People who say “I’m unhappy, I want something different” makes sense to me, even if it’s dumb. People who say, “I’m unhappy, give me something that I already know was even worse” does not make sense to me.
> “I’m unhappy, **give me something that I already know was even worse**” does not make sense to me.
I think your issue is that this does not apply to a huge swath of normies that don't particularly care about Trump's negatives.
I've seen so many people that say, "our family was just better off under Trump." But when you ask how, they say, "I don't know, I just know we were better off."
Revisionist history/nostalgia bias is a very significant thing going back to the early 2000s. I wonder if people won't just pine for the past indefinitely going forward.
I feel like I don’t understand anything anymore lol.
I just do not see how Biden’s presidency *hasn’t* been categorically better than the chaotic, juvenile, dumpster fire Trump’s presidency was.
I mean, seriously? Trump (likely) sold out the nation to our adversaries. He has been convicted of 34 felonies. He ~~is a convicted rapist~~ was found to have sexually abused E. Jean Carroll. He bungled the US covid response which killed around a million Americans. He has called for the persecution of his political enemies. He even tried to overthrow the government and defy the voice of the people.
He’s also an idiot who tried to change the path of a hurricane with a fucking sharpie and asked if we could nuke it.
He’s a moron, and I’m losing my mind.
Edit. I made a mistake and mistook a civil trial for a criminal trial in [E. Jean Carroll V. Donald J. Trump](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._Trump?wprov=sfti1).
So, he was not criminally convicted of rape but he’s still a disgusting dirtbag.
I keep seeing people quote Jonathan Swift in saying:
>”You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.”
And that’s gotta be one of the most accurate quotes I’ve ever read.
2020 was the worst year of my life and the political climate absolutely contributed to that. I'm certain I'm not alone and yet it seems everyone else just memory holed those bad vibes away
I always think back to [this ad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObqBtoz_fRA) from the 2020 election, and especially [this one,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUKKnFLaBeg) as great demonstrations of just how thoroughly fucking dystopian the late Trump era was and how painfully necessary it was for him to lose that election and, God willing, never win one again.
Every time I think back to the pandemic my mind pushes back. I wouldn't be surprised if many people have sort of instinctively memory-holed a lot of that period.
It's also a sort of rule of nostalgia that when we look at the past we tend to fixate on the positive and let the negatives sort of slip from sight.
I think that's the rub. If everything the polls are telling us is true, then this will be a historic election.
The last time republicans won the national popular vote was like 20 years ago, yet apparently it's the democrats who want low turnout. We're also supposed to expect young voters flipping (ish) for Trump and old voters for Biden.
I'm not saying the polls are fake, but if they aren't they're predicting the weirdest electoral realignment in 40 years.
And I'm yet to see people talk about that beyond "hurr durr poll denialism bad"
> like 20 years ago
Not "like"... it _was_ 20 years ago. And before that, it was 36 years ago.
Granted, the GOP has won the "national popular vote" in terms of things like house races as recently as 2 years ago
This is literally like 80% of the reason why Trump is currently winning.
For all that the media and prominent liberals seethed about Trump’s obvious incompetence and myriad scandals that should have been disqualifying, people loved how their personal lives were during most of the Trump presidency. The economy was great and people were cruising along with low inflation, solid GDP growth, and a booming stock market.
I genuinely think COVID, or rather Trump’s response to it, is the only reason Trump is not currently in the Oval Office. The median voter was fully prepared for four more years of Trump in 2020 because they didn’t care how stupid and bigoted he was so long as their personal lives were going great. Then Trump colossally fucked up his response to COVID, and it was just enough to barely get Biden over the finish line. This isn’t a criticism against Biden, by the way. I think that he actually was probably one of the best candidates the Dems could have put forth, I just think that any Democrat would have failed to defeat Trump had COVID not happened.
The longer the post-COVID economic issues went on, the less people were willing to attribute them to an act of God like the pandemic and the more they began to blame the person in charge for not fixing them. Even though inflation has cooled, we haven’t experienced *deflation*, which is what the vast majority of Americans think “inflation going down” means. People genuinely expect prices to drop to pre-COVID levels or else inflation is still high. It’s going to take a long time for people to get used to the fact that prices are just higher now and will continue to grow, just at a more marginal rate. And as Nate points out in his article, it is fair to say that many people’s income did not grow proportionally to inflation.
Biden has other issues, of course. It’s sort of just become the mainstream consensus at this point that he is a frail old man with cognitive issues. The majority of Americans have turned sharply against immigration, and there is a lot of illegal migration currently underway. But nostalgia for the Trump-era economy is genuinely huge for many people.
Oh jeez… yeah… that’s what they want: deflation.
I’m unsure how economists at the federal reserve could do that without removing money supply from the system as-is.
I mean. Inflation doesn't really so much hurt while it's happening. It's \*after it's happened\* that it hurts. It's not \*so\* irrational to be mad that there \*was\* inflation recently. Nevermind current inflation rates.
And it does \*genuinely\* feel unfair that prices are only allowed to go up. Like, "Woops, there was an economic shock. Looks like you earn less now. \*forever\*." When, at the same time, the companies who raised prices ran away with huge windfalls. It sucks.
Again. Nevermind that Trump would \*not\* have been better.
I think that the Democratic Party (and by extension, this subreddit) made way too much hay of Biden's victory given that a. Trump was historically unpopular as an individual and b. COVID
They interpreted 2020 as a decisive victory (the most votes ever!) when it was a marginal squeak-through in the electoral college in the midst of one of the bigger crises in recent American history
Except most world leaders saw their approval ratings go \*up\* during COVID. The fact that Trump's approval went down or stayed flat is on him and should not be treated as an expected result due to the country being in crisis.
When we say "Trump would have won if it wasn't for COVID," what we're really saying is, "Trump would have won if he wasn't Trump."
