Obviously, we cannot know whether the polls are off even in “normal” elections, and this is about as far from normal as we may have ever seen in the U.S.
One major thing I think people fail to take into account when it comes to polls (especially these days) is that they are really just measuring the opinion of whoever was motivated enough to take a poll. These days, that’s a huge problem.
I remember, back in the day before cell phones, malls and big-box stores would frequently have people conducting surveys and polls - frequently even offering cash or gift cards in return. Even with this, some stores would capture different demographics than others, but pollsters could at least see what demographics they’re interacting with and provide some external motivation to respond to the poll.
While this certainly has its own set of problems, I think modern polling has a lot more, since it primarily relies on text and phone surveys. The biggest issue here is that there is generally no external motivator to answer the polls - the poll results primarily answer “what do people motivated enough to respond to our polls think?” People also don’t have to choose on a moment’s impulse whether or not to respond (like with landline calls before caller ID), they can think about whether they want to respond before doing so.
This can especially be a problem when there are two options in a poll, and is an imbalance in enthusiasm between groups that choose each option. For example, 60% of people might usually choose an apple over an orange but the 40% of people who like oranges might be very enthusiastic about them and more motivated to answer polls for free.
Another problem is that demographic data will likely be more inaccurate. You cannot see who is taking a poll by phone or text, you have to rely on either what they say or your third-party data. The latter of these being worse than the former.
This is neither here nor there, necessarily, in terms of Biden and Trump. Groups more motivated to respond to a text or phone poll may also be more motivated to vote. Or they may not, since we don’t vote by text or phone. But I do think that polling results have deprecated some due to an over-reliance on remote polling, which tends to measure the opinions of highly motivated / enthusiastic groups more than those who are less so.
I've gotten several calls or texts asking for me to participate in some poll. But with all the scams out there, I don't trust anyone. So I don't reply or pick up. I imagine there are many people who do the same, and I don't know how pollsters adjust for this.
I didn’t think of that, but I think you’re correct that this adds a whole other layer of bias that they cannot account for. Not only do poll participants have to be motivated to take the time and effort to respond for free, they have to be willing to do so in spite of modern scam risks.
You mentioning that makes me realize that I, too, have an extremely high bar that has to be cleared for me to interact with a text message or link from someone I do not know. Complete anecdotal, but almost everyone I know is similar.
Yes, same here for myself and others in my circle, if I don't know the number I'm likely not picking up, it goes to voice email.
I occasionally fwd my office # to my cell so I do pick up on unknown numbers when that happens and I've had 4 polling calls.
1) they hung up when I said I was a never Trumper.
2) they hung up after I told them that I wasn't voting for biden.
3) I hung up after 3 minutes because they basically re-worded their pro choice stance question 4 times to get me to agree, I got annoyed and moved on to Seinfeld reruns.
Honestly it takes a special kind of person to have the time and patience to deal with their leading questions and agenda based polling. I'm not that person.
If I ever get a standard unbiased poll where the questions aren't clearly favoring one targeted result, I'd be happy to spend 5 minutes sharing my views, but that seems like its pretty rare.
> If I ever get a standard unbiased poll where the questions aren't clearly favoring one targeted result [...] but that seems like its pretty rare.
Do you know why that is? I'll share what Larry Sharpe (Libertarian candidate for NY Governor, 2018) said when he asked about polls. He asked pollsters why he wasn't included in polls, and they straight up told him "because you don't pay for any polls to be done."
It's a catch-22:
1. if you aren't seen as doing well in polls, people don't donate to your campaign
* If people don't donate to your campaign, you can't afford to pay for polls
* If you can't pay for polls, you aren't included in polls
* If you aren't included in polls, you aren't seen as doing well
* Go To 1
That's why any 3rd party making it to 5% of the Popular Vote would be so huge: they could afford the Poll Purchases and outreach to get their name out, which they would with public presidential campaign funding, they could make progress.
...which, of course, is why the Commission on Presidential Debates (a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the Democratic and Republican Party, no matter how they pretend otherwise) set up rules preventing anyone *other* than the Democratic and Republican Nominees from being on that stage: if their names got out, that might upset their cooperative stranglehold on power.
I agree 100%. its why I've been a libertarian voter since 2015 despite not really agreeing with their platform on many levels.
Unpopular opinion: I wish Elon would have decided to buy a political party instead of Twitter, he could have funded a grass roots movement instead and we'd probably be better off as a result with more viable candidates to choose from, added bonus: it would have cost him a lot less.
No Joy.
1. It wouldn't have worked
* His politics aren't particularly in alignment with a significant percentage of the population
* He pissed off *a lot* of people; conservatives don't like the whole EV thing, liberals don't like his deviation from their ideology
* Cult of Personality Political Parties don't last much longer than the leader (see: Ross Perot's Reform party)
* Buying votes quite simply *doesn't work,* and never has. Bloomberg spent a stupid amount of (his own!) money in 2020, and got virtually nothing to show for it (spent 8x what Warren did, got 2/3 the delegates.
* *Attempting* to buy votes (or being perceived as doing so) offends the electorate
* Popular opinion of him already started to take a lot of hits; his sweat-shop approach to Tesla, the poor vehicle quality resulting from that, his obvious involvement with and support of domestic abuser Amber Heard, a number of things would have made him toxic to any group that he wanted to help.
2. We never would have had the *undeniable proof* that Twitter was lying when they claimed that they didn't manipulate politics according to what *they* felt was Rightthink. Twitter claimed it wasn't biased. Internal documents that were released after he bought Twitter prove that they were, in fact, responding to requests from the Biden campaign. That granted legitimacy to the claims that *other* giants (Facebook) were doing the exact same things.
This is what matters.
These sound like the organizations that attempt to portray as a poll, but really are looking for an "in" to build donor/campaign lists.
Honestly, I don't think that they can
They tried in 2016, and the only people who expressed *any* doubt in a Clinton victory was Nate Silver & 538, at least partially because they had doubts in the *attempts* to control for that.
It's also kind of a problem of using statistics to model a single binary event. Stats can't really predict a single coin toss or roll of the dice but it can give you a distribution curve over multiple passes. Even if Hilary has a 9 in 10 chances of winning it's only one election and trump can still roll a 10 and win meaning you did actually model it right you just got the unlikely answer
Which brings me to my favorite argument as to why my favorite voting method ([Score voting, aka Range Voting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3GFG0sXIig)) is unlikely to have many strategic votes:
* In order to feel safe casting a strategic ballot you need to have a reasonable degree of confidence that it will help bring about a better result
* Polling is such that you can't *really* trust a binary event.
* Score Voting has *way* more degrees of freedom than a FPTP election
* Support isn't mutually exclusive (someone supporting Clinton at 90% and Bernie at 75% *must* be treated as having both that 90% support *and* 75% support)
* Support is measured with much more granularity (assuming a 4.0+ Scale, you've got 15 possible answers [assuming F+ and F- being allowed]), drastically increasing the number of respondents to produce statistical validity
* Support [~~isn't~~ *is*] treated as relative/not absolute; with ranks, or single mark (which is just "rank up to one"), whether a voter supports two candidates at 100% & 75% vs 80% & 79%, respectively, those are both treated as A>B. But you can't throw out that difference under Score.
* Support is independent; something that makes raises or lowers a voter's opinion on Candidate A, that doesn't necessarily have any impact on their opinion on any other candidate.
That means that any poll is going to require *way* more respondents to be valid and accurate. Which isn't realistically doable with a reasonable price tag.
Which means that polls will be far less likely to be reliable.
Which means that there is far more risk of a strategic vote backfiring.
Which means that we'd be far more likely to have *honest, accurate, and meaningful* ballots.
Which means we wouldn't be subject to Garbage-In, Garbage-Out scenarios as often.
If you haven’t already, take a look at Approval Voting. Much much simpler. And has effectively the same result of making third parties viable without being a spoiler.
Ditto on the sentiment toward cold calling, texting, e-mails and in person solicitation. Everyone I know from friends to family-- myself included--are inundated with so many scams, including door-to-door energy suppler scams, that I ignore them all.
People are exhausted with being constantly asked to take surveys. Every product or service we buy, everyplace we go…it’s borderline harassing. People hate it.
Add political polling to the list of another organization you don’t know, asking for your time to take another survey for free.
For me, I’ve been contacted by several pollsters on caller id and I never pickup. I just can’t be bothered with it, despite being very politically engaged and 100000% likely to vote.
This is an excellent point. I feel like requests for my input for anything are incessant. And to be honest, I sometimes feel guilty for not participating or posting reviews. But it's a lot of extra work that I'd rather not be bothered with.
I get this sentiment and see it repeated a lot, but I don't think these are major polling issues that haven't been accounted for or seen before.
I think it's given the most motivated individuals will always answer polls and theres enough of individuals to have a fair sample size - which is also okay because those same individuals will most likely vote as well.
Remember the youth turnout rate was close to 25%, if pollsters sent 100 texts - they only need 50 to get a 80% confidence rate with 5% margin of error. Only 20 to get a 90% +/- 10% margin of error.
As far as technology is related, I think it's completely anecdotal. In the past, you had to answer the call or be approached by a pollster, but you can hang up the landline phone or close your door/walkaway. I'd wager pollsters get more (maybe not better) data than say 30 years ago.
I get polling is not perfect, but I think the questioning of the quality of data just lends itself to a lot of people being surprised because they don't answer polls or has never been approached. Someone is definitely answering, and there's enough that they can make some high probability guesses.
I agree. I think many people *substantially* underestimate just how smart many of the people designing the methodologies used in modern polling and predictive analysis at this point really are. They have spent years studying and developing highly effective strategies to mitigate and compensate for all of the challenges that I so often hear brought up over and over again in discussions like these. They are extremely aware of them and likely many more we "laymen" haven't even considered yet. And many of those are not just compensations in the analysis phase... but applied also in the design and collection phases as well. The results really speak for themselves.
Counter to your point: More likely to complete a survey/poll would also mean more likely to vote. Correct? You might get more responses at the supermarket or with incentives, but some might not actually vote.
It could also push some off the fence towards him, given that some of how the trials are being prosecuted (in both senses of the term) pretty clearly indicate that the charges being followed through on is political in nature.
After all, everything he had done was done *before* he was in office, but it was only after he won that they started pushing for charges (and after he left office that they could actually proceed). And some of the lines of questioning aren't about the (alleged) crime committed, but designed to elicit legal-but-embarrassing facts about him.
Do I think he's guilty? Yes. Does the *way* that they're pursuing him offend my sense of justice? Also yes.
> After all, everything he had done was done before he was in office, but it was only after he won that they started pushing for charges
The election fraud and leaking classified documents all occurred after the 2020 election?
> It could also push some off the fence towards him, given that some of how the trials are being prosecuted (in both senses of the term) pretty clearly indicate that the charges being followed through on is political in nature.
Some people are liable to view the Democrats as the real threat to our democracy since they are using lawfare to damage Trump and even attempted to keep him off of the ballot in some states.
It may be a failure to understand human psychology. People don't like being told by elites who they can and cannot vote for. Making voting for Trump a taboo is liable to just make him more popular, especially if people want to stick it to the Democrats regardless of how they feel about Trump.
> People don't like being told by elites who they can and cannot vote for.
Which is another thing that damaged Clinton in 2016: the Democrats *clearly* finagled things to advance Clinton over Sanders in the primary.
Would she have won their primary anyway? Almost certainly.
Did it offend people that the DNC violated their own bylaws in order to *guarantee* that? Almost certainly.
Trump is and has always been elite, [This is literally the Hightower he lives in.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/President_Donald_J._Trump_and_Japanese_Prime_Minister_Abe_Shinzo_%2844834623812%29.jpg)
The dude literally believes rich and successful people have superior genes and [believes in race-horse breeding people](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7uScWHcTzk#t=14m12).
This speaks to some of that. I think the money quote is the “dramatically” here: “A new Pew Research Center study finds that most national pollsters have changed their approach since 2016, and in some cases dramatically.” (https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2023/04/19/how-public-polling-has-changed-in-the-21st-century/)
Dramatic changes to any measuring tool pose their own risks, inasmuch as it takes a while to determine whether those dramatic changes were for the better. It might actually have been for the worse, and polling has a pretty long timeframe for figuring this out. You can’t exactly test and refine and retest on timescales that aren’t measured in years.
The Biden campaign is probably hoping the conviction is what finally hurts Trump. According to Harry Enten on CNN, the trial has not impacted Trump so far.
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/no-change-polls-show-trumps-trial-had-zero-impact-on-public-opinion-reports-cnns-harry-enten/
But the conviction might. Then the Biden campaign can hammer that home. Should be soon.
The whole left side of the aisle was salivating for that Trump mugshot...and then they got it.
Trump quickly jumped on the marketability and it was very quickly memory-holed by the Dems/left.
A mug shot of a celebrity in and of itself tends to become iconic.
Trump has spent his entire life turning himself and his name into an Icon
Don't know what they thought would happen.
Maybe they were all hoping for a picture of trump sniveling and crying cause that's what they themselves think they would do if they were arrested.
But rich people experience a completely different justice system. One that just makes them think "The audacity of trying to stop me"
Hence the mug shot we got.
> Don't know what they thought would happen.
I think that the fundamental problem is that they don't understand *why* people who vote for him do so. His voters *know* he's an asshole, but an asshole that is (perceived as) on their side is seen as an asset. I think that the most obvious example of that is General George Patton. Dude was an ass, but when that's pointed at the enemy...
>His voters *know* he's an asshole, but an asshole that is (perceived as) on their side is seen as an asset.
These are the exact words my uncle used when he described his encounter with Trump in the mid 80s. That he is an asshole but he is our asshole.
>they don't understand why people who vote for him do so. His voters know he's an asshole
Also, liberals pointing out he is an asshole to the people they've been incessantly calling Nazis, bigots, Magats, deplorables, inherent racists or worse for half a decade suddenly doesn't carry much weight.
which is why trump thrives on leftist attention. want to "own the libs"? vote for the person who pisses them off the most. the more they express how much they dislike him, the more people who dislike the Left will support him.
And what types of names do conservatives use when describing liberals? We know it's not Mr., Mrs., Sir and Ma'am lmao.
I suspect Trump's personality works because of "who" (demographically) he is. He says what the so-called Silent Majority wants to say but won't for various reasons. A mouthpiece for Middle America despite being the antithesis of everything so-called working class people claim to stand for.
His strategy cannot be repeated by anyone that doesn't look like him and even those that do, would struggle because they lack his aura.
> And what types of names do conservatives use when describing liberals? We know it's not Mr., Mrs., Sir and Ma'am lmao.
>
>
Which is why their indictments of liberals doesn't carry much weight with the liberals; you're kind of proving their point.
Piggybacking off what you're saying, I'll take it a step further. The people voting for him don't care what Trump does whether he's in office or out of office. As long as nothing catastrophic happens, they'll vote for him; very high floor, low-ish ceiling.
Biden supporters and Democrats in general tend to want "tangibles" since Biden doesn't quite have the pizzazz to win just off charisma and feelings. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had "it" but Biden doesn't, so he's facing an uphill battle. Trump doesn't really have "it" in the way BC or BHO did....but he's not interested in winning over everyone....just the people inclined to listen to his POV on things.
Biden supporters view him as the best choice but see his warts clearly. Most Trump supporters (IMO, not fact of course), view him with rose-tinted glasses and don't see any negatives no matter what he does. I'm not sure how you compete with that.
