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[–] [email protected] 68 points 2 months ago (24 children)

Who is this guy and how serious should we take this information? This is by far the highest number I've seen for Trump so far.

[–] [email protected] 83 points 2 months ago (1 children)

He's quite a well known pollster. Up until recently he was responsible for Five Thirty Eight, but it got sold and he left.

He got the 2016 election wrong (71 Hilary, 28 trump) He got the 2020 election right (89 Biden, 10 Trump)

Right and wrong are the incorrect terms here, but you get what I mean.

[–] [email protected] 67 points 2 months ago (40 children)

He didn’t get it wrong. He said the Clinton Trump election was a tight horse race, and Trump had one side of a four sided die.

The state by state data wasn’t far off.

Problem is, people don’t understand statistics.

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 2 months ago (3 children)

He works for Peter Theil now, so I take everything he says with a huge grain of salt.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Polling guru Nate Silver and his election prediction model gave Donald Trump a 63.8% chance of winning the electoral college in an update to his latest election forecast on Sunday, after a NYT-Siena College poll found Donald Trump leading Vice President Kamala Harris by 1 percentage point.

He's just a guy analizing the polls. The source is Fox News. He mentions in the article that tomorrow's debate could make that poll not matter.

Should you trust Nate or polls? They're fun but... Who is answering these polls? Who wants to answer them before even October?

So yeah take it seriously that a poll found that a lot of support for Trump exists. But it's just a moment of time for whoever they polled. Tomorrow's response will be a much better indication of any momentum.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (3 children)

It just seems strange because I don't think that many people are on the fence. Perhaps I'm crazy, but I feel most people know exactly who they're voting for already. Makes me wonder how valid this cross-section was that was used as the sample set. If it accurately represents the US, including undecided voters, then... 😮

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago

but I feel most people know exactly who they’re voting for already

The cross-section of people you know are more politically off the fence than the entire nation. Those that aren't online at all are also more undecided and less likely to interact with you.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I listen to those news things that interview people on the street and I'm amazed at how many are uninformed and can go either way.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

There's a Trump undercount in polling: Trump voters don't trust "MSM" and therefore don't answer calls from pollsters, or are embarrassed to admit they will vote for him.

Same goes for asking random people on the street.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (2 children)

There's also an undercount of young people who don't answer the phone.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

I don’t know many people (boomers and younger) who answer the phone from numbers they do not recognize. I would like to imagine that the people who do answer strange numbers tend to be out of touch. Bias in the polls to fools or the lucky who are not spammed ?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Pollsters are compensating for that undercount of unlikely voters. 2016 they were low, 2020 still low but pretty close. They will have scaled it up to be more accurate this go around.

Except there's a few snags there. In between the 2020 election and now, there was an insurrection, Roe v. Wade was overturned, Trump was convicted of crimes and indicted for many more. These are things that a statistical process can't really account for when putting weight on how likely a respondant is to actually vote.

Trump lost in 2020. Do all of these events incentivize more people will turn out for him this time than in the last election? Or will less people turn out for him?

Every time something unprecedented happens it negatively impacts the ability for a scientific statistical process to predict the outcome. Science can't predict things there's no model for, and how do you can't have a model for something you haven't seen before. And a hell of a lot of unprecedented shit has happened. Maybe next time a convicted felon that tried to overthrow democracy runs in an election there can be accurate polling, but it's not going to be the case in this election.

There really is no way to know what will happen on election day. So there's else to do other than maximum effort until election day.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

The issue isn't really people on the fence for Trump or Harris but mainly with generating turnout. After Biden's poor debate performance, people didn't change their mind and decide to vote for Trump, they became apathetic and maybe wouldn't show up to vote.

Harris doesn't need to persuade people to abandon Trump, she needs to get people excited to show up to vote.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

I have shamed my family

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

He's not polling, he is aggregating all of the polls into a prediction model. Either way it is just a snapshot in time.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

The key to doing statistics well is to make sure you aren't changing the results with any bias. This means enough samples, a good selection of samples, and weighing the outcome correctly. Even honest polling in pre-election is hard to get right, and because of that it's easy to make things lean towards results if you want to get certain results, or or getting paid to get those results.

There's only one poll that matters, and that poll should include as large of a sample as possible, and be counted correctly. Even though some will try to prevent that from happening.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

It's a chance of winning, not a poll, so 64% is high but not insane. Silver is serious and it's a decent model. Knowing the model there's a pretty good chance this is a high point for Trump but it's not like he's pulling this out of nowhere, he has had similar models every election cycle since like 2008.

If it's overstaying Trump it's because his model is interpreting the data incorrectly because of the weirdness of this election cycle. I personally think that is likely the case here.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

This quote sums it up:

𝘾𝙝𝙖𝙨𝙚

@chsrdn

In the future we won't elect presidents. We'll have a primary, then Nate Silver will go into a spice trance and pick the winner.

3:41 AM · 7 nov 2012

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That used to be true, but in recent years he has gotten a lot more conservative, so I personally take his predictions with a huge grain of salt.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

This isn't a poll. That's why the number is so high. His model is also automatically depressing Harris' numbers because of the convention right now. (It did the same thing to Trump after his convention)

Nate has been upfront in his newsletters about the factor dropping off the model after today, but then it's also the debate. Things are likely to be far more clear going into the weekend because we'll have post debate polling being published and no more convention adjustments.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

You shouldn't take it seriously. The 24-hour news cycle depends on data like this. It just doesn't tell us anything.

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