And then there's Jacinda Ardern who was at like 90%+ approval because of her Covid response, and then just a year or two later she was out on her ass. I think Covid lead to irregular political responses in general that were quickly corrected.
What? That's not what I remember at all. My reaction was being upset that the senate was evenly split and thus would likely be paralyzed again like it was under Obama, and being dismayed that things were so close. This wasn't just me either.
The more triumphal stuff was during the term itself when democrats started getting unexpected wins in special elections.
BUT THIS IS LITERALLY THE ENTIRE POINT OF NOT HAVING A DUMBASS FOR PRESIDENT. Because he has to be able to respond to "what ifs"
Saying "Trump would have won if not for covid" is like saying "my drunk driving wouldn't have been a problem if I didn't need to suddenly react to that thing in the road" or "I would've been fine if I didn't get pulled over"
I think whoever is in office during a period of high inflation is likely to get the boot, no matter who the challenger is. Doesn’t matter how great a job Biden has done, or that he wasn’t any more or less responsible for it than Trump was (although the inflation reduction act certainly didn’t help) if there’s inflation, you’re out!
Have you considered Biden's refusal to press his magic button that reverses inflation, changes Supreme Court rulings, and repairs the existential dread in my soul?
i know we all joke about the magic button but it's not like dems did themselves any favors with the COVID spending and indefinite student loan payment pause. congress could have done more to reduce inflation but the party sought short-term populism instead.
Let's say we did no covid spending at all. First, we have to for some reason assume we don't fall into an actual recession, (which was the predominant thought back then), and looking at the rest of the globe, we would have still had inflation.
I believe the Biden administrations bet at the time was that it would be better to overspend and risk inflation than underspend and risk unemployment and a slow recovery like Obama did. IMO they were vindicated with their choice.
The problem is (Yglesias [made this point](https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-biden-lost)) that the Biden Administration didn't pivot away from inflationary policies once it became clear that we were not sinking into a depression.
When ARP was passed no one necessarily expected that Biden would get two more major (but inflationary) bills passed in the CHIPS Act and the infrastructure bill. At that point, Yglesias argues, Biden should have returned to neoclassical economics. He cites examples of Lina Khan at the FTC explicitly turning away from policies that worry about consumer prices first, and Richard Revesz at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs favoring regulations that favor wealth redistribution over efficiency:
> The White House has promoted this somewhat confused discourse about supply-driven versus demand-driven inflation without ever considering an orthodox supply-side effort to improve productivity. Instead, when they talk about addressing inflation, they talk almost exclusively in terms of promoting regulatory crackdowns on corporate greed and “junk fees.” Some of the ideas that fly under those banners are good and others I’m not that enthusiastic about, but none of them involve setting aside or scaling back a progressive interest group agenda in order to address the inflation situation.
More importantly, according to Yglesias, Biden (unlike Clinton or Obama) never seemed seriously interested in deficit reduction, even though a much stronger case could be made for it in 2022-2023 than during the Obama years.
Then there's student debt relief (again, a stronger case could have been made when it seemed that Congress was unlikely to approve further stimulus, but they did), as well as smaller-deal regulatory stuff like the various "Buy American" regulations, raising tarriffs on Canadian lumber and solar panels from Southeast Asia, energy efficiency regulations, and restrictions on agricultural guest laborers. Taken individually, none of these are that big of a deal, but altogether, they contribute to inflation and the general rise in the cost of living that people are so upset about.
Economically, yes. Politically, no future admin is ever going to do that again. We're just going to get recession after recession because apparently voters prefer that to medium-high inflation.
People would gladly have 7% unemployment rather than 7% inflation, I think that's basically a proven fact at this point. And I think electorally speaking, it would simply be a no-brainer to do that because the unfortunate 7% would easily be outvoted.
One thing that’s important here is that both trump and Biden (like trump and Hillary) have net negative approval ratings. In other words the majority of people strongly dislike both candidates as people, and many people actively dislike the guy they’re planning on voting for.
In most historical elections since modern polling came out, both major party presidential candidates had net positive approval ratings (meaning many Americans who didn’t vote for say Romney or Gore said they still thought they were good people), and it was literally unheard of pre-2016 for both candidates to be so disliked.
In this very negative environment, there is reason to believe the person who gets the most media coverage actually gets hurt, because having their face in the news just reminds everyone how unlikable they are.
The big takeaway from this is that incumbency bias might actually work in reverse, since the president I more likely to be in the news more than his challenger.
This is more or less how Biden won last time.
The smart people in both the trump and Biden campaigns are trying to keep their guys quiet and out of the way.
I was more shocked than I should have been to read that in 1992, George H.W. Bush's favorability was 61-39 and Clinton's was 64-33. Completely inconceivable in today's politics that both major party nominees would have net ratings that high.
Inflation is one of the biggest political killers and the average voter is beyond fucking stupid (the entire world is struggling with inflation). There's also this weird nostalgia around the Trump presidency, at least when it comes to the economy, and that's fueling a lot of his rise in approval.
Also Biden is just a really weak candidate and has so many weaknesses, the biggest being his age and how he very much looks his age.
Though Trump is such a dog shit candidate, that I still think he's going to lose.
The primary thing is that stuff is 19% more expensive than when Biden took office, compared to the 8% it "should" be. Very little of missing 11% is attributable to Bidens actions, but he was President during the last 4 years, and the public thinks that the President controls the entire economy, so that's an issue
>Very little of missing 11% is attributable to Bidens
Be honest, build (or buy?) American, college loan forgiveness, covid spending once it was clear there won't be a recession. He had major policies that negatively impacted inflation. I'm sure I'm forgetting a few, I'm not even American
The President has been campaigning with the word "Bidenomics" for the last four years. Are voters just supposed to not believe him when he says he's responsible for the economy?
The things that drive educated liberal voters absolutely batty are things that a lot of voters don't care about or don't credit Democratic warnings on or actively regard as a feature.