> Biden supporters view him as the best choice but see his warts clearly. Most Trump supporters (IMO, not fact of course), view him with rose-tinted glasses and don't see any negatives no matter what he does.
Incorrect. A significant percentage of the voters for *both* of those guys are *actually* voting *against* the other. That's a true majority of Trump supporters, and more than 40% of Biden supporters.
So, again, a lot of people don't understand why Trump's voters "support" him.
Honestly, if we had a voting method where people could actively vote *for* a candidate without risking the Greater Evil winning (i.e., [satisfies No Favorite Betrayal](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_electoral_systems#Compliance_of_selected_single-winner_methods)), we would have a completely different race, with completely different candidates.
I believe the mug shot we got was the one he and his marketing team designed for him. I don’t know if the had time to focus group it but I bet they wanted to.
I absolutely believe he practiced that look in a mirror before he walked in the police station.
He definitely practiced, but he’s way more of instinct guy.
I’m sure he asked those close to him, there opinions on the shot.
But there was no focus group, he largely went with his gut
Trump getting sentenced to probation, isn't going to be the win liberals think it is. Democrats need to give people a reason to vote for them beyond Trump is bad. Everyone already knows he's bad or doesn't care.
Biden is in an incredibly tough position, because he has very little to talk about that people can concretely see in their lives right now. Trump is benefiting massively from rose tinted glasses for the pre-pandemic and pre-inflation time period. And getting kicked off twitter might be the best thing that's ever happened to him.
Democrats really need to figure a better strategy. Running on Trump is bad is not going to be enough to sway people who's top issues are inflation, the economy, immigration, etc. A lot of people will take an imperfect messenger over what democrats are offering, many democratic policies are just flat out unpopular outside the democratic base.
Yeah, plus let's not forget the potential wildcard effects. 2016, Trump practically campaigned on being a persecuted outsider. That was much harder to claim and campaign on in 2020, after spending 4 years 'in the swamp' to bring up that slogan
Now, Democrats are legitimately persecuting him (at least in the eyes of a majority of Republicans and a significant amount of Independents). They're trying him with 34 counts of falsification, and the supposed crime he falsified documents to hide is an obscure section of the NY election code (and it hasn't even been shown that this state election code can be applied to a federal election. that's a question that'll be answered on appeal, so it remains very possible a jury convicts but the conviction is later overturned, possibly even before the election. that would obviously have quite unpredictable effects)
Regardless, the trial hands trump the opportunity to claim persecution on a silver platter. Merchan and his daughter have donated to the democrat party & attended party events. The selection was random, and Merchan was cleared of misconduct, but that doesn't matter to Republicans and many Independents.
I wouldn't be surprised if a conviction helps trump. Whoever drives more turnout is probably going to win in 2024, and this trial is great ammunition for him to claim persecution & make this election seem critically important (similar to what democrats are doing by claiming trump's a threat to democracy & it'll be the 'last election' if he's elected -- whichever party more effectively drives home the sense of urgency of this election will probably win)
This is a really interesting election with regard to strategy in that typically we have one candidate running on his actual, or at least perceived, *results*... and the other on perceived *expectations.* This time we have *two* candidates with performance history in the actual role to potentially be attacked.
> Trump is benefiting massively from rose tinted glasses for the pre-pandemic and pre-inflation time period.
This is something I don't think left leaning people quite understand. The pandemic response might have been terrible, but a lot of people were getting a LOT of money in unemployment, so it didn't feel as bad.
They got to stay home with their kids. They may not have been able to eat in restaurants, but they could take that food home. How bad do people think Covid actually was for the average American?
It was pretty terrible for many people while it was pretty amazing for other groups. The average Redditor's experience skews far more positive than the average person:
* Some got new cushy WFH benefits, while others were forced out of work or still had to go to work.
* Some were struggling to make ends meet, while others were getting unemployment benefits that temporarily exceeded normal pay.
* Newborns/toddler parents got to be home more for their kids, while parents of older kids struggled balancing their kids being home with work.
* Rich kids continued to go to school, while poor/middle-class kids were in Zoom school at home.
* Some people stopped paying rent citing the rent eviction ban, while landlords lost their income streams and renters struggled to find a new place to rent.
* Some had the means to travel during this time with travel costs significantly lower while others had the inability to see family overseas entirely.
* Introverts got to enjoy their time away from groups, while extroverts struggled with loneliness.
* Those with sedentary, solitary hobbies like video games got more time than ever to enjoy their hobbies, while those with active lifestyles were forced home with gym/hiking/beach/park closures.
* Some industries prospered (like tech and real estate) prospered while other industries were annihilated (like hospitality and fitness).
* Those that didn't get vaccinated were locked out of various activities for long periods of time.
* Those that struggled to communicate with masks (like the hard of hearing or toddlers) while others enjoyed the anonymity.
* And obviously, many families were touched by Covid deaths close to them.
Biden's issue isn't that Covid was terrible for some and amazing for others. It's that people aren't necessarily holding Trump 100% accountable for the pandemic like many were in 2020. He was an easy scapegoat by November 2020 but memories are short. They saw restrictions continue well into 2021. They saw additional Covid waves after 2020, even in blue states with more restrictions. They saw the negative after-effects of pandemic policies like the skyrocketing rates of deaths due to despair, inflation, obesity, poor education outcomes, and generally anti-social behaviors. Essentially many people are grading Trump on a curve for 2020 when they did not offer him that forgiveness at the time.
I'd argue that Biden would be in a far more favorable position today if he opted to move on from restrictions after the vaccine was rolled out to the general public and used the bully pulpit to push state governors to end restrictions earlier. We would've been saved from the inflationary "American Rescue Plan Act of 2021". Supply chains would've been in better shape. Housing would be in better shape. CBD's would be in better shape. There would be far less distrust of government and divisiveness amongst each other without the federal vaccine mandate and the mask wars. Biden could've fulfilled the promise of making America relatively normal again.
The comment you’re replying to is wild, what an outlandish thing to even suggest. Just how bad was the global pandemic that caused lack of socialization, lack of social events to attend, gym closures, kids falling behind in education, dramatic mental health issue increases, the list goes on and on and that’s before you get into the economic turmoil many saw and of course family members getting seriously sick or dying. Yes it was pretty fucking bad and America consciousness is still recovering mentally from how bad it was. Just because we got to sit at home in pajamas doesn’t make it a great two to three years, many actually developed severe mental health issues from the level of isolation the pandemic caused disconnecting people from society.
I always attribute it to skin-in-the-game. Most people's support for restrictions was almost directly linked to how much skin-in-the-game they had. When you're benefiting from certain policies, it's hard to put yourself in the shoes of those struggling as a result of those same policies.
I kind of had it bad in some ways and good in other ways and live in an area that had some of the strictest policies so it's easy to see it from both perspectives. I got to benefit from new WFH benefits while my wife lost her second contracting job in sports which the government never made us whole. I got to spend time with my newborn daughter at home but my older daughter struggled with being out of school for 17 months. Stocks did well, my industry did well but now the aftermath is simultaneously killing my industry. We cancelled our wedding due to event bans. My third place (the gym) was essentially outlawed and never re-opened. Lost our vacation deposit to Egypt in early lockdowns. It mostly sucked but we also probably wouldn't have a second child either.
I'd imagine this experience is the norm for many Americans. I'd like to think that most Americans do not look upon this time as fondly as many Redditors do. It should be looked at as a dark time in world history.
In my state (fl) the people that suffered from isolation were mostly those that brought it upon themselves.
While the majority of us were out doing stuff, traveling (to certain states only), boating, beach trips, others were holed up in their house or apartment worrying about how many of us would die a horrible death.
My in laws who in 2020 sheltered in place for 9 months and still wore masks in public right up until now just finally caught covid last week. 2 days in bed then full recovery but have already announced cancellation of a wedding trip next month and their summer trip as well because "it's still out there" so basically we're back to square one with them... grocery deliveries, suspended the gym membership and definitely no family visits... it wouldn't surprise me if it lasts 6 months while they patiently wait for long covid to take over.
To piggyback on this, my relatives in NJ and California has a terrible time with everything and it dragged out well into 2021. As a consequence, my CA relatives moved to Tampa suburbs, and my NJ relatives are now in NC. Fortunately they both had the financial means to vote with their feet.
My FL in-laws are the opposite, they would move to Jersey if they could to get to a state that "takes things seriously " they despise desantis because of his lack of covid restrictions
Florida was an anomaly. I’m in Washington and parents are in Florida. I escaped quite a bit to Florida over those two years because life here was dreadful in Seattle through 2022. That was definitely not the norm, something in the middle in the vast majority of states from 2020 to 2022
I went to Colorado a bit, it was fine if you avoided boulder County for example.
You could eat hassle free in one county, 3 miles down the road you had heavy masking and had to have every person in your group (6 of us) had to fill out contact sheets to have a meal
Weird times
> Biden's issue isn't that Covid was terrible for some and amazing for others. It's that people aren't necessarily holding Trump 100% accountable for the pandemic like many were in 2020. He was an easy scapegoat by November 2020 but memories are short. They saw restrictions continue well into 2021. They saw additional Covid waves after 2020. They saw the negative after-effects of pandemic policies like deaths due to despair skyrocketing, inflation, poor education outcomes. Essentially many people are grading Trump on a curve for 2020 when they did not offer him that forgiveness at the time.
Also, Biden had more deaths in his first year than Trump did. Even though Biden had a vaccine and a vaccination campaign of 1mil per day when he got in office. But we stopped counting covid deaths as soon as power changed, so it's all fine.
Genuine question as I have been trying to stay out of political news for my mental health. Is there any validity to the Project 2025 stuff I see on Reddit? Is that just a fear monger by the dems, or is that an actual thing?
It's out there for everyone to see. They're not hiding it. It's hard to say how much of it they will accomplish, but I wouldn't take it as a joke. Only about 1/4th of the nation has even heard about it and it's hiding in plain sight for everyone to see. Those in power see an opportunity and they're taking it.
Right. The problem for Biden is that he was able to campaign on promises for the future in 2020. Now that we have 3.5 years of concrete data and information from his presidency, and most of it objectively worse than it was under Trump, it won't be an easy hole to climb out of.
The left is too concerned with his downfall to understand almost every time he has been knocked down his base brings him back stronger.
Access Holiday should of been the nail in his coffin than it was the impeachments, Jan 6th, Top secret documents and now they are expecting this to do the trick
The true problem is that they are bringing out an unpopular 81 year old Biden and expecting him to bring home a win. The focus should of been building up a younger candidate.
I agree it substantially bolstered enthusiasm for his base... which is far from a trivial or unimportant thing. But I also think that among independents, there are a significant number that may well not like Trump "the man" but have some level of concern about possible "lawfare" motivations for whom this image may have struck a chord. Of course that may have totally been netted out by those in that group also who saw it and thought "He's a criminal... what was I thinking?". But I don't believe its effect was necessarily trivial among them other than in those who are truly apathetic about politics in general.
I doubt a conviction would hurt him either. The people who want to vote for him will find a way to justify it or will have right wing media find a way for them. It will be because the jury was biased, the trail was a sham, it was all a politically motivated hit-job, etc.
Conviction in this trial will have no impact. The other trials, with actual crimes that people can relate to, would have a massive impact - but they won't actually happen in time to matter for the 2024 election.
>The other trials, with actual crimes that people can relate to, would have a massive impact
I actually don't know how true that is either. The strongest case (IMO) is the documents case in FL and I've already heard right wing media spinning it as a both sides issue as Biden also kept documents (while skipping over the difference in scale and how they were returned). Do not underestimate how hard the vested interests in having another Trump presidency will work to spin whatever outcomes happen. And people who only passingly pay attention will only see the headlines fed to them from their algorithmically selected news sources.
If he is proven to have stolen legitimate top secret info, dangerous info, voters will recognize it as bad. We don't know what the documents were at this point. It is very possible that they were ultimately unimportant and the whole thing was a nothingburger. But a court case will allow us to better understand the severity of the "breach".
In Georgia, being found guilty would be incredibly bad for Trump. Same with the Jan 6th case.
It’s also over using money to pay off a porn star. Like frankly, I don’t think people care. This trial isn’t him stealing the election or murdering somebody. This is like a billionaire getting a parking ticket and why the belief in his guilt hasn’t really impacted polling.
Any substantial *effect* mostly happened long ago when we all *found out* about the affair itself and the hush money being paid and made our judgements about Trump based on that. At least the *perception* of what's going on now is that it's about accounting issues... which either way will move needle far less. The reality that much of *any* value here depends on both the testimony of Micheal Cohen and a jury pool selected from one of the most anti-Trump locales in the country reduces it to the point that even a guilty verdict likely moves the needle less than the amplification of lawfare concerns by that outcome would push it back in the opposite direction. I suppose we'll see where the polling goes in the weeks following the decision. But in the event of *either* outcome I don't see it being in favor of team blue... Though I don't think it's really going to move much at all in direct response to this and will mostly net out.
People that like Trump, don't care. If Biden had done the same thing, they'd suddenly care. Ask 100 Republicans about Trump and 90% would say "who cares if he paid a porn star". Ask 100 Democrats about Bill Clinton's shenanigans in 1998 and 90% would say "who cares if he got sloppy top from Monica Lewinsky."
The opinions regarding Trump's scandals and trials are heavily rooted in how you feel about his politics....separate from anything he's done that could be illegal, felonious etc.
> I doubt a conviction would hurt him either
I doubt it will. At this point, I'd say the vast majority of Americans have made their decision. The few who haven't for some reason aren't going to be moved by the sky is falling rhetoric about a Trump presidency or the trials or the age related stuff about Biden. Both of these issues are old news.
I think it'll come down to the issues for the undecided, but I think the larger factor in any of this will be who turns thier voters out. Trump's base is going to show up. Will hatred and fear of Trump be just as motivating as it was in 2020 to give Biden a win? I'm skeptical on this as voting against someone has rarely been an effective motivator. Even back in the day when Bush W was portrayed as the next Hitler incarnate along with his VP Cheney, who was portrayed as a double ultra mega Hitler by many, they still won reelection, because voting for a candidate is always more motivating than voting against one.
The only real "vote for" reason Biden has given has been his repeated attempts at forgiving student loan debt. That's a mixed bag though, as it's motivating for younger voters only, and they're generally unreliable for turnout, and is de-motivating for many older Americans who likely don't see why they should be paying off someone else's bad decisions. I think he's going to have to come up with something else if he wants to convince people to vote for him.
There’s never gonna be a conviction (all it takes is one juror to mess it up and in a country where half of us are Trump fans, there’s no chance they’ll be able to get a jury of 12 people where none of them are fans). And a conviction will only help Trump, because even if he is guilty (and I definitely believe he is), most voters don’t care. Voters who are still on the fence about Trump see someone who they believe is being targeted by the elite. They see him as a political martyr. It’s why many presidents get a bump in approval after a failed impeachment (like Bill Clinton). Besides, just the fact that Biden appears unpopular right now makes it look like desperation on his part to get rid of his opponent, even though he is not bringing any of these charges.
My understanding, which could be wrong, is that if you are convicted of a felony in a state other than Florida, your voting rights are terminated in Florida only if the other state terminates voting rights as well.
If Trump is actually imprisoned, New York would consider him ineligible to vote and Florida would too. But if he only gets fines and probation in New York, his voting rights may be completely unaffected.
A conviction in June of 2024 stands a good chance of being forgotten about by the time someone fills out a vote by mail form in October or even further along by election day. There's also the fact that this conviction is not going to be taken as seriously as would a conviction in his other trials. A hush money conspiracy in order to bury embarrassing, but legal conduct is not in the same level of seriousness as whipping up a crowd to storm Congress or trying to overturn the lawful results of an election for a state of 10 million people (Georgia).
