Trump Can Still Win, But The Polls Would Have To Be Off By Way More Than In 2016

[Crtcl Rice Theory 2,432]

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-can-still-win-but-the-polls-would-have-to-be-off-by-way-more-than-in-2016/

 

 

 

 

 

ILLUSTRATION BY FIVETHIRTYEIGHT / FABIO BUONOCORE

OCT. 31, 2020, AT 6:25 PM

 

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No, I don’t know who’s going to win the election. According to our forecast, President Trump still has a chance at a second term: a 10 percent chance, to be more speci

 

There just hasn’t been any real sign that the race is tightening. If anything, Joe Biden’s margins are expanding slightly in the Upper Midwest. And there isn’t any particular reason to expect the race to tighten when more than 90 million people have already voted and the most important news story — that the United States just set a record for the number of COVID-19 cases in a day — is a negative one for Trump.

 

 

In fact, in many states, such as North Carolina, we’ve gotten what are likely to be the final polls of the state from most of the major polling firms. The one important exception is Pennsylvania, which some high-quality pollsters seem to have kept as the last state they’re planning to poll. And those polls could matter quite a bit. Pennsylvania is the most likely tipping-point state (it delivers the 270th electoral vote around 37 percent of the time in our forecast), so any deviation from Biden’s current 5.1-point lead in the polls there — say, if Biden climbs to a 6-point lead or falls to a 4-point lead — could make a fairly big difference in our forecast.

 

 

But what we’ve seen so far in Pennsylvania doesn’t suggest much movement in the polls. We’ve gotten two live-caller polls since the debate: A Muhlenberg College poll published this morning had Biden up by 5 points, closely matching our average in the state. And a Quinnipiac University poll had Biden ahead by 7, which is not quite as good for Biden as it might seem — Quinnipiac has generally had friendly results for him this cycle and their previous poll of the state had him up by 7 as well.

 

 

And if nothing changes at all in the polls, Biden’s chances of winning will nonetheless increase slightly by Tuesday morning in our forecast. That’s for two reasons:

1. Trump is still receiving a tiny boost in our forecast based on economic conditions and incumbency, currently amounting to an 0.2-percentage-point shift. But this will fall to 0 percent by Election Day.
2. Uncertainty in the forecast will also be slightly reduced when we actually make it to Election Day.

That said, Biden’s current lead of 8 to 9 points nationally is quite large given our highly polarized political environment, so maybe a few of the remaining undecided voters will drift to Trump. Don’t be surprised if Biden drops to 86 percent — or jumps to 94 percent — in our final forecast.

 

 

But I don’t think that Biden and Trump are likely to escape the current zone that they’re in. Here’s what I mean by that: I think of election forecast odds as basically falling within the following four zones.

• The Gray Area.
• The Normal-Polling-Error Zone.
• The Zone of Plausibility.
• The Outer Reaches.

Edited November 1, 2020 by CanAm1980

[Prizm123 1,086]

i dont believe polls.

ever.

i just sort of look at them as oh, well maybe theres a decent chance.....

oddly enough i have been polled to death this cycle, at least once every 2 weeks

[Nature Boy 2.0 8,376]

28 minutes ago, CanAm1980 said:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-can-still-win-but-the-polls-would-have-to-be-off-by-way-more-than-in-2016/

 

 

 

 

 

ILLUSTRATION BY FIVETHIRTYEIGHT / FABIO BUONOCORE

OCT. 31, 2020, AT 6:25 PM

 

ADVERTISEMENT

No, I don’t know who’s going to win the election. According to our forecast, President Trump still has a chance at a second term: a 10 percent chance, to be more speci

 

There just hasn’t been any real sign that the race is tightening. If anything, Joe Biden’s margins are expanding slightly in the Upper Midwest. And there isn’t any particular reason to expect the race to tighten when more than 90 million people have already voted and the most important news story — that the United States just set a record for the number of COVID-19 cases in a day — is a negative one for Trump.

 

 

In fact, in many states, such as North Carolina, we’ve gotten what are likely to be the final polls of the state from most of the major polling firms. The one important exception is Pennsylvania, which some high-quality pollsters seem to have kept as the last state they’re planning to poll. And those polls could matter quite a bit. Pennsylvania is the most likely tipping-point state (it delivers the 270th electoral vote around 37 percent of the time in our forecast), so any deviation from Biden’s current 5.1-point lead in the polls there — say, if Biden climbs to a 6-point lead or falls to a 4-point lead — could make a fairly big difference in our forecast.