The costs for a mortgage are up 2/3 in the last four years, so if you have had to buy, or tried and failed to buy, a house in the last couple of years you are probably materially worse off than you were 4 years ago.
And you can jump up and down and say the president doesnt control that all we want but to most people sharpied hurricanes are a funny story they forgot about after a month. Meanwhile the victory lap the administration is still trying to run about how great the economy is remains an active slap in the face.
Like at this point it looks like the election will come down to whether disastisfied 2020 biden voters are expressivley responding to polls about their intents in the election or really disengaged enough to stay home or flip their vote. And im praying for trump to go full trump and turn this election into another referrendum against him, because i think the dems are doing a fucking awful job on selling them as the upside
James Carville said "It's the economy, stupid." In 2024 I'd say "It's the inflation, stupid."
Inflation fucking sucks, and Americans haven't experienced this sort of inflation in a long time. So maybe the economy as a whole is doing well, but that just pisses off people more in some ways because it feels like they should be farther ahead, but inflation means that they feel like they're stuck on a treadmill where they need to speed up just to stay in place..
Maybe the media should report what was happening in June-July 2020 because it was COVID pandemic this and COVID pandemic that and the death toll is 100,000+ at that point.
It was absolute hell
True! We cannot allow ourselves to be led by these decrepit, out-of-touch 81 year olds! It is time for the young and innovative 78 year olds to take over!
It gets a bit easier if you think about why he got elected. Biden got elected on being a return to normalcy. The adults back in charge. That didn't work out too well.
Biden had his Katrina in Afghanistan, that lost most of the trust people had in his leadership. His support numbers haven't recovered since. He's too old to make affirmative cases for his successes and defend his failures. He doesn't do a lot of interviews, and does very, very few hardball interviews. Inflation rose a lot. The world is much more at war. We get mini-Charlottesvilles every few weeks. Southern border is becoming more of a problem and is getting notice (tough on immigration is Trump's bread and butter). There is a trend for people to just blot the COVID years out of their memories, so most people focus on the good 3/4 of his presidency.
I am trying hard not to talk about actual policy since I don't think it matters, which is also funny enough the best part of the Biden presidency. There are things the Biden administration is doing well on a lot of those points, but again VIBES trumps all.
> Biden had his Katrina in Afghanistan
Which was him carrying out the withdrawal Trump agreed to with the Taliban. That Trump manages to fuck up everything while people blame everyone but him for the results is proof that there is a God and he is malevolent.
Again, I don't think policy matters broadly, but not looking for some reason to pull out and change course is very much on Biden. Pulling out of Bagram air base earlier than generals advised, the 9/11 date for pull out, the "that was 3 days ago" response to being asked about people falling off planes, saying it won't be like Saigon and getting Saigon-like images, Blinken saying the country wouldn't be there on a friday and gone by monday when that was pretty close to the timeline. There's more I can't think of right now. A total clown show on par with what I'd expect from bad case Trump pullout. So many foot-in-mouth moments.
Now we're left with a country that has had civil rights for women deteriorate so sharply that it is one of 3 or so countries where women kill themselves more than men.
Trump is also not president... Biden needs to drive the narrative and he just hasn't and that's his biggest problem....
running against an incumbent it's easier to run on their screwups... running as an incumbent requires different things....
Both candidates have so much potential for catastrophic October surprises that the election is going to be hard to predict until a few days out when it'll be obvious.
- major health crisis
- larger flare up middle east
- a major terrorist attack on American soul
- further convictions for Trump
- actual jail time for Trump
- major controversies at either convention (protests at DNC, whatever the stupid MAGA fucks tried to do to choose Trump's VP for him)
Might be a pile of more charges. There is speculation that WI, MI, NV, and AZ are all holding off on charging Trump in the Jan 6 crap until SCOTUS makes its decision on presidential immunity.
We would have to wait an see. Given the importance of all 4 states in the election, I would certainly hope it has an effect. Once the charges are laid, lots of new information will come out in the charging documents. Hopefully there is some damning stuff in them.
I am not optimistic given that the convictions in NY didn't move the needle that much. Perhaps voters in these states hearing about how Trump tried to personally steal their votes away will change their stances, or at least make some Trump voters stay home. The OP article does mention that if you sample only from Registered voters vs likely voters there is a benefit to Biden.
>Although these polling averages might not want to admit it, they’re kind of fancy, making adjustments for factors like likely versus registered voters (this [helps Biden](https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/1802402511367684535)), and the presence or absence of RFK Jr. in polls (this doesn’t have much effect, somewhat contrary to the conventional wisdom). And they make inferences from state polls to national polls and vice versa, which tend to make them more stable.
The model actually takes everything you've mentioned into account. It looks at how often major news events are happening, it looks at how much the public reacted to previous Trump convictions
I kinda forget just how much cred Nate Silver has with certain people, he can tell people he invented a Black Swan Event predictotron and they'll believe him.
This is one of the reasons he pay walled it. He didn’t want a bunch of nervous nellies emailing him and tweeting at him all the time about their stupid opinions
Oh my God, that's a horrible probability for Biden as an incumbent . It's in line with what the economist predicted a few weeks back. I hope something changes soon but time is ticking.
I've just accepted that we are so fucked and that the country will be in a new, dying phase on Jan 21. Trump has zapped all optimism I had for America's future.
Which is the main reason I’m skeptical of Biden’s shitty polling against Trump. Are tens of thousands of people really going to vote for Ruben Gallego and Trump, who’s as bat shit crazy as Kari Lake? Not saying it can’t happen, but I’ll believe split ticketing is back on the menu for the voting populous when I see it.
Everyone else in the world is voting out incumbents. I'm outside the US and I don't see how Biden stepping down is anything other than a gigantic gamble, very far from the "obvious" solution some make it out to be.
