Elections Biden on Pace to Blowout Trump

[Grenz]

I hope no one is relying on polls to predict the outcome for this election...

I think this is due to the obfuscation of polling results network TV news were pushing. I'll admit I haven't looked back on this specifically in years, but I remember that as late as two weeks or so before the election, virtually every poll had the Dems winning, but those margins eroded more and more the closer we got to election night. Then you had networks giving these crazy numbers, like Clinton had a 90% chance of winning or something along those lines. There's no poll that said that. That's simply massaging the number to suit the message, probably something along the lines of "well, 9 out of 10 polls still have Hilary in the lead, so that means 90% chance of winning, right?". No, of course it doesn't.

Yes, the polls got the electoral results wrong. They didn't get the popular vote wrong. Somehow, that turned into 'polls are fake news'. They're not, but they have their limitations. They are useful in determining a trend, assuming the methodology doesn't significantly change with each iteration.

 

[Overtures]

He's getting fatter has anyone noticed?

 

[Joe]

LolLol "unnice" genius stuff here. Pretty sure its I don't want to be rude. Not nice.

 

[panamaican]

Polls by major organizations are always going to be way better than intuition. What is behind your thinking that people shouldn't rely on them?

That I don't think modern polls accurately capture the mindset of the voting public. I don't question their validity at the time that they're done, I just think that what people think when answering polls doesn't reflect what they'll think when they're actually voting.

 

[HereticBD]

I think this is due to the obfuscation of polling results network TV news were pushing. I'll admit I haven't looked back on this specifically in years, but I remember that as late as two weeks or so before the election, virtually every poll had the Dems winning, but those margins eroded more and more the closer we got to election night. Then you had networks giving these crazy numbers, like Clinton had a 90% chance of winning or something along those lines. There's no poll that said that. That's simply massaging the number to suit the message, probably something along the lines of "well, 9 out of 10 polls still have Hilary in the lead, so that means 90% chance of winning, right?". No, of course it doesn't.

Yes, the polls got the electoral results wrong. They didn't get the popular vote wrong. Somehow, that turned into 'polls are fake news'. They're not, but they have their limitations. They are useful in determining a trend, assuming the methodology doesn't significantly change with each iteration.

I think another thing to ponder, is if oversampling certain groups to push a narrative, has become a norm. The entire journalism field is heavily compromised by political activists. Hard to believe that pollsters haven't been equally as compromised, and might look to massage results for the results they want to publish.

 

[Pinyin]

Feelz like a quick and heavy edit there, guessing you don't have the full clip to hear the context of why he was saying that, his words or quoting someone else..?

his usage the "er" at the end of that word is enough to get him disqualified as the democrap candidate.

 

[PainIsLIfe]

Correct. You're missing the angle that it was *ineffective* and just xenophobic.​

You persistently seem to think that the "ban," which let us remember did not work at all, was the only possible thing to do. A smarter approach would have included more-targeted travel restrictions *along with* the long list of other things that Biden and his team discussed. "Durr, let's ban restrictions from some countries that we don't like and do nothing else to prepare" turns out not to have been a good strategy, which I would think that anyone who is remotely grounded in reality could see.



Yes, I get that the hack response is to say that the buck stops anywhere but in the WH. But doesn't it seem that the federal-gov't response was about as bad as it could possibly be besides that? Every other president running for re-election: "Ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago?" Trump: "It's not my fault. I just work here."



Who the fuck cares about Chinatowns? You realize that the virus doesn't spontaneously generate in Chinese people, right? And that it mostly came to America from Europe? It's really amazing that someone could be so hackish that he'd defend the president's plan of "do nothing and tell everyone that it will magically go away" after over 100,000 people have died. Like I said, it literally seems like a cult in action here.

1st you claim that Biden; and other dems' didn't say the ban was racist, then move the goalpost when I post the quotes. You never change Jackie.

I never said the ban was the only thing to do. I simply pointed out that dems were running around calling it racist/xenophobic 2 months before Biden said he agreed with the ban.