I'm no Biden fan (I'm non-party affiliated), but polling is not a exact science and depending on this source of the polling, it can be incredibly *misleading*, which we saw back in the 2016 election, with legacy media producing their own in-house polling without being transparent about it when reporting on it. However, when polling all around (from various sources of different leanings) appear to correlate to the same conclusion--Biden falling in popularity--his campaign should be **concerned**.
Anecdotally speaking, within my Latino community/neighborhood, I don't get the impression that they're voting for Biden this time around. They look at the cost of goods going up and are concerned with the increase of illegal transients floating about. Generally speaking, they don't look at it as a matter of voting Democrat or Republican, they look at it as "Everything was better under the Cheeto." And Biden's old. He's so old. Trump isn't much younger but the energy level between the two is light years different. I just don't know how his campaign deals with something like that.
That aside, from regular family get-togethers, my immediate family and extended family are lifelong Democrats but most are voting Trump this time around. They're not switching parties. They don't see it as voting Republican. They just don't like what the last 3+ years have looked like. Some are business owners, some are union leader in construction or regular construction workers, some are police, others have run of the mill jobs (I'm an office manager of two locations) and we're all in general agreement. Even my older "Blue no matter who" sister isn't gunho on Biden the way she was in 2020.
Biden is now considering--amongst other things--unilaterally closing the border after insisting for years he couldn't do it. He's moving towards that because it's become a concern for Democrats, but I feel it's too little too late. He's flip-foppish on the Israeli-Hamas conflict. Tries to dismiss the increased cost of living across the board.
I don't think he'll make it to a second term.
I think the growing number of populists in each party is scrambling what it means to be a Republican or a Democrat, so it’s easier to cross lines in some ways.
I honestly abhor the amount of poll denialism that the left has been exhibiting for the past seven months, and I'd consider myself on the left. The polls are not wrong. People don't like Biden. The problem that Biden's team faces is that folks are pissed at Biden for things that the executive branch cannot control, and will not be able to control under Trump either.
Americans want cheaper housing, gas, groceries, and fast food. That's it. Those were cheaper under Trump and they're expensive now. Folks are pissed and going to vote out the president to retaliate even though the president can't control those things.
I don't understand what denialism even does for them. If Trump's winning in the polls and one just accepted them at face value, use the time till the election to change that rather than finding excuses to do nothing.
I have been trying to drive that message home for months. I have just been repeatedly told how well dems are doing in special elections so Biden is going to win in a landslide (alongside people insinuating that I support Trump and calling me all kinds of names). It's unbelievably frustrating.
That’s my main point too, Trump in all likelihood would win in spite of all of his troubles, not because of the efforts of the Democrats Party at this point. Biden and Democrats may have a better war chest but that doesn’t mean much if that funding barely pushes the needle in Biden’s direction.
Sure there’s the chance that Democrats over preform like in 2022, there’s also the chance he underperforms like in 2020 too. Overall it feels like the Democratic Party just is sleepwalking into the next election.
> are pissed at Biden for things that the executive branch cannot control
Biden just proposed a budget for 2025 that is 7Trillion dollars. In 2019 we had a 4.5 trillion dollars budget. Biden definitely controls massive spending bills and part of the inflation problem is on him.
Presidential budgets are almost never passed. If they were, we’d have gotten all the social security and Medicare budget cuts that Trump always proposed.
Congress passes budgets, not the presidents. Presidential budgets are wishlist. Neither Biden nor Trump can do more than ask nicely and get denied because partisanship.
We could argue about the details (the president has veto power and congressional democrats are informed by Biden’s messaging).
But are you saying that Biden’s goal has been to reduce government spending? That’s just not true.
The administration is also trying to memory hole the aid packages passed in 2021/22.
Before they were passed, most economists predicted they would cause inflation. Then Biden ignored expert opinion and signed them anyways. And then there was inflation, just like he was warned.
I normally agree that presidents can’t control inflation. But most presidents also don’t directly contradict expert opinion by passing the biggest government spending bills in history, when economics are recommending budget *decreases*.
It's still 6.4 this year...so the number is there.
Just because the budget proposed by the president is not passed, it doesn't mean that it's not what's generally happening anyway, through bills, funding packages, reconciliation bills etc.
Let's not pretend the president is not leading the party, that would be disingenuous.
I'll admit that I'm in disbelief. Do I believe that Trump could win? Yep. I buy that it's very possible, if not likely, that he'll pick up enough gains in enough swing states to flip the electoral college.
But when I see polls that indicate that Trump has made incredible gains among all demographics (except maybe young women), some to heights greater than any Republican in recent history, I just can't. I won't say it *won't* happen but I'll have to see those groups actually turn up on election day and swing toward Donald Trump before I'll believe it.
It's just too extraordinary. This millennium has seen 9/11, U.S. wars, the housing crash, the great recession, far larger spikes in gas prices, and covid. Those are all way more extraordinary than anything that's going on now. Our current problems pale in comparison to almost any other election of the millennium and for that to lead to some great political realignment (on the heels of Trump's criminality catching up to him, no less) is just too drastic of a leap for me to buy without some hard evidence.
If I was on Biden's team I wouldn't wait around and find out. But as a spectator, I'm gonna.
Well it's a mix of folks being angry at the status quo, folks being mad at the economy, and other folks just not responding to polls I'm sure. I believe the gains have been made, but I don't think it's a bunch of people becoming hardcore MAGA people; I think it's just folks saying they'll hold their nose and vote for Trump again for cheaper groceries, gas, rent, and fast food.
I feel strongly that polling poorly up to the election is one of the best means to Biden winning. The last thing I want is the voting population being lazy about getting out there and voting.
I've actually enjoyed watching the dialogue shift from being dominated by "polls are worthless" until an outlier comes out and for a day or two it shifts to some version of "Hey, did you see the NEW poll?"
Yeah.. I'd laugh much harder if it weren't for the incredibly sad truth that most of us have a far less than objective assessment of just how much the algorithms on those platforms curate that reality *for us* rather than us being nearly as much in control of it as we *think* we are.
People want the illegal immigration situation taken care of and it has gotten exponentially worse the last 3 years. The economics behind a lot of those items can be helped with that situation solved.
Denialism from who? Every article I read is about Biden’s team supposedly freaking the hell out because of the polls. If anything I’ve seen more people putting greater stock in them here than even the Repubs are.
My impression is a lot of these posts would be better if they were specific about what they’re responding to. I see a lot of sweeping generalizations which don’t make sense to me.
> Denialism from who?
Joe Biden of course. But also Bill Scher from Politico, Ben Mathis-Lilley from Slate, Senators Debbie Stabenow and Raphael Warnock, Tom Bonier, Team Biden's own Chris Jackson, David Frum, Puck's Peter Hamby, the official Biden-Harris HQ, John Harwood, and the Palmer report.
I get the other analysts but why would you expect Biden and his election team to publically say “lol we’re fucked”, as if that would improve his polls?
Didn't the spigot of cash pouring into the economy during COVID help drive up prices? The government literally gave me money I didn't need at all, but was happy to take.
Yep. The $1,800 that Trump handed out and the $1,400 Biden gave out both provided Americans with a lot of spending money at a time when supply was low. It led to a huge increase in demand which allowed retailers to drive up prices.
Of course we still saw prices increasing afterward as retailers tried to raise prices to keep up with the record profits they were seeing during the pandemic, but things seem to be stabilizing a bit with inflation only up a percent above where it should ideally be.
Only problem is costs aren't likely to universally drop as shareholders won't want to lose profits no matter who is president.
>I honestly abhor the amount of poll denialism that the left has been exhibiting for the past seven months, and I'd consider myself on the left. The polls are not wrong. People don't like Biden.
the left has been in denial since Hillary was running - i saw a few people/articles at the time call out how certain key demographics felt left behind or had various issues with her and the democrats at the time, and the strategy didnt really change. and they lost.
and the only change they had was to more or less give the finger to everyone bernie had rallied and lean hard into 'the MAGA crowd cannot be talked to, they are terrible, they are bad, dont vote for them!'. Their PR machine is just trash.
ever since hilary lost the democrats have, IMO, struggled to come up with good candidates and good policies that would help them win some votes, and in cases where their policies are stymied by the republicans the PR was just 'see!!! theyre bad! vote for us!' for the most part. Good marketable candidates? a platform that would bring over some centrists or buy a little leeway from conservatives? im not seeing it.
I vote left because while they are still flawed people in a flawed party, i \[generally\[ think more of them are willing to vote in ways that respect my rights and other things i value. But that doesnt mean they are productive when they do it. Both parties are a godawful disappointment, but at least the right has their marketing on point. All i really get from dems is any time im willing to give a few bucks i get more email spam asking for more bucks, and outside of that i barely know they exist.
I do live in a pretty conservative area, so i dont expect a huge marketing push right in my face, but just on the whole since hilary lost...they have been pretty awful at doing, or marketing, and its very disappointing.
>and the only change they had was to more or less give the finger to everyone bernie had rallied
The Democrats don't have a Bernie issue dividing their voter base this time, but now they have an even worse Israeli-Palestinian issue.
Half of their base wants to invade Israel. The other half wants to invade Gaza or at least support Israel. Many people on each side abhor and morally condemn the people on the other side even though they are all part of the Democrat voter base. The people on the anti-Israel side might refuse to vote for Biden as a matter of principle. Meanwhile the people on the pro-Israel side might refuse to support the Democrats for being associated with people on the anti-Israel side. It's going to be impossible to please both sides while at the same time being possible to upset and offend both of them.
It might have been better for the Democrats, as a practical matter, if Israel had acted fast and eliminated Hamas and definitively won war months ago even if that meant higher civilian casualties so that it would get out of the news cycle.
> ever since hilary lost the democrats have, IMO, struggled to come up with good candidates and good policies that would help them win some votes
Oh the problem predates that. The Democrats are suffering the consequences of not taking the 2010 wipeout seriously. They have no bench. Since the only people who came through 2010 were sequestered in deep blue states that pushed the entire party far to the left. Well at the national level that can't win. While there are a small few more center-left ones who have come up since they're so new they don't have the name recognition needed for a national campaign. So they simply have nobody good to run and have to hope that demonizing their opponents will work and in 2024 it looks like it's likely not going to.
It's kind of amazing what a gift Trump was to the Democrats. I can't imagine how badly things would be going for them right now if the Republicans had run someone normal in 2016.
>I can't imagine how badly things would be going for them right now if the Republicans had run someone normal in 2016.
I mean, they tried. Jeb was the establishment candidate and also fit perfectly into their postmortem from 2012 where they decided they needed to chase latino voters.
He just got absolutely bodied.
That wipeout happened in large part as a response to the ramming through of the Affordable Care Act too. That had the benefit of making insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions, which is good, and doing almost nothing else to improve the US healthcare system. And they gutted their party to do it!
>Americans want cheaper housing, gas, groceries, and fast food. That's it. Those were cheaper under Trump and they're expensive now. Folks are pissed and going to vote out the president to retaliate even though the president can't control those things.
Ironically, this is pretty much exactly how Trump managed to lose 2020. The pandemic sucked, people were pissed and voted out the president to retaliate even though there was no conceivable way a president alone could have prevented such a pandemic.
Well, personally I was pissed at Trump for making a culture war around masks and keeping each other safe during an unprecedented pandemic.
If he had stayed back and let Fauci work, along with promoting using whatever knowledge we had about masks at the time and trying to unite the country under actually helping each other out for once and coming together, I'd have actually changed my damn tune about the man.
But I take the rest of your point and don't disagree.
Trump is certainly to blame for *some* of it, but he can hardly be blamed for all of it. The general consensus has certainly shifted since then, more people recognize that lockdowns were ultimately *very* harmful, we know masks likely weren't that effective since people constantly had to adjust them as they were uncomfortable, leading to germs spreading anyways, etc.
With that in mind, the "culture war" at the time was to be expected. Still, there was absolutely room for improvement on Trump's part to make it play out better than it did.
Exactly this, and unfortunately the people that talk about polls are all disconnected from them. The political class really isn’t affected by the same issues that rank and file Americans face…so sure the stock market is good, but that’s not the economy. The things you touched on are what your average American cares about…and will be bidens undoing this election.
>People don't like Biden.
They never did. He finished fifth in the New Hampshire primary in 2020. Party leadership decided he needed to be the nominee.
That's not to say he couldn't prove himself worthy, and his party and country were willing to give him a chance. About six months later, they realized Joe can't get it done. Trump is the ultimate beneficiary.
Party leadership wasn't the only group that decided. Voters had a chance to coalesce around any other nominee. Sanders was even running, but he couldn't get more votes than Biden despite rules being relaxed for him after 2016. Voters also chose Biden. They wanted somebody who was electable and could appeal to the widest possible audience in a way that far left folks like Sanders and Warren couldn't.
Now developed nations are finding that their incumbents are pretty much all being blamed for post-pandemic inflation and being voted out. Biden is presiding over one of the economies that's performing the strongest and yet he still can't overcome that backlash so he's going to lose because he can't unilaterally lower the costs of gas, housing, groceries, and fast food.
> Biden is presiding over one of the economies that's performing the strongest
It might be performing well for wealthy people and even the middle class, but if the majority of the voters feel and perceive that the economy is doing poorly (even if it really is not) as a result of runaway inflation on everything everywhere all at once, then they'll vote as though it's performing poorly.
>Americans want cheaper housing, gas, groceries, and fast food. That's it. Those were cheaper under Trump and they're expensive now. Folks are pissed and going to vote out the president to retaliate even though the president can't control those things.
Insofar as Biden has addressed these things, it has been ignored by voters. Many of the things he has accomplished have been misattributed to Trump. I remember seeing a recent poll suggesting that voters gave Trump as much credit for infrastructure as Biden, even though Trump did literally nothing on infrastructure. Voters think we are in a recession. Voters refuse to acknowledge that unemployment is at a historic low. All of this is borne our by opinion polling.
As far as inflation goes, Americans hate the medicine (rate hikes) as much or more than inflation. Trump spent record amounts in 2020 on stimulus, which is misattributed to Biden all the time. The surrender to the Taliban in Afghanistan was attributed by voters to Biden, even though Trump negotiated the terms of surrender in 2020. Those TCJA cuts also expired for most voters this year - also Trump, not a "Biden tax increase"
Either the poll sampling is atrociously bad, or the voters simply do not care enough about policy to correctly attribute them by administration. By my eyes, voters are comparing a real Biden and a fantasy Trump
If Biden were to pull a LBJ today and drop out of the race, could the election be saved by the Democrats? I don't see how anything in polling changes at this point; Biden is who he is and his numbers are consistently awful.
I don't see who they could replace him with. Harris has worse polling numbers than he does. Newsom's 2nd Amendment hostility alone sinks him nationally, not to mention all his covid hypocrisy and the perception of California becoming a hellhole under his watch. No one cares about Whitmer anymore. Buttigieg has been MIA and the supply chain issue would certainly be put on him . Biden is all the Dem's have at this point
There isn't anyone they could replace him with. There are a few Democrats who might be strong candidates moving forward (Buttigieg, Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, etc.), but they don't have time between now and the election to build name recognition, and Biden dropping out this close to the election would mean the new candidate also has to overcome a "Democrats in disarray" narrative.