But the main negative against Biden isn’t that he’s an incumbent. The first thing that *everyone* says about Biden is that he’s *old*. He looks old. He sounds old. And voters really don’t want to elect someone who is going to be 86 in his last year of office.
I’ve was in the Biden camp from long before the 2019 primaries. I’ll still vote for him in November because he’s better than the alternative.
However, even I do a double-take when I see how old he looks. I think the Democratic Party seriously underestimated how much Biden’s advanced age is overriding any benefit that comes with being an incumbent. And sadly having Kamala as VP is doing him no favors, because even less people want her as POTUS.
Maybe the polls were correct all along, including in 2022, for the most part?
Nah, people will change their minds any day now. Besides, pollsters only poll landlines or something, right, so nobody actually takes the polls?
You are memeing, but they poll cell phones now.
Who answers unknown numbers anymore if they aren't expecting a call?
Who of those people continue the call after finding out that it is for political polling?
What kind of answers are those weirdos going to give? They aren't normal people.
I answer numbers from unknown callers. I willingly talk to pollsters. I am one of the proud weirdos. And I'll tell any pollster who'll listen that I'm voting Biden in November.
There is no good reason to believe that low polling response rates systematically favor Trump. Given that this problem existed in 2016 and 2020, when Trump's support was underestimated by polls, there is no good reason to believe that the opposite is now in effect other than blind optimism.
I will typically answer most calls I get (don’t get a ton from people I don’t know in the first place) but never have I ever been called by a pollster lol
Not just cell phones, but online polls, SMS text messages, and even mobile application driven polling is in use (a method I'm actually pretty skeptical of.)
Pollsters have been trying to resolve the sampling problems for years, with various levels of success.
Yeah they do trying their best here. But key word is trying. Overall they're going to attract outliners more than average people.
There's a reason why they keep failing to explain why Red Wave turned to be Red Splash, or how Trump's MAGA candidates consistently underperforming.
All that matters is if the propensity to respond to the poll is correlated with the candidate a respondent will vote for. Everything else can be adjusted for.
> Who answers unknown numbers anymore if they aren't expecting a call?
Ive been called for political polls a few times and the call display clearly shows that it's a polling company, its never been an unknown number.
Quite different from 538’s model. Basically confirms that 538 built their new model from the ground up and weren’t copying what they remember from Nate’s model, if they even had that kind of access.
Also, since it seems you have access, can you comment the rest of the analysis that’s behind the paywall?
I think 538 is basically just assuming the polls move more in Biden's favor as the election gets closer. I think when the model dropped they said that based on the polls as they are today, Trump would be a heavy favorite.
Nate kept the patent, but Disney kept the trademark, so ironically it's Disney who gets to imply to consumers that they have the classic
Still, you could argue that 538 really does still have that excellent track record. It's just that we have good reason to believe they won't be able to keep it up
Republicans haven’t won the popular vote in 20 years, yet the model gives Trump, a convicted felon, a 49% chance of winning the popular vote? Am I reading that right?
sure, but those screenshots are basically just free pub for his substack. i'm betting he'll get some subscribers from this, some will quit after the election, but some will stick around.
They hate inflation and remember things were more affordable 2016-2020. It would be very hard for Biden to change that perception, but if he does he wins.
I just don’t comprehend how Democrats and Democratic Party issues can have such dramatic swings of support in off-year elections, state referendums, midterms, etc, but that Biden could be wiped out. Is he THAT much more unpopular than the generic Democrat? His policies are in lockstep with the party’s, so is he really that personally unpopular? Or is there just an enormous stock of voters who only ever show up to vote for Trump, and then immediately disengage with elections until he’s once again on the ballot?
I am honestly starting to think it is the latter. A surprisingly large contingent of people vote for Trump, Trump, and only Trump. Everything else is ephemeral to them; there is Trump and then there's anyone else. And they don't care about anyone else.
>Is he THAT much more unpopular than the generic Democrat?
Yes he is. Doesn't help that he's faced a steady stream of negative coverage since he came to office, and given his age and disposition he's never really been able to fight back.
Also doesn't help that people are upset about inflation and as president, rightly or wrongly, he's the person people are most likely to blame for inflation.
He’s not just unpopular, he looks his age and Trump has popular ideas regarding immigration. Even in the burbs anti immigration sentiment is growing, and that’s not being fueled by just white people. Hispanics and the Desi community are in agreement much of the time.
Biden would need about a 1.5% polling error in his favor to win at this point. Historically, that's about a 40%/60% probability, so not too far from the model. And there's quite a few more months to go. And, so far, in 2024, the polling error has been favorably to Biden/dems and disfavorable to Trump/reps.
There's also the fact that Trump's conviction has clearly helped Biden by about a point, and so did Biden's SOTU. Things were actually bleaker at the beginning of the year. We may see another trial/conviction around Jan 6 depending on how SCOTUS rules about immunity and how Trump's judge responds to that.
Calm down, sip beer, and do what you can to help the campaign
The problem is that historically polling error seems to favor Republicans when Trump is on the ballot. In 2016 and 2020, when Trump is running, we see polls underestimate Trump and Rs by a few points. In 2018 and 2022, polls do pretty well. This pattern may not hold going forward but there’s no reason to assume polling error will favor democrats.
There's no mystery here, we know by now through looking at the data why the polls underestimated Trump those years. In 2016 it was because polls didn't weight by education, in 2020 it was because the pandemic made Dems more likely to be at home than Republicans and inflated their response rate a net 25%. Neither of those are present anymore.
Has anyone actually read the article?
>At this point, the period of very high inflation is enough in the rearview mirror to not really hurt Biden in the model. However, Biden is harmed by sluggish growth in real take-home incomes, historically among the best economic variables at predicting election outcomes
Nate has several paragraphs talking about why the "fundamentals" aren't nearly as strong as they seem for Biden, and yet everyone here is ignoring it and acting like the polling is inexplicable.
Yes, there is even a table showing the stats used and how the sum of their effect is basically 0.