 

 

But what we’ve seen so far in Pennsylvania doesn’t suggest much movement in the polls. We’ve gotten two live-caller polls since the debate: A Muhlenberg College poll published this morning had Biden up by 5 points, closely matching our average in the state. And a Quinnipiac University poll had Biden ahead by 7, which is not quite as good for Biden as it might seem — Quinnipiac has generally had friendly results for him this cycle and their previous poll of the state had him up by 7 as well.

 

 

And if nothing changes at all in the polls, Biden’s chances of winning will nonetheless increase slightly by Tuesday morning in our forecast. That’s for two reasons:

1. Trump is still receiving a tiny boost in our forecast based on economic conditions and incumbency, currently amounting to an 0.2-percentage-point shift. But this will fall to 0 percent by Election Day.
2. Uncertainty in the forecast will also be slightly reduced when we actually make it to Election Day.

That said, Biden’s current lead of 8 to 9 points nationally is quite large given our highly polarized political environment, so maybe a few of the remaining undecided voters will drift to Trump. Don’t be surprised if Biden drops to 86 percent — or jumps to 94 percent — in our final forecast.

 

 

But I don’t think that Biden and Trump are likely to escape the current zone that they’re in. Here’s what I mean by that: I think of election forecast odds as basically falling within the following four zones.

• The Gray Area.
• The Normal-Polling-Error Zone.
• The Zone of Plausibility.
• The Outer Reaches.

Added to that, although I dont like Bidens policies,  i dont think he inspires dislike anywhere near the level Hillary did. Even more so when he is stacked against an easily disliked opponent like Trump.

I do agree the polls are off. But sadly not enough to ensure Trump wins 

[Burnt Reynolds 5,058]

How will you handle it if Trump wins again? 😃

 

There's a few polls, by the way, if you're a fan of them, that jive with those of us who know how to gauge trends, point out that the bias against Trump is "way more than 2016", and so people are hiding their true feelings "way more than 2016" because they don't want to deal with retributive people. 

 

On 10/20/2020 at 8:06 PM, Burnt Reynolds said:

Quote

Much of Trafalgar’s approach focuses on accounting for the so-called social-desirability bias. As Cahaly puts it, that’s when a respondent gives you “an answer that is designed to make the person asking the question be less judgmental of the person who answers it.” Cahaly notes that this phenomenon showed up as long ago as the 1980s, in the so-called Bradley effect, when the African-American mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, underperformed his polling in a gubernatorial race. It has been a hallmark of the Trump era and is one reason other pollsters missed the impending victory of Ron DeSantis over Andrew Gillum in the 2018 Florida gubernatorial race.

Quote

One is the number of questions on its surveys. “I don’t believe in long questionnaires,” Cahaly says. “I think when you’re calling up Mom or Dad on a school night, and they’re trying to get the kids dinner and get them to bed, and that phone rings at seven o’clock — and they’re supposed to stop what they’re doing and take a 25- to 30-question poll? No way.”

Why does that matter? “You end up disproportionately representing the people who will like to talk about politics, which is going to skew toward the very, very conservative and the very, very liberal and the very, very bored, “Cahaly explains. “And the kind of people that win elections are the people in the middle. So I think they miss people in the middle when they do things that way.”

 

Quote

This goes back to the social-desirability bias.

People with opinions that are unpopular “don’t want to be judged by somebody on the phone that they don’t know.” If this was always true, it’s particularly so now: “They’ve seen all this stuff of people being shamed for their opinion, people losing their jobs.”

So Trafalgar mixes up how it contacts people, and especially wants respondents to feel safe in responding. “We use collection methods of live calls, auto calls, texts, emails, and a couple that we call our proprietary digital technology that we don’t explain, but it’s also digital,” Cahaly says. The point, he continues, is to “really push the anonymous part — this is your anonymous say-so.”

Another factor, is that “conservatives are less likely to participate in polls in general,” he says. “We see a five-to-one refusal rate among conservatives.” That means “you’ve got to work very hard to get a fair representation of conservatives, when you do any kind of a survey.” 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/the-pollster-who-thinks-trump-is-ahead/

 

 

We see what happens when anyone, conservative or otherwise, openly talks about things to people they don't know, they get censored, ostracized, doxxed, etc. And what none of these polls account for is 1) the lack of enthusiasm from Biden, especially from the minorities they play up, and doubly, 2) the higher minority support Trump is going to get than last time.