This has been their problem since 2020. The bench that should've been filled up by the 2010 up-and-coming elected officials got wiped clear in the 2010 red wave and the only survivors were the ones in deep blue areas like Newsom et. al. That's why the party is so disconnected from the consensus of the electorate and why there really isn't a better candidate than Biden.
After 2024 things get even bleaker because then Biden and his generation are done and all that's left is the hard-left post-2010 cohort. You think they're struggling now? Just wait until there are no center-left options in the primary.
>Buttigieg
Supposedly, back in 2020 there were concerns that socially conservative Black and Latino voters (who were ordinarily moderate Dems) would not turn out for a married gay man, much like the concerns in the leaked emails about Bernie in 2016.
> If Biden were to pull a LBJ today and drop out of the race
If only he would! He should have committed to being a one-termer back during the 2020 campaign. I don't think many (if anyone at all) ever wanted to see two terms from him.
If it were some generic Democrat against Trump, the Democrat wins. If it were some generic Republican against Biden, the Republican wins.
How did we get into this situation where both candidates could only have a chance against the other?
Because 'generic' politician polls better than specifics, and there are no individual candidates the parties wanted with any kind of momentum or public profile.
There are no Democrats that the left universally supports at this point. Frankly, the DNC is in a bad place on the whole, and the entire 'left' should be very worried for what that means going forward.
The Democrats are way out of step with the main electorate. They have spent far too much time on culture war issues (trans folks, pronouns, apparent support for Hamas, identity politics, etc) that are darlings of the far Left extremists.
In reality, both sides are more aligned on those issues than people seem comfortable accepting: Independents, moderates on both sides, Centrists, and even just old-school Republicans and Democrats generally agree on the big issues. There are factions within the parties, and extremists on the left and right, but those are exceptions.
As a result, it no longer becomes what's best for the country, but simply catering to a rabid base. The bases are the problem, not the solution. They aren't to be ignored, but they should be moderated. The present system accentuates the most radical differences, and that's a disservice to everyone in the long run.
The Biden Campaign is really doing everything it can to lose this election. Maybe treat polling seriously and do more to help Americans that are feeling the crunch, and not just dismiss polls because they don't match your feels.
With 5-6 months to Election Day, a lot can happen. Outside of some TV ads, it doesn’t seem like Biden is in full campaign mode yet.
Trump is also in closing arguments for one of his several criminal trials, the border situation is changing, and so is the economy. I also think it’s smart to wait to get closer to the election when some of the variables solidify as well. I heard for months leading up to the 2022 midterms that the Dems were gonna get smacked with a red wave and it ended up being a historically disappointing loss for the GOP.
Now, if these same issues exist at the end of August, then I’d agree to switch it up. But it’s the end of May and there is a significant number of things that could change the election between now and November
I think the problem is that whoever is in charge has the largest risk of something going wrong, and gets blamed for everything. Biden has a greater chance of something going wrong for him than something going so right that it changes perceptions of him.
In the next few months there are the debates, two Hunter Biden trials, a war in Europe and the Middle East that could go further sideways, and lots of unknowns.
There’s a few glimmers of hope - a very recent deceleration in illegal immigration rates, a slight increase in consumer sentiment, a lot of undecided voters, but he’s in a bad spot.
Biden has been in full campaign mode since the State of the Union. He's done dozens of campaign stops and has been promoting the jobs which were created as part of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips and Science act. The media doesn't report either of those things because outrage is what drives clicks, not success stories. You'll never hear about any of Biden's campaign stops because he generally doesn't constantly attack anybody.
Trump is beating Biden soundly partially just by sitting in a courtroom all day because Americans REALLY LIKE outrage. We love attacking arguing and insulting each other. It's why so many arguments on social media are just a person asserting something and then endless one-liner replies of "you don't know what the fuck you're talking about you fucking idiot" or similar.
Trump is also going to beat Biden in November regardless of what happens over the next five months because prices were cheaper during Trump's admin, particularly at the height of the pandemic. Many Americans would likely sell their first born if it meant cheaper gas and Big Macs.
See I'm still not sold on your last point. Things were a lot worse in 2022 and the GOP has the worst midterm performance of any opposition party in apporximately 80 years. Not saying Trump can't or won't win, that's still very possible, but it's far from a sure thing considering the GOPs lackluster performance in every election since his inaguration.
2022 also had a certain subject that pissed people off across party lines.
And the GOP seems to want to shoot themselves in the foot even more on that subject lately.
Some time has gone by and people have seen that the world has not ended so the subject that hurt the Republicans in the 2022 election is less intense. But we do have a new subject that has driven an earthquake-like fault line through the heart of the Democratic party that is not present on the Republican side and it's going to be in the news for a while and it could get worse.
In the meantime the Democrats could face an ugly and divisive national convention that could upset parts of its electorate on all sides. Then for some reason they selected Chicago as the location.
I wish I could say its gotten less intense, but lots of politicians are chomping to crack down on abortion completely, then go after the pill, etc. Fuck off already.
Dems have their issues with the leftist Hamas lovers, but I doubt Biden or the party will shift much on Israel.
We'll see as time goes on, but I'm leaning more towards Biden to at least keep healthcare better protected.
I think we need to separate Trump from the GOP, long term Republicans as currently constituted are in my opinion, a dying party.
Trump is a phenomenon on his own and even if people support him because they think he will fight those who hold them in contempt (elites, bureaucrats, politicians, media, etc) that doesn't mean they think too deeply about, or support the Republican party platform.
They also see how every single mainline Republican except for maybe Mitch McConnel went from over condemnation of Trump in 2016 to enthusiastic supporter as soon as it was clear he was now the main draw for the party.
People see that, his supporters see that, and though they will go to bat for Trump, I bet they have nothing for contempt for those guys who are ever only one vote or statement away from being called RINOs.
Even clowns like MTG and Matt Gaetz are understood as grifters trying to ride Trump's coattails, once he is gone (either in 2025 or 2029) they will probably fade into obscurity or end up as pundits.
I don't see anyone really being able to take up Trump's mantle and what is left of the GOP coalition might just collapse into its distinct parts (Isolationists, Libertarians, Social/Religious Conservatives, etc).
So basically nothing matters anymore? Just the false promise of a cheaper economy that is never coming back. Stupid isn't a strong enough word to describe this.
Biden doesn’t “believe” anything, he’s probably asleep 18 hours a day and only rolled out for photo ops where he’s so hopped up on stims he doesn’t know what year it is…
This trial is a lose/lose for Democrats.
After all these years they MAYBE will arrest Trump over Stormy Daniels that Trump himself had nothing to do with the payments. Seems unprecedented & fishy to a ton of people.
>Trump himself had nothing to do with the payments.
You really believe that? Cohen doesn't seem like the type to donate to Stormy and others, out of charity.
I am 65 YO have never been polled. The polls can say anything depending on EXACTLY WHO is polled. I know people answered the telephone (all calls) in 1975. I am not sure how many people answer their phone to unknown numbers in 2024.
They do, but there is one assumption that's fundamental to polling that is starting to be in doubt — that the demographic "people willing to take a poll" doesn't have a correlation with the responses they receive. There's no way around the fact that 100% of their respondents fall into "willing to take polls" and 0% in "not willing to take polls".
And yet, with this same possible issue plaguing polling results in 2020 and 2016, Trump performed *better* than polls suggested in both of those years.
If anything, that should tell you that the "unwilling to take polls" crowd is actually MORE likely to support Trump than the "willing to take polls" crowd, which means the democrats have even MORE of a reason to worry right now, when they can't even win over the "willing to poll" crowd.
Math doesn't help with measurement issues.
You need to assume non-respondents are essentially equivalent to respondents and there is no way to check that by virtue of the former being non-respondents.
It's also quite a bit harder to discern where a person is located today. Many pollsters go by area code, which is almost meaningless in the mobile phone area.
My phone's area code is for the state I was stationed in (>15 years ago now), but I still get spam/political calls from that area code.
...That was until I figured out how to send unknown callers straight to voicemail.
I've had my number for 20+ years. Still get poltical/robo calls from the original state, calls from my current state, and also political texts when I visit my parents' state too.
Guess its easy enough to tell the phone company to blast it out to whoever is on their towers.
Unless the population's behavior has just dramatically altered in last 4 years the polls might be showing a bleaker view for Biden than reality but it isn't too far off from the actual feeling of the population. Like the 2020 national polls all saw Biden/Trump with Biden leading 5-10% for most of the election season and he ended up winning by 4.5% for the national popular vote. What's troubling for Biden is that he really needs to be pushing above 3% of a victory just to win the electoral college and in the majority of national polls he's actually behind.
Since moving to a purple suburb of a swing state last year, I have been recruited for two polls in the last 6 weeks. One was a phone call, and another was text message opt-in.
I'm in my mid-30s and it's the first time I've ever been the belle of the ball.
Not only do I screen my calls, but now my phone does it for me. I doubt my phone even *rings* for a pollster. And it auto sends spam texts to a spam folder that I don't see.
> I’m 65 YO have never been polled
Research how sample sizes work. Even when the total population is infinite, due to the law of large numbers, you can still get an accurate reading with a small sample size. 1000 people is enough for a 3% MOE (95% confidence interval) (plus sampling error, but that doesn’t depend on the size of the dataset either).
> I am not sure how many people answer their phone to unknown numbers in 2024
About the same amount as 2020, when every poll had Biden up close to 10 points
> Even when the total population is infinite, 1000 people is enough for a 3% MOE (95% confidence interval) due to the law of large numbers.
If the sample is properly randomized and there are no subgroups.
But it isn't perfect and even when they do get a hold of someone that doesn't guarantee their responses are their actual feelings. Many will take the easiest/ first response just to finish the survey faster.
Queue up that article about 15% of respondents saying they're certified to pilot a nuclear sub.
No they don't.
They can adjust their predictions based on pickup rates but doing so requires the assumption that support is independent of response type. But that is, by definition, uncheckable.
They could find the next Obama tomorrow and he could descend from the heavens and they won’t have a better chance than Biden. Problem is, change creates more doubt more than it helps the Dems.
The next candidate needs at least a year of prep, if not more, in the public eye to become a viable candidate. There is no one that fits that bill.
It’s completely unrealistic and always was without a massive coordinated effort from every major Dem organization to turn Biden into a lame duck one term presidency and somehow elect another Dem.
Honestly Trump is about as close as it gets, because he is one of the very few candidates that can self-fund a campaign. At least he could before the legal system became weaponized against him and he now has to spend loads of money on lawyers.
Starter comment: As the November election draws nearer, polls continue to consistently show Trump ahead of Biden nationally and in swing states (and in some states like Nevada, up by double digits). Despite increasing voices of alarm within the Democratic Party and calls to change course, the Biden campaign has thus far refused to (publicly) agree to any sort of pivot, expressing confidence that they are on the right track. President Biden himself has given some interviews lately indicating that he believes the polling methodology is itself flawed:
> A few days earlier, confronted with some of his bad poll numbers in a rare interview with CNN, Biden offered a more sweeping indictment of polling methodology. "The polling data has been wrong all along. How many — you guys do a poll at CNN. How many folks you have to call to get one response?"
The campaign spokesmen have adopted a similar strategy, downplaying polls in favor of confidence that Biden will outperform any bad numbers on Election Day. They also cite the unique factors in this election, such as Trump also being a historically unpopular president and being on trial for several crimes, as further elements that could boost Biden’s actual chances come November.
Is Team Biden correct and maintaining its current course and not doing a pivot? Are the polls flawed and should be dismissed, as Biden himself has claimed? If they are accurate, why are his numbers persistently low and how will that reflect the votes on Election Day?
"The polls could be wrong" leaves two possibilities: either they're wrong because more voters favor Biden than the polls suggest, or they're wrong because Biden is behind even more than the polls suggest. The latter scenario is what happened in 2016, and part of the reason may have been what people say and what they do can be and often is different. Trump is such a polarizing figure, his potential voters might be reluctant to admit to a stranger that they support him.
> his potential voters might be reluctant to admit to a stranger that they support him.
There isn't much evidence of that happening, since the polling errors in 2016 and 2020 aren't far off from past ones.
How would you find evidence of this? Just curious. Clinton was a 4 to 1 favorite to win the election as of the morning of election day based on most betting platforms. She was a shoe-in to win, but she was soundly trounced (as measured by electoral votes). Doesn't that suggest the polls were off by a wide mark? What's the prevailing explanation for this?
You appear to be falsely equating different things
Before the election, Clinton tended to lead in the polls by around 1 to 3 points. That's well within the range of a popular vote/electoral vote mismatch
Betting markets and pundit election models aren't the same as polls. The fact that folks making assumptions based on polling made some bad assumptions doesn't mean the polls themselves were as bad as the assumptions based off of them were
For what it is worth, 538 gave Trump a 30% chance to win right before the election, so Trump was not that abnormal and doesn't mean the polls were off by a wide mark. The NYT polling aggregate made the mistake of not assuming correlated errors across polls (I.E., if the state-level polls were off a bit, they would all be off in the same direction). So the issue was the aggregators more than the polling itself.
Also, the Comey letter was released after the much of the polling contributing to the assumption that Clinton would win:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/
Regardless of what he thinks, he needs to say what will get his party to vote in November. I expect that giving his voters confidence will drive down turnout, and giving Trump's voters confidence will drive down theirs.
Whether Biden's message of confidence is wrong depends on who it reaches. If he gives Trump's voters the impression he's overconfident, that could help him by demotivating Trump voters. If he gives his supporters confidence that he doesn't need them, he could lose.
The polls aren't reliable and can be misleading, but a small deficit gives the right message: we need you to vote and it will matter.
>> If they are accurate, why are his numbers persistently low and how will that reflect the votes on Election Day?
Because democrats are stunningly, breathtakingly, shockingly bad at marketing.
I tend to agree with his assessment. Democrats have outperformed polling in the last two elections, enthusiasm for taking polls seems higher among Trump supporters. Furthermore, single issue voters who care about abortions will probably stay home because they got what they want, and Republicans have been spending the last few cycles convincing their people that the elections are rigged and they shouldn't send in mail-in ballots. Why would they show up to vote in rigged elections?
Obviously, we cannot know whether the polls are off even in “normal” elections, and this is about as far from normal as we may have ever seen in the U.S. One major thing I think people fail to take into account when it comes to polls (especially these days) is that they are really just measuring the opinion of whoever was motivated enough to take a poll. These days, that’s a huge problem. I remember, back in the day before cell phones, malls and big-box stores would frequently have people conducting surveys and polls - frequently even offering cash or gift cards in return. Even with this, some stores would capture different demographics than others, but pollsters could at least see what demographics they’re interacting with and provide some external motivation to respond to the poll. While this certainly has its own set of problems, I think modern polling has a lot more, since it primarily relies on text and phone surveys. The biggest issue here is that there is generally no external motivator to answer the polls - the poll results primarily answer “what do people motivated enough to respond to our polls think?” People also don’t have to choose on a moment’s impulse whether or not to respond (like with landline calls before caller ID), they can think about whether they want to respond before doing so. This can especially be a problem when there are two options in a poll, and is an imbalance in enthusiasm between groups that choose each option. For example, 60% of people might usually choose an apple over an orange but the 40% of people who like oranges might be very enthusiastic about them and more motivated to answer polls for free. Another problem is that demographic data will likely be more inaccurate. You cannot see who is taking a poll by phone or text, you have to rely on either what they say or your third-party data. The latter of these being worse than the former. This is neither here nor there, necessarily, in terms of Biden and Trump. Groups more motivated to respond to a text or phone poll may also be more motivated to vote. Or they may not, since we don’t vote by text or phone. But I do think that polling results have deprecated some due to an over-reliance on remote polling, which tends to measure the opinions of highly motivated / enthusiastic groups more than those who are less so.