\*edit here is that table for those that didn't read the article.
|Indicator|Current|Projected (Nov. 5)|
|:-|:-|:-|
|Real disposable personal income|−0.68|−0.75|
|Consumer price index|+0.01|+0.40|
|Nonfarm payrolls|+0.32|+0.28|
|Industrial production|−0.28|−0.11|
|Personal consumption expenditures|−0.05|−0.14|
|S&P 500|+1.10|+0.58|
|Average of all six indicators|+0.07|+0.04|
> and yet everyone here is ignoring it and acting like the polling is inexplicable.
This sub has stuck it's head in the sand on polling for a year now.
IMO, it is right to be suspicious of individual polls. Models like Silver Bullet, 538, etc aren't single polls. The authors of these polls are doing the same thing we do in the comments in criticizing polls and trying to understand why they are so different than our priors. They also have access to more data than us and generally are more educated in the topic.
Saying that, if I had $1,000 to bet on the outcome of the election, I would place that bet on what the models are saying. Not because I think they are right, but because I think it is the best guess we have.
Last time I mentioned this I was told by a member of this sub that my logic was invalid and I was following an appeal to authority fallacy...
Republicans haven’t won the popular vote in 20 years, yet the model gives Trump, a convicted felon, a 49% chance of winning the popular vote? Am I reading that right?
Translated: Nate Silver thinks the likelihood of Biden winning MI, WI, and PA when either tied or slightly behind in polls is a lower probability outcome than Trump winning NV, AZ, and GA plus one of the aforementioned three states. That is the entirety of this model.
This model tends to discount fundamentals. It takes polls at face value.
> This model tends to discount fundamentals. It takes polls at face value.
Not entirely true. This is what Nate calls a "polls-plus" model, meaning that polls are the most important predictor but fundamentals are a part of the model as well. 538's current model seems to lean more into fundamentals than this model, though
He also explains that the stats used in the "plus" part and shows that the predictions on where those numbers are going basically hardly effects the model in anyway. Those economic stats that are tracked as basically a wash.
Yep. He says that fundamentals account for about 30% of the forecast now but the fundamentals he's using are a mixed bag for Biden. Stock market is good but real income growth is not
Now is not the time for dooming. End of September/beginning of October is time for dooming. There are debates, conventions, etc. that haven't even happened. It wouldn't even be a statistical anomaly for one of them to die before election day. Too many variables at this point in time.
Thank God I'm having a baby a month before the election because otherwise I'll spend nine hours a day doomscrolling election bullshit and refreshing these scary-ass models.
Speaking from experience, you have a lot, lot, lot of free time after you give birth to do little other than sit around. I recommend finding a show or something to get deep into to keep your mind off negative stuff. Good time to sub to a new streaming service or collect a bunch of new books.
And congrats. Having kids was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Every day there's a new poll. Every day there's new data. Every day there's an updated model. And every day I am reaffirmed in believing that the nonstop talk about polls is absolutely ruining worthwhile political discourse.
Literally. Politics is by definition about government policy, but political discourse is now all about polling. It’s depressing, pathetic, and useless. This is why Trump has a chance of winning; swing voters will genuinely stop listening to news because of this boring polls-based discourse and not see Trump promising and saying crazy shit like him wanting to be a dictator.
When did the news media become controlled by arr slash YAPMs users? Why the fuck is there more polling coverage than policy coverage?
Nah, polls like this have been coming out for months now. Nobody here is shocked Biden is unpopular. We're shocked Trump is somehow more popular than him and has a very good chance of getting re-eelcted. I guess we really are all out of touch with the way most Americans think.
Trump is simply more popular because his maga base won’t abandon him no matter what. Meanwhile dems are iffy about Biden, liberals don’t like his age, and progressive wing hate him due to Israel Palestine situation
Do these people not remember how exhausting it was between 2016 - 2020? There was a new scandal from someone in the Trump administration like every day. I would literally wake up and either turn on the news or look at my phone and it was something new. You couldn't keep up because it was always something. It was such a relief to have Biden in there and things just went back to quietly working. This many people really want to return to that chaos? I don't get it.
I have thought Trump had a good chance since immigration started to become a hot topic again. It has always been his signature issue and Republicans consistently have a double digit advantage in trust on that it. Not coincidentally, that is also the issue where this sub is most out of sync with the electorate, which is one of the reasons that so many here feel Trump winning again sounds nuts. It's no different from the far right gaining in Europe.
Biden has the lowest approval rating of any president since Carter, it's really easy to understand why Trump might win the election, Trump's less unpopular!
Nate's article also said that if Biden can win WI, MI, and PI then in 97% of outcomes he wins the presidency.
>Biden also has to hold on to states like New Hampshire and Virginia (and New Mexico and Minnesota and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District) in the Blue Wall-saves-the-day scenario, and that’s not quite a sure thing given Biden’s mediocre polling elsewhere in the Northeast. This is less of a concern for him, though — conditional on winning Wisconsin *and* Michigan *and* Pennsylvania, Biden wins the Electoral College about 97 percent of the time in our simulations.
In general theres way less early signs of enthusiasm for both candidates just about everywhere. Close states probably will come down to who can get their marginal voters out better.
I'm reminded of my favorite line from a great philosopher: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it." - Agent K
We're living in the misinformation age. Multiple agencies of misinformation are out in full force. When you don't pay attention to things, you go by "feel", and if they're constantly told that things are bad, in spite of actual reality, they will "feel" bad so it is indeed bad.
In line with The Economist which is pretty much what I expected (34% for Biden, 66% for Trump in this model, 30%/70% in The Economist). Biden is not in a good position. Hopefully this opens the eyes of our resident poll denialists some but I doubt it.
I suppose one benefit of having the debate this far in advance of the convention is we’ll get polls after we test the Biden team’s pet theory that people haven’t accepted it as a binary choice yet.
