for an abortion. But the other half of the increase was due to a 20% increase of in-state residents getting abortions.
“I think it's wrong to flood a bunch of foreigners into someone's town and call them racist for complaining.”
See, this is the wild re-imagining of reality that points to bigotry.
Town puts in a huge effort to try re-ignite industry in their long shrinking town.
Lots of people, including legal migrants, starting under Trump(!), move to a town creating boom town issues.
Neo Nazis see it as a great opportunity to show up & spread rumour propaganda. Some locals fall for that, mistakenly accuse & echo the rumour. Trump unhinges in front of 68 million TV viewers screaming & embellishing the Neo Nazi propaganda. His VP repeats it on TV, knowing it to be untrue (Trump probably doesn’t even know it’s untrue, not that he gives a damn). None of that is helpful to anyone in the town, is actually quite harmful to them. Even the “right” residents.
Hang. Your. Head.
You're proving my point. Instead of addressing the concerns of the native Americans you accuse them of being Nazis.
I did NOT. https://www.npr.org/2024/09/24/nx-s1-5118438/neo-nazi-haitian-springfield-trump-debate
Those are self described neo nazis.
Then a lady’s cat wandered into the basement, and primed by weeks of that propaganda she called the cops & accused her neighbours.
Couple days later she found the cat & her daughter convinced her to go apologize to the neighbours (good on her for that👍🏼).
Then, JD Vance, knowing the truth of the matter, kept repeating what he knew was untrue.
Hang.
Your.
Head.
I appreciate you taking the time to answer questions! Regarding the current administration not doing anything about the border: what about the border bill Trump sunk?
I don't believe Biden or Harris want to stop the illegals from coming. I think they just want to appear like they're doing something because their border policies are unpopular. The immigration bill says that once 5000 illegal crossings a day are averaged for a week, the border is shut down. I think the border should be shutdown against any illegals coming over... after all that is what the current law already says. Put another way, the bill doesn't obligate the government to do anything so long as "only" 1.5 million illegals cross in a year. Meanwhile the asylum officers hired by the bill would have conveniently given illegals legal status.
Asylum applicants need to have their claims processed. That is what the staffing was for.
And people with pending asylum applications are not here illegally.
Thats am extremely low bar and vulnerable to massive abuse, which is happening right now.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/01/migrant-encounters-at-u-s-mexico-border-have-fallen-sharply-in-2024/
Seriously why at eyiu guys so slow to catch up with the facts? Border crossing have gone way down the last few months. Isn't that what everyone wanted? So why do you keep insisting it's out of control?
Great, then we can focus on deporting every last one of them already in the country.
At gunpoint, if need be.
I was in the middle of typing this, couldn't have said it better myself. It bothers me that both Trump and J.D. didn't mention this at their debates (though chances are they would have been fact checked).
It’s disturbing that the idea of checking facts is problematic for Trump and Vance. If they are stating the facts, fact-checking will support, not harm them. No? Are you suggesting they should be able to say anything they want and no one should question whether it is true?
I appreciate you taking the time to reply.
The one that came 3.5 years into their administration?
Do you send a meal back at a restaurant because it came 10 minutes later than you expected it, or are you just happy to eat?
I understand you might have wanted them to do something sooner, but they did try.
The question you have to answer is this: Trump did it without congress, why couldn't Biden?
They did nothing about the border for 3.5 years, even repealing Trump's measures. The bill was an election year stopgap. But for the commenter you are responding to, it sounds like he's voting to have a tough stance on the border during all 4 years - not just election years.
IKO SAYS - Neophyte is RIGHT!!!....But to say they did nothing on immigration is wrong... THEY ENCOURAGED IT, by issuing 72 executive orders int he first three weeks of Biden's horrible presidency: 1) Stop construction of border wall on DAY ONE - that says something right there, 2) Stopped "Remain in Mexico" by executive action, which allowed millions to enter the US and roam free, 3) Loosened the definition of asylum, so that ANYONE could come into the US, 4) Stopped deportations to lowest level EVER, 5) Continues to FLY INTO THE US 30,000 "parolees" into the US each month distributing them to many RED States in an obvious horrid scheme to dump illegals into unsuspecting communities WITH NO PLAN, that have NO MONEY to help them - NOR SHOULD THEY!!!!