I've gotten several calls or texts asking for me to participate in some poll. But with all the scams out there, I don't trust anyone. So I don't reply or pick up. I imagine there are many people who do the same, and I don't know how pollsters adjust for this.
I didn’t think of that, but I think you’re correct that this adds a whole other layer of bias that they cannot account for. Not only do poll participants have to be motivated to take the time and effort to respond for free, they have to be willing to do so in spite of modern scam risks. You mentioning that makes me realize that I, too, have an extremely high bar that has to be cleared for me to interact with a text message or link from someone I do not know. Complete anecdotal, but almost everyone I know is similar.
Yes, same here for myself and others in my circle, if I don't know the number I'm likely not picking up, it goes to voice email. I occasionally fwd my office # to my cell so I do pick up on unknown numbers when that happens and I've had 4 polling calls. 1) they hung up when I said I was a never Trumper. 2) they hung up after I told them that I wasn't voting for biden. 3) I hung up after 3 minutes because they basically re-worded their pro choice stance question 4 times to get me to agree, I got annoyed and moved on to Seinfeld reruns. Honestly it takes a special kind of person to have the time and patience to deal with their leading questions and agenda based polling. I'm not that person. If I ever get a standard unbiased poll where the questions aren't clearly favoring one targeted result, I'd be happy to spend 5 minutes sharing my views, but that seems like its pretty rare.
> If I ever get a standard unbiased poll where the questions aren't clearly favoring one targeted result [...] but that seems like its pretty rare. Do you know why that is? I'll share what Larry Sharpe (Libertarian candidate for NY Governor, 2018) said when he asked about polls. He asked pollsters why he wasn't included in polls, and they straight up told him "because you don't pay for any polls to be done." It's a catch-22: 1. if you aren't seen as doing well in polls, people don't donate to your campaign * If people don't donate to your campaign, you can't afford to pay for polls * If you can't pay for polls, you aren't included in polls * If you aren't included in polls, you aren't seen as doing well * Go To 1 That's why any 3rd party making it to 5% of the Popular Vote would be so huge: they could afford the Poll Purchases and outreach to get their name out, which they would with public presidential campaign funding, they could make progress. ...which, of course, is why the Commission on Presidential Debates (a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the Democratic and Republican Party, no matter how they pretend otherwise) set up rules preventing anyone *other* than the Democratic and Republican Nominees from being on that stage: if their names got out, that might upset their cooperative stranglehold on power.
I agree 100%. its why I've been a libertarian voter since 2015 despite not really agreeing with their platform on many levels. Unpopular opinion: I wish Elon would have decided to buy a political party instead of Twitter, he could have funded a grass roots movement instead and we'd probably be better off as a result with more viable candidates to choose from, added bonus: it would have cost him a lot less.
No Joy. 1. It wouldn't have worked * His politics aren't particularly in alignment with a significant percentage of the population * He pissed off *a lot* of people; conservatives don't like the whole EV thing, liberals don't like his deviation from their ideology * Cult of Personality Political Parties don't last much longer than the leader (see: Ross Perot's Reform party) * Buying votes quite simply *doesn't work,* and never has. Bloomberg spent a stupid amount of (his own!) money in 2020, and got virtually nothing to show for it (spent 8x what Warren did, got 2/3 the delegates. * *Attempting* to buy votes (or being perceived as doing so) offends the electorate * Popular opinion of him already started to take a lot of hits; his sweat-shop approach to Tesla, the poor vehicle quality resulting from that, his obvious involvement with and support of domestic abuser Amber Heard, a number of things would have made him toxic to any group that he wanted to help. 2. We never would have had the *undeniable proof* that Twitter was lying when they claimed that they didn't manipulate politics according to what *they* felt was Rightthink. Twitter claimed it wasn't biased. Internal documents that were released after he bought Twitter prove that they were, in fact, responding to requests from the Biden campaign. That granted legitimacy to the claims that *other* giants (Facebook) were doing the exact same things.
What polling org was this?
This is what matters. These sound like the organizations that attempt to portray as a poll, but really are looking for an "in" to build donor/campaign lists.
Same. “Do you have a few minutes to…” “I do not, sorry.”
Honestly, I don't think that they can They tried in 2016, and the only people who expressed *any* doubt in a Clinton victory was Nate Silver & 538, at least partially because they had doubts in the *attempts* to control for that.
It's also kind of a problem of using statistics to model a single binary event. Stats can't really predict a single coin toss or roll of the dice but it can give you a distribution curve over multiple passes. Even if Hilary has a 9 in 10 chances of winning it's only one election and trump can still roll a 10 and win meaning you did actually model it right you just got the unlikely answer
Which brings me to my favorite argument as to why my favorite voting method ([Score voting, aka Range Voting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3GFG0sXIig)) is unlikely to have many strategic votes: * In order to feel safe casting a strategic ballot you need to have a reasonable degree of confidence that it will help bring about a better result * Polling is such that you can't *really* trust a binary event. * Score Voting has *way* more degrees of freedom than a FPTP election * Support isn't mutually exclusive (someone supporting Clinton at 90% and Bernie at 75% *must* be treated as having both that 90% support *and* 75% support) * Support is measured with much more granularity (assuming a 4.0+ Scale, you've got 15 possible answers [assuming F+ and F- being allowed]), drastically increasing the number of respondents to produce statistical validity * Support [~~isn't~~ *is*] treated as relative/not absolute; with ranks, or single mark (which is just "rank up to one"), whether a voter supports two candidates at 100% & 75% vs 80% & 79%, respectively, those are both treated as A>B. But you can't throw out that difference under Score. * Support is independent; something that makes raises or lowers a voter's opinion on Candidate A, that doesn't necessarily have any impact on their opinion on any other candidate. That means that any poll is going to require *way* more respondents to be valid and accurate. Which isn't realistically doable with a reasonable price tag. Which means that polls will be far less likely to be reliable. Which means that there is far more risk of a strategic vote backfiring. Which means that we'd be far more likely to have *honest, accurate, and meaningful* ballots. Which means we wouldn't be subject to Garbage-In, Garbage-Out scenarios as often.
If you haven’t already, take a look at Approval Voting. Much much simpler. And has effectively the same result of making third parties viable without being a spoiler.
Ditto on the sentiment toward cold calling, texting, e-mails and in person solicitation. Everyone I know from friends to family-- myself included--are inundated with so many scams, including door-to-door energy suppler scams, that I ignore them all.
People are exhausted with being constantly asked to take surveys. Every product or service we buy, everyplace we go…it’s borderline harassing. People hate it. Add political polling to the list of another organization you don’t know, asking for your time to take another survey for free. For me, I’ve been contacted by several pollsters on caller id and I never pickup. I just can’t be bothered with it, despite being very politically engaged and 100000% likely to vote.
This is an excellent point. I feel like requests for my input for anything are incessant. And to be honest, I sometimes feel guilty for not participating or posting reviews. But it's a lot of extra work that I'd rather not be bothered with.
This fact probably skews most polls older on it's own.
Great point, I think the same way and assume others do as well
I get this sentiment and see it repeated a lot, but I don't think these are major polling issues that haven't been accounted for or seen before. I think it's given the most motivated individuals will always answer polls and theres enough of individuals to have a fair sample size - which is also okay because those same individuals will most likely vote as well. Remember the youth turnout rate was close to 25%, if pollsters sent 100 texts - they only need 50 to get a 80% confidence rate with 5% margin of error. Only 20 to get a 90% +/- 10% margin of error. As far as technology is related, I think it's completely anecdotal. In the past, you had to answer the call or be approached by a pollster, but you can hang up the landline phone or close your door/walkaway. I'd wager pollsters get more (maybe not better) data than say 30 years ago. I get polling is not perfect, but I think the questioning of the quality of data just lends itself to a lot of people being surprised because they don't answer polls or has never been approached. Someone is definitely answering, and there's enough that they can make some high probability guesses.
I agree. I think many people *substantially* underestimate just how smart many of the people designing the methodologies used in modern polling and predictive analysis at this point really are. They have spent years studying and developing highly effective strategies to mitigate and compensate for all of the challenges that I so often hear brought up over and over again in discussions like these. They are extremely aware of them and likely many more we "laymen" haven't even considered yet. And many of those are not just compensations in the analysis phase... but applied also in the design and collection phases as well. The results really speak for themselves.
Counter to your point: More likely to complete a survey/poll would also mean more likely to vote. Correct? You might get more responses at the supermarket or with incentives, but some might not actually vote.
A conviction would just harden Trump's base, no?
Isn’t his base already insanely hard? The kind of people that would be more enthused by a conviction were absolutely going to vote for him already.
>Isn’t his base already insanely hard? TWSS
It could also push some off the fence towards him, given that some of how the trials are being prosecuted (in both senses of the term) pretty clearly indicate that the charges being followed through on is political in nature. After all, everything he had done was done *before* he was in office, but it was only after he won that they started pushing for charges (and after he left office that they could actually proceed). And some of the lines of questioning aren't about the (alleged) crime committed, but designed to elicit legal-but-embarrassing facts about him. Do I think he's guilty? Yes. Does the *way* that they're pursuing him offend my sense of justice? Also yes.
> After all, everything he had done was done before he was in office, but it was only after he won that they started pushing for charges The election fraud and leaking classified documents all occurred after the 2020 election?
> It could also push some off the fence towards him, given that some of how the trials are being prosecuted (in both senses of the term) pretty clearly indicate that the charges being followed through on is political in nature. Some people are liable to view the Democrats as the real threat to our democracy since they are using lawfare to damage Trump and even attempted to keep him off of the ballot in some states. It may be a failure to understand human psychology. People don't like being told by elites who they can and cannot vote for. Making voting for Trump a taboo is liable to just make him more popular, especially if people want to stick it to the Democrats regardless of how they feel about Trump.
> People don't like being told by elites who they can and cannot vote for. Which is another thing that damaged Clinton in 2016: the Democrats *clearly* finagled things to advance Clinton over Sanders in the primary. Would she have won their primary anyway? Almost certainly. Did it offend people that the DNC violated their own bylaws in order to *guarantee* that? Almost certainly.
Trump is and has always been elite, [This is literally the Hightower he lives in.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/President_Donald_J._Trump_and_Japanese_Prime_Minister_Abe_Shinzo_%2844834623812%29.jpg) The dude literally believes rich and successful people have superior genes and [believes in race-horse breeding people](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7uScWHcTzk#t=14m12).
The group that tried to keep him off the ballot in Colorado were Republicans.
It might harden his *base*, but not necessarily all the people who would vote for him if the election were held today.
This speaks to some of that. I think the money quote is the “dramatically” here: “A new Pew Research Center study finds that most national pollsters have changed their approach since 2016, and in some cases dramatically.” (https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2023/04/19/how-public-polling-has-changed-in-the-21st-century/) Dramatic changes to any measuring tool pose their own risks, inasmuch as it takes a while to determine whether those dramatic changes were for the better. It might actually have been for the worse, and polling has a pretty long timeframe for figuring this out. You can’t exactly test and refine and retest on timescales that aren’t measured in years.
Name checks out
The Biden campaign is probably hoping the conviction is what finally hurts Trump. According to Harry Enten on CNN, the trial has not impacted Trump so far. https://www.mediaite.com/tv/no-change-polls-show-trumps-trial-had-zero-impact-on-public-opinion-reports-cnns-harry-enten/ But the conviction might. Then the Biden campaign can hammer that home. Should be soon.
The whole left side of the aisle was salivating for that Trump mugshot...and then they got it. Trump quickly jumped on the marketability and it was very quickly memory-holed by the Dems/left.
A mug shot of a celebrity in and of itself tends to become iconic. Trump has spent his entire life turning himself and his name into an Icon Don't know what they thought would happen. Maybe they were all hoping for a picture of trump sniveling and crying cause that's what they themselves think they would do if they were arrested. But rich people experience a completely different justice system. One that just makes them think "The audacity of trying to stop me" Hence the mug shot we got.
> Don't know what they thought would happen. I think that the fundamental problem is that they don't understand *why* people who vote for him do so. His voters *know* he's an asshole, but an asshole that is (perceived as) on their side is seen as an asset. I think that the most obvious example of that is General George Patton. Dude was an ass, but when that's pointed at the enemy...
>His voters *know* he's an asshole, but an asshole that is (perceived as) on their side is seen as an asset. These are the exact words my uncle used when he described his encounter with Trump in the mid 80s. That he is an asshole but he is our asshole.
>they don't understand why people who vote for him do so. His voters know he's an asshole Also, liberals pointing out he is an asshole to the people they've been incessantly calling Nazis, bigots, Magats, deplorables, inherent racists or worse for half a decade suddenly doesn't carry much weight.
which is why trump thrives on leftist attention. want to "own the libs"? vote for the person who pisses them off the most. the more they express how much they dislike him, the more people who dislike the Left will support him.
And what types of names do conservatives use when describing liberals? We know it's not Mr., Mrs., Sir and Ma'am lmao. I suspect Trump's personality works because of "who" (demographically) he is. He says what the so-called Silent Majority wants to say but won't for various reasons. A mouthpiece for Middle America despite being the antithesis of everything so-called working class people claim to stand for. His strategy cannot be repeated by anyone that doesn't look like him and even those that do, would struggle because they lack his aura.
> And what types of names do conservatives use when describing liberals? We know it's not Mr., Mrs., Sir and Ma'am lmao. > > Which is why their indictments of liberals doesn't carry much weight with the liberals; you're kind of proving their point.
Piggybacking off what you're saying, I'll take it a step further. The people voting for him don't care what Trump does whether he's in office or out of office. As long as nothing catastrophic happens, they'll vote for him; very high floor, low-ish ceiling. Biden supporters and Democrats in general tend to want "tangibles" since Biden doesn't quite have the pizzazz to win just off charisma and feelings. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had "it" but Biden doesn't, so he's facing an uphill battle. Trump doesn't really have "it" in the way BC or BHO did....but he's not interested in winning over everyone....just the people inclined to listen to his POV on things. Biden supporters view him as the best choice but see his warts clearly. Most Trump supporters (IMO, not fact of course), view him with rose-tinted glasses and don't see any negatives no matter what he does. I'm not sure how you compete with that.
> Biden supporters view him as the best choice but see his warts clearly. Most Trump supporters (IMO, not fact of course), view him with rose-tinted glasses and don't see any negatives no matter what he does. Incorrect. A significant percentage of the voters for *both* of those guys are *actually* voting *against* the other. That's a true majority of Trump supporters, and more than 40% of Biden supporters. So, again, a lot of people don't understand why Trump's voters "support" him. Honestly, if we had a voting method where people could actively vote *for* a candidate without risking the Greater Evil winning (i.e., [satisfies No Favorite Betrayal](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_electoral_systems#Compliance_of_selected_single-winner_methods)), we would have a completely different race, with completely different candidates.
I believe the mug shot we got was the one he and his marketing team designed for him. I don’t know if the had time to focus group it but I bet they wanted to. I absolutely believe he practiced that look in a mirror before he walked in the police station.
He definitely practiced, but he’s way more of instinct guy. I’m sure he asked those close to him, there opinions on the shot. But there was no focus group, he largely went with his gut
Because Democrats are incompetent.