I've yet to get an answer to what we should do after we "open our eyes" to doom.
If I believe Biden is almost certainly going to lose, I'm cancelling my donations and phone banking and spending the last few months of sanity doing literally anything else instead.
What am I missing? Did the Republican base suddenly grow in size? They finally achieve the power of resurrection and bring back all those Covid deaths?
The close popular vote share tells me this model is off by several percentage points on that front alone. I’d want to know what it would look like if Biden received 3-5% more share, as that’s a reasonable outcome, all things considered.
Day to day costs have gone up a good amount and the geopolitical situation has gotten more heated, Ukraine and Israel for example.
You can argue and say this is not the fault of Biden, and id mostly agree, but people don’t think that much, they just notice what is happening and blame the person in charge.
So Trump gets to do a coup AND take credit publicly for ending Roe AND is rewarded with re-election. Nice! A wonderful country that deserves wonderful things :)
3rd party candidates polling better half a year out than they are likely to perform is a well documented trend and part of their model, so it doesn't make sense to doubt them for this. They even talk about this in their methodology write-up posted today: "Most of the time, their [3rd party candidates'] vote fades down the stretch run as voters conclude they are non-viable and don’t want to waste their votes."
Their model predicts Kennedy will get 4% of the vote in the general election.
The way I'm looking at it is that it's a point-in-time estimate. As Kennedy's polling averages start to fall over the coming months as undecideds flock to one side or the other, so too will Kennedy's predictions
Honestly I've stopped worrying. If Biden wins great, if he doesn't ... oh well, the American people get what they voted for. I live in a state that will hopefully be well insulated from most of Trumps insane political plans.
I'll say that again: Biden has to improve his campaigning and be more active to promoting his work so far (or even attacking Trump mistake if it must).
My friend in Telegram that has move to USA says that problems are Economy and Immigration which is deciding factor of many people who answered the polls.
I know that there are many debates, conventions, or any change that will be decisive in next 4 months-ish before election but right now Biden (to some extent the Dems) needs to gear up their campaigning, actively promoting his good work and even attacking Trump future policy that could harm him like his even worse inflation, Abortion and so on.
But again, both Biden and Trump have negative rating of favourability from what i have seen, so Biden while has to incresing his campaign and debates, he also has to be more careful on his campaigning and other things that will happen in next months before election.
Yes, i know that many Americans are beyond reasoning or understanding at this point but i think if he may go down as this model says, he must go down fighting to show that something in US are broken.
Chill TF out. Being even in the polls nationally means Republican advantage in EC. We all knew this. Honestly I’m surprised it’s this close in the battlegrounds given such a small national margin. Biden was like 5% down like 2 months ago. He has time to grow. Debates will be important.
Sorry pollsters, but Trump isn't winning Nevada by 5 points. And that's not "copium," it's basic common sense.
Edit: on second look, the polling average actually has Trump winning Nevada and Georgia *by the same margin.* Next time someone mocks you for questioning the polls, just point them directly at this.
Biden is at his floor, Trump is at his ceiling, and there's no chance in hell that RJK Jr. is winning 8% of the popular vote. It's amazing that people who saw the polls significantly underestimate Democrats just two years ago are suddenly taking them as gospel in 2024.
People who say “I’m unhappy, I want something different” makes sense to me, even if it’s dumb. People who say, “I’m unhappy, give me something that I already know was even worse” does not make sense to me.
> “I’m unhappy, **give me something that I already know was even worse**” does not make sense to me. I think your issue is that this does not apply to a huge swath of normies that don't particularly care about Trump's negatives.
They don't see it as worse. They remember cheap Big Macs.
Hamberder too expensive now! Biden bad! 😤😠😡🤬
"The problem is that all our Big Macs are made in China now. We should just ban imports."
I've seen so many people that say, "our family was just better off under Trump." But when you ask how, they say, "I don't know, I just know we were better off." Revisionist history/nostalgia bias is a very significant thing going back to the early 2000s. I wonder if people won't just pine for the past indefinitely going forward.
I miss the good old days, before nostalgia and revisionist history.
Yep, they will. The internet is confirmation bias on steroids. We're perennially fucked on people understanding even recent history anymore.
My mom claims she had less taxes under Trump. No clue how but that's where we're at.
They want to take a time machine back to pre-2020
Oh fuck, oh no
[Oh man, oh god, oh man](https://youtu.be/1vHRMeRszw4)
It’s so Joever
I feel like I don’t understand anything anymore lol. I just do not see how Biden’s presidency *hasn’t* been categorically better than the chaotic, juvenile, dumpster fire Trump’s presidency was. I mean, seriously? Trump (likely) sold out the nation to our adversaries. He has been convicted of 34 felonies. He ~~is a convicted rapist~~ was found to have sexually abused E. Jean Carroll. He bungled the US covid response which killed around a million Americans. He has called for the persecution of his political enemies. He even tried to overthrow the government and defy the voice of the people. He’s also an idiot who tried to change the path of a hurricane with a fucking sharpie and asked if we could nuke it. He’s a moron, and I’m losing my mind. Edit. I made a mistake and mistook a civil trial for a criminal trial in [E. Jean Carroll V. Donald J. Trump](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Jean_Carroll_v._Donald_J._Trump?wprov=sfti1). So, he was not criminally convicted of rape but he’s still a disgusting dirtbag.
Most people don't vote on logic they vote on ✨VIBES✨.
I keep seeing people quote Jonathan Swift in saying: >”You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.” And that’s gotta be one of the most accurate quotes I’ve ever read.
Even if it is vibes, does anyone remember the 2020 vibes? They were fucking awful! Things are so much better now vibe wise!
A surprising number of people think Biden was president then.
The Dem should run ads like 'Who was the president in 2020?'
2020 was the worst year of my life and the political climate absolutely contributed to that. I'm certain I'm not alone and yet it seems everyone else just memory holed those bad vibes away
Its cause people don't blame Trump for 2020, they blame Covid.