No they are not - they are mad about 20mm illegals in the uS roaming free, using our resources and violently beating and raping women like Laken Riley in Georgia...she was a college student on a jog who was raped and then had her skull bashed in my an illegal from Venezuela who had already been arrested and let go - THAT DID NOT NEED TO HAPPEN, CHAD!!!!
This is a site devoted to statitstical probability and its uses. Do you honestly believe that a single rape attack in Georgia is some sort of calamity? For the nation I mean. Of course it was a calamity for Ms. Riley and the attacker should be punished severely and THEN ejected after he completes his sentence.
But one rape in a nation of 330 million people is about as statistically insignificant as how many crickets you hear on the evening of September 22 and what they say about the coming winter.
You're one of those clueless LIBERAL mormons that won't acknowledge a problem until you or your family are mugged, raped or killed by an illegal...WHAT A COMPLETE HAPLESS FOOL YOU ARE...
What do you think about Trump trying to steal the 2020 election? I just can't get over this on any level. There are a variety of reasons I wouldn't vote for Trump whether it's the non-stop lies that genuinely hurt people (like lying about the aid that is available during disasters), telling Republicans not to pass the border bill because fixing the border crisis before the election will help the Democrats, threatening to jail critics and shut down news organizations, engaging in criminal activity like rape and fraud, and a variety of other reasons.
However, trying to steal an election is worse than any of those. It undermines our very system of government. If he pulled that off, we literally would no longer be in a Republic and it was only his Vice President who prevented that from happening.
Now, it's unclear whether things would have righted themselves from there, whether at the Supreme Court or with the military but it's too close to seeing our 250-year experiment in representative democracy slip away.
The problem is that Trump didn't try to steal an election. His tactics were more aggressive than the norm, but Dems seem to forget the lawfare embraced during Bush v Gore, Abrams and Clinton's assertions of stolen elections, and Marc Elias running around lodging lawsuits everywhere that he can.
There was no attempt to 'steal' the election. There was no insurrection.
The problem is that Trump tried to steal the 2020 election. He called Raffensperger to "find" votes. He pressured Pence to not certify a free and fair election. He engaged in seditious conspiracy with the fake elector scheme. He propagated unequivocal lies about the election. He incited a mob that attempted an insurrection of the government and some of whom wanted to hang the Vice President.
Gore tried to get votes counted. Interestingly, had all votes been recounted, he would have won though he was only asking for a couple of counties to be recounted.
Clinton did nothing to try to steal the election. Nothing even close. She was angry about the Russia hack and all the unregistered foreign agents in Trump's campaign as all Americans should be.
I am voting for Trump, but I agree that Trump lied about the 2020 election and it was wrong to do so. Trump told people to go to the Capitol peacefully, but it is true that his overall lying is to blame for the riot. But, I don’t believe that he should be held legally responsible for it.
The “find votes” argument isn’t compelling for me due to the different interpretations of that. Alternate electors are not fake electors. There is actually a little precedent for it. Pressuring Pence is not a big deal and Pence did the right thing. That said, it was a nonsensical waste of time by Trump and his lawyers (he needs better lawyers). All there machinations was not going to change the fact that Biden won the election.
It was also wrong for the Democrats to lie about the 2004 and 2016 elections for years. The only difference is that Democrats were never called out for doing so in the mainstream media. I also thought it was wrong for Joe Biden to call Georgia election reform Jim Crow 2.0 to the point that it cost Georgia economically. This wrong was especially highlighted when a University of Georgia study found that the election reform did not suppress the black vote in any way. In fact, more black people voted and they found through polling that their voting experience was better than ever. For me, “Jim Crow 2.0” ranked up there with some of Trump’s worst lies. It was reprehensible and caused real damage to the people of Georgia.
The reason no one called Democrats out for the 2004 and 2016 elections is because no one knows what you're talking about. I do, since I've engaged in these discussions before, but no one else does, because someone said something some time, but never pursued it in the courts, never pursued it in the media, it just dropped and no one cared or bought into it, and the people who said it never tried to sell it, probably because no one was buying.
Yes, I thought those comments were irresponsible then, and I do today, and Trump completely obliterated the scale of what they did with what he did. Surely you see that? That's not irresponsibility, that's malice, or stupidity so deep that it should be disqualifying if the malice was not.
You know if any Democrat had done what Trump had done, you'd be apoplectic. Be honest. You can see the difference. There's a test, and you've already pointed it out - with the assertion of a stolen election, who was so moved to try and defend it by force? I guarantee to you, Dems would do the same if they had real reason to believe the votes weren't counted fairly.