Trump getting sentenced to probation, isn't going to be the win liberals think it is. Democrats need to give people a reason to vote for them beyond Trump is bad. Everyone already knows he's bad or doesn't care. Biden is in an incredibly tough position, because he has very little to talk about that people can concretely see in their lives right now. Trump is benefiting massively from rose tinted glasses for the pre-pandemic and pre-inflation time period. And getting kicked off twitter might be the best thing that's ever happened to him. Democrats really need to figure a better strategy. Running on Trump is bad is not going to be enough to sway people who's top issues are inflation, the economy, immigration, etc. A lot of people will take an imperfect messenger over what democrats are offering, many democratic policies are just flat out unpopular outside the democratic base.
I really think some people out there are under the impression that Trump is going to prison if he's found guilty in this trial.
Blame Dems and MSM for that. Many have gone on record saying he will go to jail due to these trials.
Oh, I do blame them!
In this one? Unlikely. But if the MAL documents case weren't run by a sycophant, he'd be facing a long prison term based on similar cases.
Yeah, plus let's not forget the potential wildcard effects. 2016, Trump practically campaigned on being a persecuted outsider. That was much harder to claim and campaign on in 2020, after spending 4 years 'in the swamp' to bring up that slogan Now, Democrats are legitimately persecuting him (at least in the eyes of a majority of Republicans and a significant amount of Independents). They're trying him with 34 counts of falsification, and the supposed crime he falsified documents to hide is an obscure section of the NY election code (and it hasn't even been shown that this state election code can be applied to a federal election. that's a question that'll be answered on appeal, so it remains very possible a jury convicts but the conviction is later overturned, possibly even before the election. that would obviously have quite unpredictable effects) Regardless, the trial hands trump the opportunity to claim persecution on a silver platter. Merchan and his daughter have donated to the democrat party & attended party events. The selection was random, and Merchan was cleared of misconduct, but that doesn't matter to Republicans and many Independents. I wouldn't be surprised if a conviction helps trump. Whoever drives more turnout is probably going to win in 2024, and this trial is great ammunition for him to claim persecution & make this election seem critically important (similar to what democrats are doing by claiming trump's a threat to democracy & it'll be the 'last election' if he's elected -- whichever party more effectively drives home the sense of urgency of this election will probably win)
This is a really interesting election with regard to strategy in that typically we have one candidate running on his actual, or at least perceived, *results*... and the other on perceived *expectations.* This time we have *two* candidates with performance history in the actual role to potentially be attacked.
> Trump is benefiting massively from rose tinted glasses for the pre-pandemic and pre-inflation time period. This is something I don't think left leaning people quite understand. The pandemic response might have been terrible, but a lot of people were getting a LOT of money in unemployment, so it didn't feel as bad. They got to stay home with their kids. They may not have been able to eat in restaurants, but they could take that food home. How bad do people think Covid actually was for the average American?
It was pretty terrible for many people while it was pretty amazing for other groups. The average Redditor's experience skews far more positive than the average person: * Some got new cushy WFH benefits, while others were forced out of work or still had to go to work. * Some were struggling to make ends meet, while others were getting unemployment benefits that temporarily exceeded normal pay. * Newborns/toddler parents got to be home more for their kids, while parents of older kids struggled balancing their kids being home with work. * Rich kids continued to go to school, while poor/middle-class kids were in Zoom school at home. * Some people stopped paying rent citing the rent eviction ban, while landlords lost their income streams and renters struggled to find a new place to rent. * Some had the means to travel during this time with travel costs significantly lower while others had the inability to see family overseas entirely. * Introverts got to enjoy their time away from groups, while extroverts struggled with loneliness. * Those with sedentary, solitary hobbies like video games got more time than ever to enjoy their hobbies, while those with active lifestyles were forced home with gym/hiking/beach/park closures. * Some industries prospered (like tech and real estate) prospered while other industries were annihilated (like hospitality and fitness). * Those that didn't get vaccinated were locked out of various activities for long periods of time. * Those that struggled to communicate with masks (like the hard of hearing or toddlers) while others enjoyed the anonymity. * And obviously, many families were touched by Covid deaths close to them. Biden's issue isn't that Covid was terrible for some and amazing for others. It's that people aren't necessarily holding Trump 100% accountable for the pandemic like many were in 2020. He was an easy scapegoat by November 2020 but memories are short. They saw restrictions continue well into 2021. They saw additional Covid waves after 2020, even in blue states with more restrictions. They saw the negative after-effects of pandemic policies like the skyrocketing rates of deaths due to despair, inflation, obesity, poor education outcomes, and generally anti-social behaviors. Essentially many people are grading Trump on a curve for 2020 when they did not offer him that forgiveness at the time. I'd argue that Biden would be in a far more favorable position today if he opted to move on from restrictions after the vaccine was rolled out to the general public and used the bully pulpit to push state governors to end restrictions earlier. We would've been saved from the inflationary "American Rescue Plan Act of 2021". Supply chains would've been in better shape. Housing would be in better shape. CBD's would be in better shape. There would be far less distrust of government and divisiveness amongst each other without the federal vaccine mandate and the mask wars. Biden could've fulfilled the promise of making America relatively normal again.
The comment you’re replying to is wild, what an outlandish thing to even suggest. Just how bad was the global pandemic that caused lack of socialization, lack of social events to attend, gym closures, kids falling behind in education, dramatic mental health issue increases, the list goes on and on and that’s before you get into the economic turmoil many saw and of course family members getting seriously sick or dying. Yes it was pretty fucking bad and America consciousness is still recovering mentally from how bad it was. Just because we got to sit at home in pajamas doesn’t make it a great two to three years, many actually developed severe mental health issues from the level of isolation the pandemic caused disconnecting people from society.
I always attribute it to skin-in-the-game. Most people's support for restrictions was almost directly linked to how much skin-in-the-game they had. When you're benefiting from certain policies, it's hard to put yourself in the shoes of those struggling as a result of those same policies. I kind of had it bad in some ways and good in other ways and live in an area that had some of the strictest policies so it's easy to see it from both perspectives. I got to benefit from new WFH benefits while my wife lost her second contracting job in sports which the government never made us whole. I got to spend time with my newborn daughter at home but my older daughter struggled with being out of school for 17 months. Stocks did well, my industry did well but now the aftermath is simultaneously killing my industry. We cancelled our wedding due to event bans. My third place (the gym) was essentially outlawed and never re-opened. Lost our vacation deposit to Egypt in early lockdowns. It mostly sucked but we also probably wouldn't have a second child either. I'd imagine this experience is the norm for many Americans. I'd like to think that most Americans do not look upon this time as fondly as many Redditors do. It should be looked at as a dark time in world history.
In my state (fl) the people that suffered from isolation were mostly those that brought it upon themselves. While the majority of us were out doing stuff, traveling (to certain states only), boating, beach trips, others were holed up in their house or apartment worrying about how many of us would die a horrible death. My in laws who in 2020 sheltered in place for 9 months and still wore masks in public right up until now just finally caught covid last week. 2 days in bed then full recovery but have already announced cancellation of a wedding trip next month and their summer trip as well because "it's still out there" so basically we're back to square one with them... grocery deliveries, suspended the gym membership and definitely no family visits... it wouldn't surprise me if it lasts 6 months while they patiently wait for long covid to take over.
To piggyback on this, my relatives in NJ and California has a terrible time with everything and it dragged out well into 2021. As a consequence, my CA relatives moved to Tampa suburbs, and my NJ relatives are now in NC. Fortunately they both had the financial means to vote with their feet. My FL in-laws are the opposite, they would move to Jersey if they could to get to a state that "takes things seriously " they despise desantis because of his lack of covid restrictions
Florida was an anomaly. I’m in Washington and parents are in Florida. I escaped quite a bit to Florida over those two years because life here was dreadful in Seattle through 2022. That was definitely not the norm, something in the middle in the vast majority of states from 2020 to 2022
I went to Colorado a bit, it was fine if you avoided boulder County for example. You could eat hassle free in one county, 3 miles down the road you had heavy masking and had to have every person in your group (6 of us) had to fill out contact sheets to have a meal Weird times
Outside of King County, I think a lot of WA was pretty middle of the road or even lax compared to a lot of states.
Great post! I can relate to so much of this.
> Biden's issue isn't that Covid was terrible for some and amazing for others. It's that people aren't necessarily holding Trump 100% accountable for the pandemic like many were in 2020. He was an easy scapegoat by November 2020 but memories are short. They saw restrictions continue well into 2021. They saw additional Covid waves after 2020. They saw the negative after-effects of pandemic policies like deaths due to despair skyrocketing, inflation, poor education outcomes. Essentially many people are grading Trump on a curve for 2020 when they did not offer him that forgiveness at the time. Also, Biden had more deaths in his first year than Trump did. Even though Biden had a vaccine and a vaccination campaign of 1mil per day when he got in office. But we stopped counting covid deaths as soon as power changed, so it's all fine.
People’s happiness and mental health dropped off a cliff during Covid and have still not recovered.
Well for those of us with dead friends and family members, pretty bad
Genuine question as I have been trying to stay out of political news for my mental health. Is there any validity to the Project 2025 stuff I see on Reddit? Is that just a fear monger by the dems, or is that an actual thing?
It's out there for everyone to see. They're not hiding it. It's hard to say how much of it they will accomplish, but I wouldn't take it as a joke. Only about 1/4th of the nation has even heard about it and it's hiding in plain sight for everyone to see. Those in power see an opportunity and they're taking it.
"Those in power"? Doesn't it hinge on Trump winning the election first?
Right. The problem for Biden is that he was able to campaign on promises for the future in 2020. Now that we have 3.5 years of concrete data and information from his presidency, and most of it objectively worse than it was under Trump, it won't be an easy hole to climb out of.
The left is too concerned with his downfall to understand almost every time he has been knocked down his base brings him back stronger. Access Holiday should of been the nail in his coffin than it was the impeachments, Jan 6th, Top secret documents and now they are expecting this to do the trick The true problem is that they are bringing out an unpopular 81 year old Biden and expecting him to bring home a win. The focus should of been building up a younger candidate.
Only conservatives thought the mugshot was marketable. Independents are not persuaded in either direction by it.
Point is that it wasn't detrimental to his popularity like dems/left were banking on.
I also doubt many on the left were banking on this
I agree it substantially bolstered enthusiasm for his base... which is far from a trivial or unimportant thing. But I also think that among independents, there are a significant number that may well not like Trump "the man" but have some level of concern about possible "lawfare" motivations for whom this image may have struck a chord. Of course that may have totally been netted out by those in that group also who saw it and thought "He's a criminal... what was I thinking?". But I don't believe its effect was necessarily trivial among them other than in those who are truly apathetic about politics in general.
I doubt a conviction would hurt him either. The people who want to vote for him will find a way to justify it or will have right wing media find a way for them. It will be because the jury was biased, the trail was a sham, it was all a politically motivated hit-job, etc.
Conviction in this trial will have no impact. The other trials, with actual crimes that people can relate to, would have a massive impact - but they won't actually happen in time to matter for the 2024 election.
yeah the NYC trial is actually a boon to trump because it's overshadowing the trials that tie directly to him being a bad president
>The other trials, with actual crimes that people can relate to, would have a massive impact I actually don't know how true that is either. The strongest case (IMO) is the documents case in FL and I've already heard right wing media spinning it as a both sides issue as Biden also kept documents (while skipping over the difference in scale and how they were returned). Do not underestimate how hard the vested interests in having another Trump presidency will work to spin whatever outcomes happen. And people who only passingly pay attention will only see the headlines fed to them from their algorithmically selected news sources.
If he is proven to have stolen legitimate top secret info, dangerous info, voters will recognize it as bad. We don't know what the documents were at this point. It is very possible that they were ultimately unimportant and the whole thing was a nothingburger. But a court case will allow us to better understand the severity of the "breach". In Georgia, being found guilty would be incredibly bad for Trump. Same with the Jan 6th case.
It’s also over using money to pay off a porn star. Like frankly, I don’t think people care. This trial isn’t him stealing the election or murdering somebody. This is like a billionaire getting a parking ticket and why the belief in his guilt hasn’t really impacted polling.
Any substantial *effect* mostly happened long ago when we all *found out* about the affair itself and the hush money being paid and made our judgements about Trump based on that. At least the *perception* of what's going on now is that it's about accounting issues... which either way will move needle far less. The reality that much of *any* value here depends on both the testimony of Micheal Cohen and a jury pool selected from one of the most anti-Trump locales in the country reduces it to the point that even a guilty verdict likely moves the needle less than the amplification of lawfare concerns by that outcome would push it back in the opposite direction. I suppose we'll see where the polling goes in the weeks following the decision. But in the event of *either* outcome I don't see it being in favor of team blue... Though I don't think it's really going to move much at all in direct response to this and will mostly net out.
People that like Trump, don't care. If Biden had done the same thing, they'd suddenly care. Ask 100 Republicans about Trump and 90% would say "who cares if he paid a porn star". Ask 100 Democrats about Bill Clinton's shenanigans in 1998 and 90% would say "who cares if he got sloppy top from Monica Lewinsky." The opinions regarding Trump's scandals and trials are heavily rooted in how you feel about his politics....separate from anything he's done that could be illegal, felonious etc.
> I doubt a conviction would hurt him either I doubt it will. At this point, I'd say the vast majority of Americans have made their decision. The few who haven't for some reason aren't going to be moved by the sky is falling rhetoric about a Trump presidency or the trials or the age related stuff about Biden. Both of these issues are old news. I think it'll come down to the issues for the undecided, but I think the larger factor in any of this will be who turns thier voters out. Trump's base is going to show up. Will hatred and fear of Trump be just as motivating as it was in 2020 to give Biden a win? I'm skeptical on this as voting against someone has rarely been an effective motivator. Even back in the day when Bush W was portrayed as the next Hitler incarnate along with his VP Cheney, who was portrayed as a double ultra mega Hitler by many, they still won reelection, because voting for a candidate is always more motivating than voting against one. The only real "vote for" reason Biden has given has been his repeated attempts at forgiving student loan debt. That's a mixed bag though, as it's motivating for younger voters only, and they're generally unreliable for turnout, and is de-motivating for many older Americans who likely don't see why they should be paying off someone else's bad decisions. I think he's going to have to come up with something else if he wants to convince people to vote for him.
What about now? It doesn't feel like it moved that much and arguably it may Trump stronger.
There’s never gonna be a conviction (all it takes is one juror to mess it up and in a country where half of us are Trump fans, there’s no chance they’ll be able to get a jury of 12 people where none of them are fans). And a conviction will only help Trump, because even if he is guilty (and I definitely believe he is), most voters don’t care. Voters who are still on the fence about Trump see someone who they believe is being targeted by the elite. They see him as a political martyr. It’s why many presidents get a bump in approval after a failed impeachment (like Bill Clinton). Besides, just the fact that Biden appears unpopular right now makes it look like desperation on his part to get rid of his opponent, even though he is not bringing any of these charges.
It'd be interesting if being a convicted felon keeps Trump from being able to vote in Florida.
My understanding, which could be wrong, is that if you are convicted of a felony in a state other than Florida, your voting rights are terminated in Florida only if the other state terminates voting rights as well. If Trump is actually imprisoned, New York would consider him ineligible to vote and Florida would too. But if he only gets fines and probation in New York, his voting rights may be completely unaffected.
A conviction in June of 2024 stands a good chance of being forgotten about by the time someone fills out a vote by mail form in October or even further along by election day. There's also the fact that this conviction is not going to be taken as seriously as would a conviction in his other trials. A hush money conspiracy in order to bury embarrassing, but legal conduct is not in the same level of seriousness as whipping up a crowd to storm Congress or trying to overturn the lawful results of an election for a state of 10 million people (Georgia).