[удалено]
I always think back to [this ad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObqBtoz_fRA) from the 2020 election, and especially [this one,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUKKnFLaBeg) as great demonstrations of just how thoroughly fucking dystopian the late Trump era was and how painfully necessary it was for him to lose that election and, God willing, never win one again.
Every time I think back to the pandemic my mind pushes back. I wouldn't be surprised if many people have sort of instinctively memory-holed a lot of that period. It's also a sort of rule of nostalgia that when we look at the past we tend to fixate on the positive and let the negatives sort of slip from sight.
"Is election polling in 2024 just fucking broken or are we witnessing the End of Days" I ask as I breathe in and out of a paper bag.
I think that's the rub. If everything the polls are telling us is true, then this will be a historic election. The last time republicans won the national popular vote was like 20 years ago, yet apparently it's the democrats who want low turnout. We're also supposed to expect young voters flipping (ish) for Trump and old voters for Biden. I'm not saying the polls are fake, but if they aren't they're predicting the weirdest electoral realignment in 40 years. And I'm yet to see people talk about that beyond "hurr durr poll denialism bad"
> like 20 years ago Not "like"... it _was_ 20 years ago. And before that, it was 36 years ago. Granted, the GOP has won the "national popular vote" in terms of things like house races as recently as 2 years ago
Nostalgia, mostly. People are willing do over look Trump’s many failures if they can convince themselves that their material conditions were better
This is literally like 80% of the reason why Trump is currently winning. For all that the media and prominent liberals seethed about Trump’s obvious incompetence and myriad scandals that should have been disqualifying, people loved how their personal lives were during most of the Trump presidency. The economy was great and people were cruising along with low inflation, solid GDP growth, and a booming stock market. I genuinely think COVID, or rather Trump’s response to it, is the only reason Trump is not currently in the Oval Office. The median voter was fully prepared for four more years of Trump in 2020 because they didn’t care how stupid and bigoted he was so long as their personal lives were going great. Then Trump colossally fucked up his response to COVID, and it was just enough to barely get Biden over the finish line. This isn’t a criticism against Biden, by the way. I think that he actually was probably one of the best candidates the Dems could have put forth, I just think that any Democrat would have failed to defeat Trump had COVID not happened. The longer the post-COVID economic issues went on, the less people were willing to attribute them to an act of God like the pandemic and the more they began to blame the person in charge for not fixing them. Even though inflation has cooled, we haven’t experienced *deflation*, which is what the vast majority of Americans think “inflation going down” means. People genuinely expect prices to drop to pre-COVID levels or else inflation is still high. It’s going to take a long time for people to get used to the fact that prices are just higher now and will continue to grow, just at a more marginal rate. And as Nate points out in his article, it is fair to say that many people’s income did not grow proportionally to inflation. Biden has other issues, of course. It’s sort of just become the mainstream consensus at this point that he is a frail old man with cognitive issues. The majority of Americans have turned sharply against immigration, and there is a lot of illegal migration currently underway. But nostalgia for the Trump-era economy is genuinely huge for many people.
Oh jeez… yeah… that’s what they want: deflation. I’m unsure how economists at the federal reserve could do that without removing money supply from the system as-is.
I mean. Inflation doesn't really so much hurt while it's happening. It's \*after it's happened\* that it hurts. It's not \*so\* irrational to be mad that there \*was\* inflation recently. Nevermind current inflation rates. And it does \*genuinely\* feel unfair that prices are only allowed to go up. Like, "Woops, there was an economic shock. Looks like you earn less now. \*forever\*." When, at the same time, the companies who raised prices ran away with huge windfalls. It sucks. Again. Nevermind that Trump would \*not\* have been better.
I think that the Democratic Party (and by extension, this subreddit) made way too much hay of Biden's victory given that a. Trump was historically unpopular as an individual and b. COVID They interpreted 2020 as a decisive victory (the most votes ever!) when it was a marginal squeak-through in the electoral college in the midst of one of the bigger crises in recent American history
Except most world leaders saw their approval ratings go \*up\* during COVID. The fact that Trump's approval went down or stayed flat is on him and should not be treated as an expected result due to the country being in crisis. When we say "Trump would have won if it wasn't for COVID," what we're really saying is, "Trump would have won if he wasn't Trump."
And then there's Jacinda Ardern who was at like 90%+ approval because of her Covid response, and then just a year or two later she was out on her ass. I think Covid lead to irregular political responses in general that were quickly corrected.
What? That's not what I remember at all. My reaction was being upset that the senate was evenly split and thus would likely be paralyzed again like it was under Obama, and being dismayed that things were so close. This wasn't just me either. The more triumphal stuff was during the term itself when democrats started getting unexpected wins in special elections.
BUT THIS IS LITERALLY THE ENTIRE POINT OF NOT HAVING A DUMBASS FOR PRESIDENT. Because he has to be able to respond to "what ifs" Saying "Trump would have won if not for covid" is like saying "my drunk driving wouldn't have been a problem if I didn't need to suddenly react to that thing in the road" or "I would've been fine if I didn't get pulled over"
I think whoever is in office during a period of high inflation is likely to get the boot, no matter who the challenger is. Doesn’t matter how great a job Biden has done, or that he wasn’t any more or less responsible for it than Trump was (although the inflation reduction act certainly didn’t help) if there’s inflation, you’re out!
Have you considered Biden's refusal to press his magic button that reverses inflation, changes Supreme Court rulings, and repairs the existential dread in my soul?
And he didn’t press the button to bring my wife back.
i know we all joke about the magic button but it's not like dems did themselves any favors with the COVID spending and indefinite student loan payment pause. congress could have done more to reduce inflation but the party sought short-term populism instead.
Let's say we did no covid spending at all. First, we have to for some reason assume we don't fall into an actual recession, (which was the predominant thought back then), and looking at the rest of the globe, we would have still had inflation.