And while I appreciate your fake concern for me and my fellow Georgians, I am much more concerned that the Georgia election board *is* trying to steal or invalidate my vote, and I will be watching like a hawk to make sure that doesn't happen. If the Georgia elections board cost the state economically, it's not Biden's fault. If you're using the midterms, when Trump wasn't on the ballot, as a gauge for how elections will be run with these rules, you know that's not intellectually honest, either.
Actually, Democrats enjoyed bringing up Ohio stealing the election from Kerry throughout the remainder of Bush’s presidency on outlets like CNN and never once did the anchor push back on that as being dangerous to democracy. Obama even joked that Democrats winning Ohio in 2008 would put a stop to what happened in 2004 (even though Obama had originally admitted in 2005 that he was certain that Bush would have won regardless).
In regard to Georgia, let’s see who wins. Will it be the administration that did real harm to Georgia through its “Jim Crow 2.0” lie or will it be Trump whose “Big Lie” did not harm Georgia in any way.
What does 'find votes' mean, exactly? You understand, that is a statement with many interpretations, right? I get it, you don't like Trump, but that's simply projection. He pressured Pence to not certify an election he believed was filled with irregularities -- because it factually was. The irregularities that were allowed in the 2020 election would have been mocked in any other country by our own government and, in fact, consistently and often is.
I agree that the fake electors scheme held no water legally. It was a stunt. It also doesn't rise to some sort of coup attempt.
I get it. You're a staunch Democrat. You believe what your side does is morally pure. But what you really are is a biased partisan tool.
Ah, the classic ad hominem when you've lost an argument.
Trump knew privately he had lost. He said as much to his own staff, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Cassidy Hutchinson, and Mark Meadows.
Both Republicans and Democrats overseeing the election process found no significant irregularities.
Giuliani and Powell were making outlandish claims about underage voters, votes being dumped, voting systems being manipulated, dead people voting, all of which were debunked. There were 475 total cases of *potential$ voter fraud in 2020. All 3 cases prosecuted in 2020 happened to be Trump voters voting twice because they thought that it was apparently easy to commit voter fraud. It's actually quite difficult as they found out.
Nah. You are speaking as a partisan, not as a neutral observer, and it is obvious that you are doing so. That's not attacking your argument because of who or what you are, that's attacking you for being what you are. I already dealt with your arguments independently. First off, maybe go look up what an ad hominem attack even is.
There were /massive/ irregularities. State voting laws were set aside. Mail-in ballots were gathered at an unprecedented rate. Law with regards to canvassing and signature verification was either ignored entirely, or changed last minute. Vote counting was performed under unusual circumstances in several states.
None of the above is debatable; those are facts. They are the sorts of issues the US Government regularly cites as 'irregularities' when excoriating other countries for their elections. Regularly.
You are trying to equate two people''s antics with what entire states (PA, WI, MI, etc) did to their own voting systems, often contrary to their own laws, in the name of an 'emergency.' Irregularities are not even necessarily illegal. They are just, as the definition of the word explicitly defines, irregular.
In short, you are proving to be exactly what I said you are; a partisan hack, trying to pretend the trite tripe you are spouting is factual when it is, in fact, partisan pablum.
I mean, Democrats manufacture mail-in ballots and drop them in the middle of the night.
I don't think you'll get away with it this time without a civil war on your hands. A deserved one at that.
I really don't understand people that get angry at articles like this. Or angry at how Nate adjusts and averages polls for his model in general. The model has no impact on who will actually win. Furthermore, Nate has a reputation that is on the line. He is trying to be as accurate as possible- he has no incentive to be partisan with his model.
One would think the fact that he is adjusting internal polling from both parties would calm people down…
Campaigns and supporters also have nothing to gain from having inaccurate data. Wishing for a polling lead before the vote is like caring more about the scores all through the game and not caring about the final score.
It's all the fog of war, but
1) The leaks about the internal polls seem to be coming from the Democratic side (the WSJ article sourced somebody inside Tammy Baldwin's campaign and the Michigan poll was referenced by Elise Slotkin in a donor call).
2. The latest batch of swing state polling seems to be pretty good for Trump, so that is at least consistent with the narrative that Harris is doing worse in more recent polling compared to the past.
At this point it's all Sherlock Holmes stuff though, so I wouldn't get too excited about it.
EDIT:
Oh yeah, 3. is that the betting markets seem to have swung back to favoring Trump at the current moment.