Don't play dense; Democrats encouraged people to attend a festival - the fact that it was in China Town is just a detail - when we were encouraging people to stay home.

Then suddenly the f'n epicenter of US exposure turns out to be in the same location where the festival was at? It takes either an ostrich or a complete hack to pretend it's just a coincidence.

 

[Grenz]

I think another thing to ponder, is if oversampling certain groups to push a narrative, has become a norm. The entire journalism field is heavily compromised by political activists. Hard to believe that pollsters haven't been equally as compromised, and might look to massage results for the results they want to publish.

I think each poll, again assuming that it's not run by a bunch of amateurs, is undertaken with the intention of getting a representative sample. But then you do have to wonder, are people who think 5G is causing Covid answering polls? Probably not. Then there's also the fact, as @panamaican pointed out a few posts above, what people say and what they actually do are often different.

It's as I said, they're useful for determining a trend. They're not so useful for accurately predicting an outcome that often hinges on a fraction of a percentage point.

 

[BarryDillon]

No metrics...otherwise it wouldn't be intuition.

But here's my impression - I don't think the energy for Biden is that high. I don't think Trump is going to lose much off of his base, especially in the current political environment. So the thing that's going to matter is turnout. I think the covid aftermath is going to depress turnout and that this will harm the democrats more the republicans. There's more to it to me but that's kind of the surface level stuff.

Voter suppression will be at unprecedented levels for modern times here.

 

[panamaican]

I think this is due to the obfuscation of polling results network TV news were pushing. I'll admit I haven't looked back on this specifically in years, but I remember that as late as two weeks or so before the election, virtually every poll had the Dems winning, but those margins eroded more and more the closer we got to election night. Then you had networks giving these crazy numbers, like Clinton had a 90% chance of winning or something along those lines. There's no poll that said that. That's simply massaging the number to suit the message, probably something along the lines of "well, 9 out of 10 polls still have Hilary in the lead, so that means 90% chance of winning, right?". No, of course it doesn't.

Yes, the polls got the electoral results wrong. They didn't get the popular vote wrong. Somehow, that turned into 'polls are fake news'. They're not, but they have their limitations. They are useful in determining a trend, assuming the methodology doesn't significantly change with each iteration.

I'm not suggesting that polls are "Fake news", I think they accurately measure what they're aiming to measure at the time of measurement. I just don't think they're predictive of election night outcomes.

As a bad analogy, it's like asking a bunch of five year olds what they will want for dinner...at 9 am in the morning. It will be an accurate reflection of what those 5 year olds think but no one would think that response is going to be predictive of what the 5 year olds' will want at 6 pm that evening. We know it's going to change and we usually have no idea what is driving that change.

 

[BarryDillon]

I'm not suggesting that polls are "Fake news", I think they accurately measure what they're aiming to measure at the time of measurement. I just don't think they're predictive of election night outcomes.

As a bad analogy, it's like asking a bunch of five year olds what they will want for dinner...at 9 am in the morning. It will be an accurate reflection of what those 5 year olds think but no one would think that response is going to be predictive of what the 5 year olds' will want at 6 pm that evening. We know it's going to change and we usually have no idea what is driving that change.

Actually, that analogy is spot on.

 

[Trotsky]

I'm not suggesting that polls are "Fake news", I think they accurately measure what they're aiming to measure at the time of measurement. I just don't think they're predictive of election night outcomes.

As a bad analogy, it's like asking a bunch of five year olds what they will want for dinner...at 9 am in the morning. It will be an accurate reflection of what those 5 year olds think but no one would think that response is going to be predictive of what the 5 year olds' will want at 6 pm that evening. We know it's going to change and we usually have no idea what is driving that change.

That analogy is...just terrible, haha. I liked your posts on this subject up until this one, mainly because I don't think it's nearly as much of a problem of timing as it is a problem of turnout. The most effective polls would, in theory, quantify enthusiasm, such as by multiplying the weight of an answer by expressed likelihood of voting and/or by the consistency with which the respondent voted in past elections.