 

I'm not going to say with assur that Trump *will* win with anywhere near 100% certainty, but the odds favor him far, far more than the polls suggest, and I'm talking about state polls, not the irrelevant popular vote ones where I almost die laughing seeing Biden 52-57, Trump 35-42. People in my former state and ones like NY, OR, IL, MA, etc. can run up the numbers for Biden all they want in states like this, they still get the same electoral votes and still need to show to the people in middle America who's jobs they want to destroy why they should vote for Biden, and "orange man bad" doesn't work outside those coastal/New England states.

Edited November 1, 2020 by Burnt Reynolds

[Crtcl Rice Theory 2,432]

There seems to be virulent strains of paranoia about doxxing floating in the air tonight.

 

 

[TBoneTX 45,469]

1 hour ago, CanAm1980 said:

paranoia about doxxing

Not altogether without justification.

I personally know at least 9 people who won't put a Trump sign in their yard.

They're certainly not answering phone polls, either frankly or at all.

[Dashinka 24,584]

Is it just me, or is TBone showing up in fourplicate  in this thread?

Edited November 1, 2020 by Dashinka

[Nature Boy 2.0 8,376]

24 minutes ago, Dashinka said:

Is it just me, or is TBone showing up in fourplicate  in this thread?

As if once. Lol. Just you you lucky devil 

[Crtcl Rice Theory 2,432]

This one poll is giving Trump backers hope and Democrats anxiety

 

 

(CNN)Poll of the week: A new Des Moines Register/Selzer and Co. poll from Iowa likely voters has President Donald Trump leading Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden by a 48% to 41% margin.

The average poll in Iowa has Trump up by 2 points.

What's the point: Let's be very clear, Biden is the favorite in polling to take back the White House. He leads in the swing states necessary to get 270 electoral votes, and those leads are wider than the ones Hillary Clinton had four years ago.

The Selzer poll is an exception to that rule. If it is correct, Trump is in a far better position than assumed, and we could be in for a much closer race than many expect.

[Burnt Reynolds 5,058]

3 minutes ago, CanAm1980 said:

Trump is in a far better position than assumed

Shock.

 

But where might one get that "assumption"? Might it be the publishing of unrealistic polls? 

[Crtcl Rice Theory 2,432]

Early voting brings one million Black voters to Georgia polls

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-georgia-voting-idUSKBN27F36Z

 

ATLANTA (Reuters) - As Georgia wrapped up weeks of early voting on Friday for the Nov. 3 election, Black voter turnout had far surpassed the level seen at the same time in 2016.

Some 1 million Black voters have already cast ballots this year, up from 712,000 this time four years ago, according to TargetSmart, a Democratic analytics firm.

 

[Crtcl Rice Theory 2,432]

9 minutes ago, Burnt Reynolds said:

Shock.

 

But where might one get that "assumption"? Might it be the publishing of unrealistic polls? 

Funny how you have to creatively currate with partial quotes to make some sort of point, that lands with a thud.  Smells desperate.

[Steeleballz 7,550]

15 hours ago, Prizm123 said:

i dont believe polls.

ever.

i just sort of look at them as oh, well maybe theres a decent chance.....

oddly enough i have been polled to death this cycle, at least once every 2 weeks

 

   I do think Biden has a lead, but I think it's closer than the polls say. The only thing that will surprise me is a quick result. I think there's a decent chance this drags out for a while with recounts and maybe even legal challenges.

[Burnt Reynolds 5,058]

18 minutes ago, CanAm1980 said:

Funny how you have to creatively currate with partial quotes to make some sort of point, that lands with a thud.  Smells desperate.

Curate? It read exactly as your headline. 

 

Strange how you'd post something then argue against what its saying. Smells like desperation.

[Crtcl Rice Theory 2,432]

4 minutes ago, Burnt Reynolds said:

Curate? It read exactly as your headline. 

 

Strange how you'd post something then argue against what its saying. Smells like desperation.

No that was not the headline, try again. You didn't even copy a full sentence but quoted an out of context segment and then made it look like my view.