I was disappointed that Nate didn’t address the Slotkin and Baldwin examples, neither of which fits well in the narrative of his article. That said, I did appreciate the points and examples that he provided from the “other side” of the debate about internal polling. While Nate makes some valid points and provided some good examples, the desire to pick a side and then generalize the other side to fit his narrative is one of the weaknesses of this article.
In an earlier post this week, he pointed out that democrats seem to enjoy a bit of freaking out, and think it helps their fundraising to be able to yell “we’re gonna lose if you don’t help us!!!!!!!”
They certainly do think that it helps their fundraising to talk about how much danger they're in. And, frankly, I find that to be a rather striking change. I don't recall Obama's fundraising appeals ever sounding like that. I don't recall Biden's own fundraising appeals ever sounding like that. The more typical pattern is that politicians want to project confidence at all costs.
On the micro-level, the Harris campaign probably knows what it's doing. They can surely test different appeals and see which ones rake in the most cash. But I have to wonder if they're overdoing the whole "we're in such terrible danger" thing. The message is bound to leak out from potential donors to ordinary voters, and it won't get them to associate Kamala Harris with confident leadership.
This could be one of the reasons that Dems have had a bad "vibes" week beyond anything visible in the data.
It occurred to me that Slotkin and Baldwin are both worried about the presidential race. Senate results are highly sensitive to who turns out just like every other election. Trump topline people (for that matter Harris people too) are probably voting straight line R and D and mostly not caring that much about individuals in the elections below the topline. So Senate poll results have limited usefulness if the actual voters skew in one direction or another. Scaring the electorate into greater turnout for your side would seem to have advantages if it works, and if excitement seems to be an issue. Whether it works or not is the rub.
I tend to think that if people aren't fired up about Trump already, they aren't going to be highly sensitive to worrying by Slotkin or Baldwin.
Very thankful for the great insight into something commonly referenced and discussed, yet also not so straight forward.
Great Substack channel, Nate.
You know the Harris campaign is in big trouble when they have to trot out Obama, who actually pleads with black voters to vote for Harris strictly because of the color of her skin. After the Colbert softball interview with Harris, she seemed to have a brain freeze when she was asked a very simple question about how her economy plan would differ from that of her current administration. Instead of giving a normal response, she went into her usual affirmative head nodding, hand gestures & talked about aspirations & joy of the American people. I can't figure out how joy & aspiration answers this simple question. Raising taxes causes jobs to be lost. The very basic idea that Harris seems to not be unaware of. I have said it before & will say it again. This woman is not fit to be the leader of the greatest Country in the free world. You may not like Trump's personality, but with him, you know our Country was much more prosperous & safe, when he was in office. Ask yourself this question = Who would you want in office when the world is on the verge of World War 111? Trump or Harris? I think the answer is a no-brainer. The sportsbooks seem to agree that Trump is gaining all the momentum, as the odds are shifting greatly in his favor. He went from a 6.5 point underdog a month ago to a 6.5 point favorites as of 10/11. No surprise here. Have a great weekend.
Well, that's me told, as the British say. I much like Nate's post on internal polling, a subject I've been interested in lately from the point of view that these are the men behind the curtain, the Oz Great and Terrible. However, those dramatic (bad) numbers leaked from the Romney internals AFTER the race was lost disabused me that there is a magic fraternity of pollsters who really know what's going on.
In summary, as I understand the post, 1) If we hear about an internal poll before the election, it's almost surely spin, propaganda. They are telling us because there is persuasive power in the cachet that internal polls do have as secret insider knowledge, so it spins us better.
2) Internal polls usually have different motivations than we do. We want to know who will win, but they want to know where to put the money.
3) What good is Truth anyway? "Correct" internal polls may demoralize the candidate and campaign bigshots, and what good would that do? They still have to run the race and they know what path they have to take: whatever internals say, they still do have to win Pennsylvania, and that's true for both campaigns. Better avoid all the upset and just bias the heck out of the polling reported to the candidate. A happy candidate is still fighting.
Okay, I'm persuaded that internal polling is not after all done by magic shamen who actually do know how to play this polling game. Darn.
Well written comment :) Have a nice weekend.
Great post, and great kicker.
And don't just long the current data. Long the previous data too, which shows that Trump's vote share is consistently underestimated in the polls by a few points. Short the vibes that say “Oh, the pollsters must have fixed it by now!”.
I don’t think you can say “consistently” about anything with an N of 2.