Although I do agree that it's really fucking stupid that Trump supporters and poll deniers generally use polls from September 2016 to make the case that polls are bad when there are polls from mere days before the election that are available and that showed a much tighter race than it seemed pre-Comey.

 

[Gas121]

Biden is so old it's shocking he is the nominee

 

[Jack V Savage]

That I don't think modern polls accurately capture the mindset of the voting public. I don't question their validity at the time that they're done, I just think that what people think when answering polls doesn't reflect what they'll think when they're actually voting.

Why do you think that? And how do you explain their accuracy if your theory is correct?

 

[panamaican]

That analogy is...just terrible, haha. I liked your posts on this subject up until this one, mainly because I don't think it's nearly as much of a problem of timing as it is a problem of turnout. The most effective polls would, in theory, quantify enthusiasm, such as by multiplying the weight of an answer by expressed likelihood of voting and/or by the consistency with which the respondent voted in past elections.

Although I do agree that it's really fucking stupid that Trump supporters and poll deniers generally use polls from September 2016 to make the case that polls are bad when there are polls from mere days before the election that are available and that showed a much tighter race than it seemed pre-Comey.

In terms of polls, I think the problem with timing and with turnout are pretty similar.

When you're being polled, it's just your opinion in the moment. You're not tasked with actually doing anything except talking and people will talk all fucking day about their political opinions. But by election night, the question isn't your opinion, it's your willingness on that specific night to go the polling place and act. And, here I agree with you, nothing in our polls tell me anything about whether or not this is a person who will act, not just talk. And what will dissuade someone from voting in 5 months is not something that any of us can predict today.

 

[reflector]

I still think the vote will be very close in November.

 

[luckyshot]

I'm not suggesting that polls are "Fake news", I think they accurately measure what they're aiming to measure at the time of measurement. I just don't think they're predictive of election night outcomes.

As a bad analogy, it's like asking a bunch of five year olds what they will want for dinner...at 9 am in the morning. It will be an accurate reflection of what those 5 year olds think but no one would think that response is going to be predictive of what the 5 year olds' will want at 6 pm that evening. We know it's going to change and we usually have no idea what is driving that change.

You know that polls nailed the 2018 midterms, right?

Admittedly, it's more difficult to predict the outcome of a single event than of a series of events using statistical analysis, and obviously, no one is saying that the polls can't change, and obviously the closer we get to the election, the more they matter...

But the idea that there is some sort of a disconnect between the way people generally respond to polls and the way they actually vote just hasn't been borne out by the weight of historical evidence.

To use your analogy, even a five year old usually has a pretty good idea of what he wants for dinner fifteen minutes before dinner time.

 

[panamaican]

Why do you think that? And how do you explain their accuracy if your theory is correct?

You're going to have to be more specific about their accuracy. Their accuracy in what - predicting presidential election outcomes? From what time period?

I think modern polls are less predictive of outcomes than previous ones because the news cycle moves much faster and there's more variety in news sources.

 

[Paynebringer]

his usage the "er" at the end of that word is enough to get him disqualified as the democrap candidate.

So no full clip of the video to show context.

"What you're seeing and hearing it's not what's really happening"

-Donald Trump

 

[panamaican]

You know that polls nailed the 2018 midterms, right?

Admittedly, it's more difficult to predict the outcome of a single event than of a series of events using statistical analysis, but polls in general are accurate.

Obviously, no one is saying that the polls can't change, and obviously the closer we get to the election, the more they matter.

But the idea that there is some sort of a disconnect between the way people generally respond to polls and the way they actually vote just hasn't been borne out by the weigh of historical evidence.

To use your analogy, even a five year old usually has a pretty good idea of what he wants for dinner fifteen minutes before dinner time.

Sure...15 minutes before dinner time. I wouldn't argue that. But we're talking about polls well in advance of that. Ask me my opinion 15 minutes before dinner time, not 15 hours before.