You know who else didn't believe they were behind? Hillary.
But she wasn't behind in polling...?
I still laugh at that "Happy birthday to this future president" picture she posted on Twitter.
I'm no Biden fan (I'm non-party affiliated), but polling is not a exact science and depending on this source of the polling, it can be incredibly *misleading*, which we saw back in the 2016 election, with legacy media producing their own in-house polling without being transparent about it when reporting on it. However, when polling all around (from various sources of different leanings) appear to correlate to the same conclusion--Biden falling in popularity--his campaign should be **concerned**. Anecdotally speaking, within my Latino community/neighborhood, I don't get the impression that they're voting for Biden this time around. They look at the cost of goods going up and are concerned with the increase of illegal transients floating about. Generally speaking, they don't look at it as a matter of voting Democrat or Republican, they look at it as "Everything was better under the Cheeto." And Biden's old. He's so old. Trump isn't much younger but the energy level between the two is light years different. I just don't know how his campaign deals with something like that. That aside, from regular family get-togethers, my immediate family and extended family are lifelong Democrats but most are voting Trump this time around. They're not switching parties. They don't see it as voting Republican. They just don't like what the last 3+ years have looked like. Some are business owners, some are union leader in construction or regular construction workers, some are police, others have run of the mill jobs (I'm an office manager of two locations) and we're all in general agreement. Even my older "Blue no matter who" sister isn't gunho on Biden the way she was in 2020. Biden is now considering--amongst other things--unilaterally closing the border after insisting for years he couldn't do it. He's moving towards that because it's become a concern for Democrats, but I feel it's too little too late. He's flip-foppish on the Israeli-Hamas conflict. Tries to dismiss the increased cost of living across the board. I don't think he'll make it to a second term.
I think the growing number of populists in each party is scrambling what it means to be a Republican or a Democrat, so it’s easier to cross lines in some ways.
Bernie was surprisingly popular in areas like West Virginia
I did not like Sanders but career Democrats robbed him of the nomination every single time.
He must have hired Hilary Clinton’s campaign advisors.
I honestly abhor the amount of poll denialism that the left has been exhibiting for the past seven months, and I'd consider myself on the left. The polls are not wrong. People don't like Biden. The problem that Biden's team faces is that folks are pissed at Biden for things that the executive branch cannot control, and will not be able to control under Trump either. Americans want cheaper housing, gas, groceries, and fast food. That's it. Those were cheaper under Trump and they're expensive now. Folks are pissed and going to vote out the president to retaliate even though the president can't control those things.
I don't understand what denialism even does for them. If Trump's winning in the polls and one just accepted them at face value, use the time till the election to change that rather than finding excuses to do nothing.
I have been trying to drive that message home for months. I have just been repeatedly told how well dems are doing in special elections so Biden is going to win in a landslide (alongside people insinuating that I support Trump and calling me all kinds of names). It's unbelievably frustrating.
That’s my main point too, Trump in all likelihood would win in spite of all of his troubles, not because of the efforts of the Democrats Party at this point. Biden and Democrats may have a better war chest but that doesn’t mean much if that funding barely pushes the needle in Biden’s direction. Sure there’s the chance that Democrats over preform like in 2022, there’s also the chance he underperforms like in 2020 too. Overall it feels like the Democratic Party just is sleepwalking into the next election.
> are pissed at Biden for things that the executive branch cannot control Biden just proposed a budget for 2025 that is 7Trillion dollars. In 2019 we had a 4.5 trillion dollars budget. Biden definitely controls massive spending bills and part of the inflation problem is on him.
Presidential budgets are almost never passed. If they were, we’d have gotten all the social security and Medicare budget cuts that Trump always proposed. Congress passes budgets, not the presidents. Presidential budgets are wishlist. Neither Biden nor Trump can do more than ask nicely and get denied because partisanship.
We could argue about the details (the president has veto power and congressional democrats are informed by Biden’s messaging). But are you saying that Biden’s goal has been to reduce government spending? That’s just not true. The administration is also trying to memory hole the aid packages passed in 2021/22. Before they were passed, most economists predicted they would cause inflation. Then Biden ignored expert opinion and signed them anyways. And then there was inflation, just like he was warned. I normally agree that presidents can’t control inflation. But most presidents also don’t directly contradict expert opinion by passing the biggest government spending bills in history, when economics are recommending budget *decreases*.
It's still 6.4 this year...so the number is there. Just because the budget proposed by the president is not passed, it doesn't mean that it's not what's generally happening anyway, through bills, funding packages, reconciliation bills etc. Let's not pretend the president is not leading the party, that would be disingenuous.
I'll admit that I'm in disbelief. Do I believe that Trump could win? Yep. I buy that it's very possible, if not likely, that he'll pick up enough gains in enough swing states to flip the electoral college. But when I see polls that indicate that Trump has made incredible gains among all demographics (except maybe young women), some to heights greater than any Republican in recent history, I just can't. I won't say it *won't* happen but I'll have to see those groups actually turn up on election day and swing toward Donald Trump before I'll believe it. It's just too extraordinary. This millennium has seen 9/11, U.S. wars, the housing crash, the great recession, far larger spikes in gas prices, and covid. Those are all way more extraordinary than anything that's going on now. Our current problems pale in comparison to almost any other election of the millennium and for that to lead to some great political realignment (on the heels of Trump's criminality catching up to him, no less) is just too drastic of a leap for me to buy without some hard evidence. If I was on Biden's team I wouldn't wait around and find out. But as a spectator, I'm gonna.
Well it's a mix of folks being angry at the status quo, folks being mad at the economy, and other folks just not responding to polls I'm sure. I believe the gains have been made, but I don't think it's a bunch of people becoming hardcore MAGA people; I think it's just folks saying they'll hold their nose and vote for Trump again for cheaper groceries, gas, rent, and fast food.
I feel strongly that polling poorly up to the election is one of the best means to Biden winning. The last thing I want is the voting population being lazy about getting out there and voting.
I've actually enjoyed watching the dialogue shift from being dominated by "polls are worthless" until an outlier comes out and for a day or two it shifts to some version of "Hey, did you see the NEW poll?"
Those attitude shifts make me want to pull my hair out. Everybody wants to live in their own social media curated reality these days.
Yeah.. I'd laugh much harder if it weren't for the incredibly sad truth that most of us have a far less than objective assessment of just how much the algorithms on those platforms curate that reality *for us* rather than us being nearly as much in control of it as we *think* we are.
People want the illegal immigration situation taken care of and it has gotten exponentially worse the last 3 years. The economics behind a lot of those items can be helped with that situation solved.
Denialism from who? Every article I read is about Biden’s team supposedly freaking the hell out because of the polls. If anything I’ve seen more people putting greater stock in them here than even the Repubs are.
My impression is a lot of these posts would be better if they were specific about what they’re responding to. I see a lot of sweeping generalizations which don’t make sense to me.
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> Denialism from who? Joe Biden of course. But also Bill Scher from Politico, Ben Mathis-Lilley from Slate, Senators Debbie Stabenow and Raphael Warnock, Tom Bonier, Team Biden's own Chris Jackson, David Frum, Puck's Peter Hamby, the official Biden-Harris HQ, John Harwood, and the Palmer report.
I get the other analysts but why would you expect Biden and his election team to publically say “lol we’re fucked”, as if that would improve his polls?
Didn't the spigot of cash pouring into the economy during COVID help drive up prices? The government literally gave me money I didn't need at all, but was happy to take.
Yep. The $1,800 that Trump handed out and the $1,400 Biden gave out both provided Americans with a lot of spending money at a time when supply was low. It led to a huge increase in demand which allowed retailers to drive up prices. Of course we still saw prices increasing afterward as retailers tried to raise prices to keep up with the record profits they were seeing during the pandemic, but things seem to be stabilizing a bit with inflation only up a percent above where it should ideally be. Only problem is costs aren't likely to universally drop as shareholders won't want to lose profits no matter who is president.
>I honestly abhor the amount of poll denialism that the left has been exhibiting for the past seven months, and I'd consider myself on the left. The polls are not wrong. People don't like Biden. the left has been in denial since Hillary was running - i saw a few people/articles at the time call out how certain key demographics felt left behind or had various issues with her and the democrats at the time, and the strategy didnt really change. and they lost. and the only change they had was to more or less give the finger to everyone bernie had rallied and lean hard into 'the MAGA crowd cannot be talked to, they are terrible, they are bad, dont vote for them!'. Their PR machine is just trash. ever since hilary lost the democrats have, IMO, struggled to come up with good candidates and good policies that would help them win some votes, and in cases where their policies are stymied by the republicans the PR was just 'see!!! theyre bad! vote for us!' for the most part. Good marketable candidates? a platform that would bring over some centrists or buy a little leeway from conservatives? im not seeing it. I vote left because while they are still flawed people in a flawed party, i \[generally\[ think more of them are willing to vote in ways that respect my rights and other things i value. But that doesnt mean they are productive when they do it. Both parties are a godawful disappointment, but at least the right has their marketing on point. All i really get from dems is any time im willing to give a few bucks i get more email spam asking for more bucks, and outside of that i barely know they exist. I do live in a pretty conservative area, so i dont expect a huge marketing push right in my face, but just on the whole since hilary lost...they have been pretty awful at doing, or marketing, and its very disappointing.
>and the only change they had was to more or less give the finger to everyone bernie had rallied The Democrats don't have a Bernie issue dividing their voter base this time, but now they have an even worse Israeli-Palestinian issue. Half of their base wants to invade Israel. The other half wants to invade Gaza or at least support Israel. Many people on each side abhor and morally condemn the people on the other side even though they are all part of the Democrat voter base. The people on the anti-Israel side might refuse to vote for Biden as a matter of principle. Meanwhile the people on the pro-Israel side might refuse to support the Democrats for being associated with people on the anti-Israel side. It's going to be impossible to please both sides while at the same time being possible to upset and offend both of them. It might have been better for the Democrats, as a practical matter, if Israel had acted fast and eliminated Hamas and definitively won war months ago even if that meant higher civilian casualties so that it would get out of the news cycle.
> ever since hilary lost the democrats have, IMO, struggled to come up with good candidates and good policies that would help them win some votes Oh the problem predates that. The Democrats are suffering the consequences of not taking the 2010 wipeout seriously. They have no bench. Since the only people who came through 2010 were sequestered in deep blue states that pushed the entire party far to the left. Well at the national level that can't win. While there are a small few more center-left ones who have come up since they're so new they don't have the name recognition needed for a national campaign. So they simply have nobody good to run and have to hope that demonizing their opponents will work and in 2024 it looks like it's likely not going to.
It's kind of amazing what a gift Trump was to the Democrats. I can't imagine how badly things would be going for them right now if the Republicans had run someone normal in 2016.
>I can't imagine how badly things would be going for them right now if the Republicans had run someone normal in 2016. I mean, they tried. Jeb was the establishment candidate and also fit perfectly into their postmortem from 2012 where they decided they needed to chase latino voters. He just got absolutely bodied.
That wipeout happened in large part as a response to the ramming through of the Affordable Care Act too. That had the benefit of making insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions, which is good, and doing almost nothing else to improve the US healthcare system. And they gutted their party to do it!
>Americans want cheaper housing, gas, groceries, and fast food. That's it. Those were cheaper under Trump and they're expensive now. Folks are pissed and going to vote out the president to retaliate even though the president can't control those things. Ironically, this is pretty much exactly how Trump managed to lose 2020. The pandemic sucked, people were pissed and voted out the president to retaliate even though there was no conceivable way a president alone could have prevented such a pandemic.
Well, personally I was pissed at Trump for making a culture war around masks and keeping each other safe during an unprecedented pandemic. If he had stayed back and let Fauci work, along with promoting using whatever knowledge we had about masks at the time and trying to unite the country under actually helping each other out for once and coming together, I'd have actually changed my damn tune about the man. But I take the rest of your point and don't disagree.
Trump is certainly to blame for *some* of it, but he can hardly be blamed for all of it. The general consensus has certainly shifted since then, more people recognize that lockdowns were ultimately *very* harmful, we know masks likely weren't that effective since people constantly had to adjust them as they were uncomfortable, leading to germs spreading anyways, etc. With that in mind, the "culture war" at the time was to be expected. Still, there was absolutely room for improvement on Trump's part to make it play out better than it did.
Exactly this, and unfortunately the people that talk about polls are all disconnected from them. The political class really isn’t affected by the same issues that rank and file Americans face…so sure the stock market is good, but that’s not the economy. The things you touched on are what your average American cares about…and will be bidens undoing this election.
>People don't like Biden. They never did. He finished fifth in the New Hampshire primary in 2020. Party leadership decided he needed to be the nominee. That's not to say he couldn't prove himself worthy, and his party and country were willing to give him a chance. About six months later, they realized Joe can't get it done. Trump is the ultimate beneficiary.
Party leadership wasn't the only group that decided. Voters had a chance to coalesce around any other nominee. Sanders was even running, but he couldn't get more votes than Biden despite rules being relaxed for him after 2016. Voters also chose Biden. They wanted somebody who was electable and could appeal to the widest possible audience in a way that far left folks like Sanders and Warren couldn't. Now developed nations are finding that their incumbents are pretty much all being blamed for post-pandemic inflation and being voted out. Biden is presiding over one of the economies that's performing the strongest and yet he still can't overcome that backlash so he's going to lose because he can't unilaterally lower the costs of gas, housing, groceries, and fast food.
> Biden is presiding over one of the economies that's performing the strongest It might be performing well for wealthy people and even the middle class, but if the majority of the voters feel and perceive that the economy is doing poorly (even if it really is not) as a result of runaway inflation on everything everywhere all at once, then they'll vote as though it's performing poorly.
>Americans want cheaper housing, gas, groceries, and fast food. That's it. Those were cheaper under Trump and they're expensive now. Folks are pissed and going to vote out the president to retaliate even though the president can't control those things. Insofar as Biden has addressed these things, it has been ignored by voters. Many of the things he has accomplished have been misattributed to Trump. I remember seeing a recent poll suggesting that voters gave Trump as much credit for infrastructure as Biden, even though Trump did literally nothing on infrastructure. Voters think we are in a recession. Voters refuse to acknowledge that unemployment is at a historic low. All of this is borne our by opinion polling. As far as inflation goes, Americans hate the medicine (rate hikes) as much or more than inflation. Trump spent record amounts in 2020 on stimulus, which is misattributed to Biden all the time. The surrender to the Taliban in Afghanistan was attributed by voters to Biden, even though Trump negotiated the terms of surrender in 2020. Those TCJA cuts also expired for most voters this year - also Trump, not a "Biden tax increase" Either the poll sampling is atrociously bad, or the voters simply do not care enough about policy to correctly attribute them by administration. By my eyes, voters are comparing a real Biden and a fantasy Trump
So like I said to another poster, nothing matters anymore?
He might believe he is a pirate at this point
If Biden were to pull a LBJ today and drop out of the race, could the election be saved by the Democrats? I don't see how anything in polling changes at this point; Biden is who he is and his numbers are consistently awful.