But by all means, don’t long the data that Democrats did better in ‘22 and ‘23 than polling or vibes suggested. As a Harris supporter, I’m pleased with Trump’s internal polls released today - because if you think Trump’s internal polls are spot on (or maybe even underestimating him, given “past data”?) you are more of a vibes guy than you’d care to admit.
Trump wasn't on the ballot in '22 or '23. Republicans used to be the party of conscientious elites, which gave them a boost in midterms. Now Democrats are the party of conscientious elites. So '22 and '23 went exactly as a data-oriented observer would expect.
Of course you can decide the ‘24 electorate will be the same as ‘20, or ‘16, much as you can decide that past polling errors predict future ones. But that’s just vibes. Just to ruin the vibes a little, at least as far as comparisons to ‘16- there are far fewer undecideds this year- fewer than in ‘20 too. And a 49-48 lead is not the same as a 46-45 lead. I remain cautiously- very cautiously-optimistic.
I'm neither optimistic nor pessimistic because I'm an impartial foreign observer who's just interested in the stats and the human psychology of how people engage with the stats.
Fair enough. I’d say lucky you, but I don’t know where you’re from. Much like Nate described, we Democrats are an angsty bunch. Plugged in but honestly can’t wait for Nov 5, or whatever date past that when this election is decided.
Good point --- there are indeed a lot fewer undecideds this election than in 2016 when the Trump phenomenon was all new and bewildering. Today I've seen headlines that some analysts are backing out of the "get the undecideds!" motif and switching to something else, such as "chase down the people who won't vote if it rains!" They are calling them "low-propensity voters." But they aren't undecided.
Trump didn't run in 22 or 23, so the polls were not off
Right. So it’s the Magic Trump Effect. Brought to you by the Two Elections Are Enough Evidence for me to Claim Certainty crowd. Not vibes at all.
I never claimed certainty. But yes, any evidence should make a foxy Bayesian adjust his priors, even just a little. There's no magic number where you flip a binary switch from “This is meaningless” to “Now I am certain”. You just keep accumulating information and gradually adjusting your priors.
Cute, but yeah ---- it's a lot more data than no elections. I suppose that was your point about an N of two not being much; true, but it's more than zero.
Vibes are probably an effort to get to information about fundamentals (like suddenly there are more Republicans than Democrats registered --- that's important!). If polls aren't worth much, vibes are a fall-back position.
That doesn't follow. There's no evidence that direction of current polling error can be predicted by past polling error, and there's a plausible reason to think it can't (pollsters accounting for sources of past error).
Not really addressing the points brought up against you by journalists. Just anecdotes and not data. These polls are more extensive and better funded than the numbers this site uses, this is not addressed. Just conjecture that they're 3 points toward their own candidate and that all leaks are a conspiracy somehow so therefore that somehow also matters. Hey guess what, the polls you use were overestimating Clinton by around 4 and Biden by around 6 at this time in those elections, that's data, are you shifting the results from your public polls by 5? lol, I don't think so.
Mark Halperin wins this round.
And I would say, a more effective defense would simply be to say, yeah those polls are better funded than the polls we use, but we don't have access to them so we don't worry about them. And that they're polls, and polls are ultimately still just polls, they can be wrong even if they're higher quality data. That would be a lot better defense.
He applies house effects to public polls also.
“These polls are more extensive and better funded than the numbers this site uses, this is not addressed.”
Yes it does address that, in a couple of ways.
1) A lot of the internal polling is aimed at precision, not accuracy. For good reason, but that lowers the utility for “who is ahead now”.
2) By their nature, we don’t have full access to the data. That creates several problems, which hr enumerates.
Sooooo…why are you here if you’re not going to bother read?
My friend, you're out of your league. But for demonstration purposes, let me show you what a person actually educated in these topics would destroy your attempted points with:
1. And you have proof of this conjecture, where?
2. And you have proof of this conjecture, where? And you have proof that you would be able to critique professional pollsters better than the professional pollsters themselves, where?
I'm not talking to the fans, every comment I make on this site is only aimed at people on my level, people who actually have some mastery over these topics academically and professionally.
I was merely being kind with the conjecture that you hadn’t read it.
So you’re putting on the table the other options that you’re a moron and/or you’re a dishonest POS. As you wish. 🤷♂️
lol, yeah that's what I thought. Enjoy reading about politics.
That I see right through your dishonest poser BS? Yes, yes I do.
You demanding “ proof” while bringing only spurious nonsense & non-sequitur, tired game I’m not interested in.
🤡💩🗑️
"...every comment I make on this site is only aimed at people on my level, people who actually have some mastery over these topics academically and professionally."
Its very impressive that you were able to make comments on this site while also being wedged so far up your own ass. And they call liberals elitist...
Cry harder. And no one thinks you're elite. Anywhere in your life. At all.
Oh, and cry harder.
Oh I was saying you were elitist, not me. I know I'm just a simple plebian who cannot dream of being on the same level as a patrician such as yourself.
I will now go cry harder. Thank you for taking valuable time out of your day to grace me with guidance, no doubt derived from all that academic and professional mastery you have.
Question: can campaigns get way more accurate data with less MOE just by increasing the sample size? I'd think if I had 1 billion dollars like the Harris campaign, I'd be able to get like 5x the sample size of public pollsters.
Once you get much past 1000 in your sample size (assuming you have a truly random sample across the population you are interested in), you quickly hit a wall of diminishing returns (statistics are often surprising). When you see larger sample sizes, it's usuallt because someone is interested in sub-populations.
Super interesting.
There is a nice graph in the Margin of Error wiki page about the sample necessary for various MoEs at various confidence levels.
You are basically right, and that is actually what the campaigns do, but not the way you are implying.
They do more polling of swing states and target populations to see if their messages are working and where to focus resources.
The end result is a much larger sample size, but not of the national race.
Yehbut ---- she still needs to secure Pennsylvania. Maybe accuracy isn't so important to campaigns: it's we who want to know who is going to win. The campaigns know the path they have to try to take.
Canceling my subscription after this. Jesus Christ
Why?
This isn't an airport, etc. etc.
Wait, what's the meaning of this expression?
This isn't an airport, and you aren't a flight; you don't need to announce your departure.
Or so the saying goes.
It means someone is butthurt over someone else saying something.
Wym? Mr. Mama is just reminding the other guy that he isn’t in an airport? What a nice fella.
First thought when seeing this post was how quick off the mark NS was. A post reporting interesting internal polling was only six down. The poster had heard about bad internal polling from a GOP 'friend'.
Second thought was the old saw that its hard to convince a person of a fact if his income depends on it not being true. I think there may be a tiny bit of this behind Nates views.
But, I think he is right that any internal polling we hear about BEFORE THE ELECTION is most likely a strategic 'leak'. I remember hearing after Clinton's loss to Trump that Dems' internal polling for Michigan was forecasting the bad news weeks before the election.
I don't think campaigns are so tightly disciplined and locked down that an unintended leak is impossible. I think Nate underestimates human nature and the urge to drop a juicy titbit of the 'You didn't hear this from me but...' type.
Right, I know what you mean about the Michigan bad news internal polling only leaking correctly AFTER the 2016 election. That was the case, too, about the Clinton campaign internal polling that caused them to cancel the fireworks to celebrate breaking "the last glass ceiling" the week before the election. This story only came out after Trump had won. And in that case it was about resource allocation --- save the money. The best info about internal polls will only be available too late and as juicy stories.
*Sometimes campaigns are selective about the polls they share with the candidate.
Oh the true believers* aren't going to like this.
*just to be certain I mean all true believers, not just those on one side.
Should the Quinnipiac polls in Wisconsin and Michigan be concerning for Harris? You have it as an A- pollster. And those aren’t internal
They go in the average and make her win probability lower, so to that extent, yes.
My take is that in an election as close as this, everyone is looking at data or signals with their own, biased filters. Speaking for myself, I do not know how my own filters are constructed and where they are wrong. I do not know if I am being rational and objective or denying what is real.
I don't know. I know it is hard having republicans now subscribing, but this is starting to read like copium. Just saying.
Do you have any arguments to refute the individual points he’s making here?
I mean I’ll admit that it’s plausible that the chatter about internals is actually real, but everything Nate said here makes sense and it’s also plausible that it’s all a smokescreen as part of either or both campaigns’ strategies.
It’s like Nate basically said: without actual access to the full population of both campaigns’ internals to perform the sort of statistical analysis he does with largely public polls, there’s no way of knowing for sure what story the internals are really telling, and if the current “vibes” shift is really signal or merely noise. The most logical approach is therefore to stick with the conclusion that the hard data we do have is still telling us (that the race is still the toss-up it has been), until said hard data actually changes enough to conclude there’s been a genuine shift.