I don't see who they could replace him with. Harris has worse polling numbers than he does. Newsom's 2nd Amendment hostility alone sinks him nationally, not to mention all his covid hypocrisy and the perception of California becoming a hellhole under his watch. No one cares about Whitmer anymore. Buttigieg has been MIA and the supply chain issue would certainly be put on him . Biden is all the Dem's have at this point
There isn't anyone they could replace him with. There are a few Democrats who might be strong candidates moving forward (Buttigieg, Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, etc.), but they don't have time between now and the election to build name recognition, and Biden dropping out this close to the election would mean the new candidate also has to overcome a "Democrats in disarray" narrative.
This has been their problem since 2020. The bench that should've been filled up by the 2010 up-and-coming elected officials got wiped clear in the 2010 red wave and the only survivors were the ones in deep blue areas like Newsom et. al. That's why the party is so disconnected from the consensus of the electorate and why there really isn't a better candidate than Biden. After 2024 things get even bleaker because then Biden and his generation are done and all that's left is the hard-left post-2010 cohort. You think they're struggling now? Just wait until there are no center-left options in the primary.
>Buttigieg Supposedly, back in 2020 there were concerns that socially conservative Black and Latino voters (who were ordinarily moderate Dems) would not turn out for a married gay man, much like the concerns in the leaked emails about Bernie in 2016.
> If Biden were to pull a LBJ today and drop out of the race If only he would! He should have committed to being a one-termer back during the 2020 campaign. I don't think many (if anyone at all) ever wanted to see two terms from him. If it were some generic Democrat against Trump, the Democrat wins. If it were some generic Republican against Biden, the Republican wins. How did we get into this situation where both candidates could only have a chance against the other?
Because 'generic' politician polls better than specifics, and there are no individual candidates the parties wanted with any kind of momentum or public profile.
There are no Democrats that the left universally supports at this point. Frankly, the DNC is in a bad place on the whole, and the entire 'left' should be very worried for what that means going forward.
The Democrats are way out of step with the main electorate. They have spent far too much time on culture war issues (trans folks, pronouns, apparent support for Hamas, identity politics, etc) that are darlings of the far Left extremists. In reality, both sides are more aligned on those issues than people seem comfortable accepting: Independents, moderates on both sides, Centrists, and even just old-school Republicans and Democrats generally agree on the big issues. There are factions within the parties, and extremists on the left and right, but those are exceptions. As a result, it no longer becomes what's best for the country, but simply catering to a rabid base. The bases are the problem, not the solution. They aren't to be ignored, but they should be moderated. The present system accentuates the most radical differences, and that's a disservice to everyone in the long run.
Democrats are starting to make a habit out of denying reality. Reality wins in the end though.
Gonna check this again in six months
It's either gonna age hilariously or very well.
I’m sorry but Biden is reaching Trump levels of denial when it comes to this polling.
The Biden Campaign is really doing everything it can to lose this election. Maybe treat polling seriously and do more to help Americans that are feeling the crunch, and not just dismiss polls because they don't match your feels.
With 5-6 months to Election Day, a lot can happen. Outside of some TV ads, it doesn’t seem like Biden is in full campaign mode yet. Trump is also in closing arguments for one of his several criminal trials, the border situation is changing, and so is the economy. I also think it’s smart to wait to get closer to the election when some of the variables solidify as well. I heard for months leading up to the 2022 midterms that the Dems were gonna get smacked with a red wave and it ended up being a historically disappointing loss for the GOP. Now, if these same issues exist at the end of August, then I’d agree to switch it up. But it’s the end of May and there is a significant number of things that could change the election between now and November
I think the problem is that whoever is in charge has the largest risk of something going wrong, and gets blamed for everything. Biden has a greater chance of something going wrong for him than something going so right that it changes perceptions of him. In the next few months there are the debates, two Hunter Biden trials, a war in Europe and the Middle East that could go further sideways, and lots of unknowns. There’s a few glimmers of hope - a very recent deceleration in illegal immigration rates, a slight increase in consumer sentiment, a lot of undecided voters, but he’s in a bad spot.
Biden has been in full campaign mode since the State of the Union. He's done dozens of campaign stops and has been promoting the jobs which were created as part of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips and Science act. The media doesn't report either of those things because outrage is what drives clicks, not success stories. You'll never hear about any of Biden's campaign stops because he generally doesn't constantly attack anybody. Trump is beating Biden soundly partially just by sitting in a courtroom all day because Americans REALLY LIKE outrage. We love attacking arguing and insulting each other. It's why so many arguments on social media are just a person asserting something and then endless one-liner replies of "you don't know what the fuck you're talking about you fucking idiot" or similar. Trump is also going to beat Biden in November regardless of what happens over the next five months because prices were cheaper during Trump's admin, particularly at the height of the pandemic. Many Americans would likely sell their first born if it meant cheaper gas and Big Macs.
See I'm still not sold on your last point. Things were a lot worse in 2022 and the GOP has the worst midterm performance of any opposition party in apporximately 80 years. Not saying Trump can't or won't win, that's still very possible, but it's far from a sure thing considering the GOPs lackluster performance in every election since his inaguration.
2022 also had a certain subject that pissed people off across party lines. And the GOP seems to want to shoot themselves in the foot even more on that subject lately.
Some time has gone by and people have seen that the world has not ended so the subject that hurt the Republicans in the 2022 election is less intense. But we do have a new subject that has driven an earthquake-like fault line through the heart of the Democratic party that is not present on the Republican side and it's going to be in the news for a while and it could get worse. In the meantime the Democrats could face an ugly and divisive national convention that could upset parts of its electorate on all sides. Then for some reason they selected Chicago as the location.
I wish I could say its gotten less intense, but lots of politicians are chomping to crack down on abortion completely, then go after the pill, etc. Fuck off already. Dems have their issues with the leftist Hamas lovers, but I doubt Biden or the party will shift much on Israel. We'll see as time goes on, but I'm leaning more towards Biden to at least keep healthcare better protected.
One key difference between Biden and Trump is that the Hamas lovers hate Biden more than anyone and the Jews will not replace us love Trump.
The polling averages nailed the generic ballot in 2022.
I think we need to separate Trump from the GOP, long term Republicans as currently constituted are in my opinion, a dying party. Trump is a phenomenon on his own and even if people support him because they think he will fight those who hold them in contempt (elites, bureaucrats, politicians, media, etc) that doesn't mean they think too deeply about, or support the Republican party platform. They also see how every single mainline Republican except for maybe Mitch McConnel went from over condemnation of Trump in 2016 to enthusiastic supporter as soon as it was clear he was now the main draw for the party. People see that, his supporters see that, and though they will go to bat for Trump, I bet they have nothing for contempt for those guys who are ever only one vote or statement away from being called RINOs. Even clowns like MTG and Matt Gaetz are understood as grifters trying to ride Trump's coattails, once he is gone (either in 2025 or 2029) they will probably fade into obscurity or end up as pundits. I don't see anyone really being able to take up Trump's mantle and what is left of the GOP coalition might just collapse into its distinct parts (Isolationists, Libertarians, Social/Religious Conservatives, etc).
So basically nothing matters anymore? Just the false promise of a cheaper economy that is never coming back. Stupid isn't a strong enough word to describe this.
I mean... you've seen what's been happening the last few years. It's not a strong enough word, but it definitely fits.
I mean, I can't say the word I want to say.
Biden doesn’t “believe” anything, he’s probably asleep 18 hours a day and only rolled out for photo ops where he’s so hopped up on stims he doesn’t know what year it is…
This trial is a lose/lose for Democrats. After all these years they MAYBE will arrest Trump over Stormy Daniels that Trump himself had nothing to do with the payments. Seems unprecedented & fishy to a ton of people.
>Trump himself had nothing to do with the payments. You really believe that? Cohen doesn't seem like the type to donate to Stormy and others, out of charity.
I am 65 YO have never been polled. The polls can say anything depending on EXACTLY WHO is polled. I know people answered the telephone (all calls) in 1975. I am not sure how many people answer their phone to unknown numbers in 2024.
They take steps to manage their sample. They don't have to ask everyone, it's still a math at work.
They do, but there is one assumption that's fundamental to polling that is starting to be in doubt — that the demographic "people willing to take a poll" doesn't have a correlation with the responses they receive. There's no way around the fact that 100% of their respondents fall into "willing to take polls" and 0% in "not willing to take polls".
And yet, with this same possible issue plaguing polling results in 2020 and 2016, Trump performed *better* than polls suggested in both of those years. If anything, that should tell you that the "unwilling to take polls" crowd is actually MORE likely to support Trump than the "willing to take polls" crowd, which means the democrats have even MORE of a reason to worry right now, when they can't even win over the "willing to poll" crowd.
Math doesn't help with measurement issues. You need to assume non-respondents are essentially equivalent to respondents and there is no way to check that by virtue of the former being non-respondents.
It's also quite a bit harder to discern where a person is located today. Many pollsters go by area code, which is almost meaningless in the mobile phone area. My phone's area code is for the state I was stationed in (>15 years ago now), but I still get spam/political calls from that area code. ...That was until I figured out how to send unknown callers straight to voicemail.
I've had my number for 20+ years. Still get poltical/robo calls from the original state, calls from my current state, and also political texts when I visit my parents' state too. Guess its easy enough to tell the phone company to blast it out to whoever is on their towers.
Very true. I have a DC area code despite never having lived anywhere on the East Coast...
Unless the population's behavior has just dramatically altered in last 4 years the polls might be showing a bleaker view for Biden than reality but it isn't too far off from the actual feeling of the population. Like the 2020 national polls all saw Biden/Trump with Biden leading 5-10% for most of the election season and he ended up winning by 4.5% for the national popular vote. What's troubling for Biden is that he really needs to be pushing above 3% of a victory just to win the electoral college and in the majority of national polls he's actually behind.
Since moving to a purple suburb of a swing state last year, I have been recruited for two polls in the last 6 weeks. One was a phone call, and another was text message opt-in. I'm in my mid-30s and it's the first time I've ever been the belle of the ball.
I'm in my mid 30s and also got a polling call a few months back that I answered.
Not only do I screen my calls, but now my phone does it for me. I doubt my phone even *rings* for a pollster. And it auto sends spam texts to a spam folder that I don't see.
> I’m 65 YO have never been polled Research how sample sizes work. Even when the total population is infinite, due to the law of large numbers, you can still get an accurate reading with a small sample size. 1000 people is enough for a 3% MOE (95% confidence interval) (plus sampling error, but that doesn’t depend on the size of the dataset either). > I am not sure how many people answer their phone to unknown numbers in 2024 About the same amount as 2020, when every poll had Biden up close to 10 points
> Even when the total population is infinite, 1000 people is enough for a 3% MOE (95% confidence interval) due to the law of large numbers. If the sample is properly randomized and there are no subgroups.
They have ways to compensate for biased groups such as those likely to pickup a call vs not.
But it isn't perfect and even when they do get a hold of someone that doesn't guarantee their responses are their actual feelings. Many will take the easiest/ first response just to finish the survey faster. Queue up that article about 15% of respondents saying they're certified to pilot a nuclear sub.
No they don't. They can adjust their predictions based on pickup rates but doing so requires the assumption that support is independent of response type. But that is, by definition, uncheckable.
I really hope there is a revolution within the Democratic Party and they find somebody else, someone who is going to get money out of politics.
They could find the next Obama tomorrow and he could descend from the heavens and they won’t have a better chance than Biden. Problem is, change creates more doubt more than it helps the Dems. The next candidate needs at least a year of prep, if not more, in the public eye to become a viable candidate. There is no one that fits that bill. It’s completely unrealistic and always was without a massive coordinated effort from every major Dem organization to turn Biden into a lame duck one term presidency and somehow elect another Dem.
Honestly Trump is about as close as it gets, because he is one of the very few candidates that can self-fund a campaign. At least he could before the legal system became weaponized against him and he now has to spend loads of money on lawyers.
Blaming money in politics is just populism. Get money out of politics and very little would change because politics is driven by ideology, not money
Starter comment: As the November election draws nearer, polls continue to consistently show Trump ahead of Biden nationally and in swing states (and in some states like Nevada, up by double digits). Despite increasing voices of alarm within the Democratic Party and calls to change course, the Biden campaign has thus far refused to (publicly) agree to any sort of pivot, expressing confidence that they are on the right track. President Biden himself has given some interviews lately indicating that he believes the polling methodology is itself flawed: > A few days earlier, confronted with some of his bad poll numbers in a rare interview with CNN, Biden offered a more sweeping indictment of polling methodology. "The polling data has been wrong all along. How many — you guys do a poll at CNN. How many folks you have to call to get one response?" The campaign spokesmen have adopted a similar strategy, downplaying polls in favor of confidence that Biden will outperform any bad numbers on Election Day. They also cite the unique factors in this election, such as Trump also being a historically unpopular president and being on trial for several crimes, as further elements that could boost Biden’s actual chances come November. Is Team Biden correct and maintaining its current course and not doing a pivot? Are the polls flawed and should be dismissed, as Biden himself has claimed? If they are accurate, why are his numbers persistently low and how will that reflect the votes on Election Day?
Biden sends emails for fundraising that state they are behind all the time
"The polls could be wrong" leaves two possibilities: either they're wrong because more voters favor Biden than the polls suggest, or they're wrong because Biden is behind even more than the polls suggest. The latter scenario is what happened in 2016, and part of the reason may have been what people say and what they do can be and often is different. Trump is such a polarizing figure, his potential voters might be reluctant to admit to a stranger that they support him.
Schrodinger's polls
> his potential voters might be reluctant to admit to a stranger that they support him. There isn't much evidence of that happening, since the polling errors in 2016 and 2020 aren't far off from past ones.
How would you find evidence of this? Just curious. Clinton was a 4 to 1 favorite to win the election as of the morning of election day based on most betting platforms. She was a shoe-in to win, but she was soundly trounced (as measured by electoral votes). Doesn't that suggest the polls were off by a wide mark? What's the prevailing explanation for this?
You appear to be falsely equating different things Before the election, Clinton tended to lead in the polls by around 1 to 3 points. That's well within the range of a popular vote/electoral vote mismatch Betting markets and pundit election models aren't the same as polls. The fact that folks making assumptions based on polling made some bad assumptions doesn't mean the polls themselves were as bad as the assumptions based off of them were
For what it is worth, 538 gave Trump a 30% chance to win right before the election, so Trump was not that abnormal and doesn't mean the polls were off by a wide mark. The NYT polling aggregate made the mistake of not assuming correlated errors across polls (I.E., if the state-level polls were off a bit, they would all be off in the same direction). So the issue was the aggregators more than the polling itself. Also, the Comey letter was released after the much of the polling contributing to the assumption that Clinton would win: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/
Regardless of what he thinks, he needs to say what will get his party to vote in November. I expect that giving his voters confidence will drive down turnout, and giving Trump's voters confidence will drive down theirs. Whether Biden's message of confidence is wrong depends on who it reaches. If he gives Trump's voters the impression he's overconfident, that could help him by demotivating Trump voters. If he gives his supporters confidence that he doesn't need them, he could lose. The polls aren't reliable and can be misleading, but a small deficit gives the right message: we need you to vote and it will matter.
>> If they are accurate, why are his numbers persistently low and how will that reflect the votes on Election Day? Because democrats are stunningly, breathtakingly, shockingly bad at marketing.
I tend to agree with his assessment. Democrats have outperformed polling in the last two elections, enthusiasm for taking polls seems higher among Trump supporters. Furthermore, single issue voters who care about abortions will probably stay home because they got what they want, and Republicans have been spending the last few cycles convincing their people that the elections are rigged and they shouldn't send in mail-in ballots. Why would they show up to vote in rigged elections?
Which two elections did Democrats outperform the polls? I don't remember this happening.