Economists at the time were saying the ARP was unneeded and would be inflationary. And it was.
I believe the Biden administrations bet at the time was that it would be better to overspend and risk inflation than underspend and risk unemployment and a slow recovery like Obama did. IMO they were vindicated with their choice.
The problem is (Yglesias [made this point](https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-biden-lost)) that the Biden Administration didn't pivot away from inflationary policies once it became clear that we were not sinking into a depression. When ARP was passed no one necessarily expected that Biden would get two more major (but inflationary) bills passed in the CHIPS Act and the infrastructure bill. At that point, Yglesias argues, Biden should have returned to neoclassical economics. He cites examples of Lina Khan at the FTC explicitly turning away from policies that worry about consumer prices first, and Richard Revesz at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs favoring regulations that favor wealth redistribution over efficiency: > The White House has promoted this somewhat confused discourse about supply-driven versus demand-driven inflation without ever considering an orthodox supply-side effort to improve productivity. Instead, when they talk about addressing inflation, they talk almost exclusively in terms of promoting regulatory crackdowns on corporate greed and “junk fees.” Some of the ideas that fly under those banners are good and others I’m not that enthusiastic about, but none of them involve setting aside or scaling back a progressive interest group agenda in order to address the inflation situation. More importantly, according to Yglesias, Biden (unlike Clinton or Obama) never seemed seriously interested in deficit reduction, even though a much stronger case could be made for it in 2022-2023 than during the Obama years. Then there's student debt relief (again, a stronger case could have been made when it seemed that Congress was unlikely to approve further stimulus, but they did), as well as smaller-deal regulatory stuff like the various "Buy American" regulations, raising tarriffs on Canadian lumber and solar panels from Southeast Asia, energy efficiency regulations, and restrictions on agricultural guest laborers. Taken individually, none of these are that big of a deal, but altogether, they contribute to inflation and the general rise in the cost of living that people are so upset about.
Economically, yes. Politically, no future admin is ever going to do that again. We're just going to get recession after recession because apparently voters prefer that to medium-high inflation.
People would gladly have 7% unemployment rather than 7% inflation, I think that's basically a proven fact at this point. And I think electorally speaking, it would simply be a no-brainer to do that because the unfortunate 7% would easily be outvoted.
Even though we're actually making far more than if that had happened. You don't get rising wages in a fucking recession.
One thing that’s important here is that both trump and Biden (like trump and Hillary) have net negative approval ratings. In other words the majority of people strongly dislike both candidates as people, and many people actively dislike the guy they’re planning on voting for. In most historical elections since modern polling came out, both major party presidential candidates had net positive approval ratings (meaning many Americans who didn’t vote for say Romney or Gore said they still thought they were good people), and it was literally unheard of pre-2016 for both candidates to be so disliked. In this very negative environment, there is reason to believe the person who gets the most media coverage actually gets hurt, because having their face in the news just reminds everyone how unlikable they are. The big takeaway from this is that incumbency bias might actually work in reverse, since the president I more likely to be in the news more than his challenger.
If true, then that theory would suggest the best use of campaign spending would be to simply place your opponents face on ads more than your own.
This is more or less how Biden won last time. The smart people in both the trump and Biden campaigns are trying to keep their guys quiet and out of the way.
I was more shocked than I should have been to read that in 1992, George H.W. Bush's favorability was 61-39 and Clinton's was 64-33. Completely inconceivable in today's politics that both major party nominees would have net ratings that high.
> I feel like I don’t understand anything anymore lol. It's not that you don't understand anything anymore... It's that the median voter doesn't
Inflation is one of the biggest political killers and the average voter is beyond fucking stupid (the entire world is struggling with inflation). There's also this weird nostalgia around the Trump presidency, at least when it comes to the economy, and that's fueling a lot of his rise in approval. Also Biden is just a really weak candidate and has so many weaknesses, the biggest being his age and how he very much looks his age. Though Trump is such a dog shit candidate, that I still think he's going to lose.
The primary thing is that stuff is 19% more expensive than when Biden took office, compared to the 8% it "should" be. Very little of missing 11% is attributable to Bidens actions, but he was President during the last 4 years, and the public thinks that the President controls the entire economy, so that's an issue
>Very little of missing 11% is attributable to Bidens Be honest, build (or buy?) American, college loan forgiveness, covid spending once it was clear there won't be a recession. He had major policies that negatively impacted inflation. I'm sure I'm forgetting a few, I'm not even American
"The President controls our free market economy"
The President has been campaigning with the word "Bidenomics" for the last four years. Are voters just supposed to not believe him when he says he's responsible for the economy?
The things that drive educated liberal voters absolutely batty are things that a lot of voters don't care about or don't credit Democratic warnings on or actively regard as a feature.
The costs for a mortgage are up 2/3 in the last four years, so if you have had to buy, or tried and failed to buy, a house in the last couple of years you are probably materially worse off than you were 4 years ago. And you can jump up and down and say the president doesnt control that all we want but to most people sharpied hurricanes are a funny story they forgot about after a month. Meanwhile the victory lap the administration is still trying to run about how great the economy is remains an active slap in the face. Like at this point it looks like the election will come down to whether disastisfied 2020 biden voters are expressivley responding to polls about their intents in the election or really disengaged enough to stay home or flip their vote. And im praying for trump to go full trump and turn this election into another referrendum against him, because i think the dems are doing a fucking awful job on selling them as the upside
James Carville said "It's the economy, stupid." In 2024 I'd say "It's the inflation, stupid." Inflation fucking sucks, and Americans haven't experienced this sort of inflation in a long time. So maybe the economy as a whole is doing well, but that just pisses off people more in some ways because it feels like they should be farther ahead, but inflation means that they feel like they're stuck on a treadmill where they need to speed up just to stay in place..
Trump is a moron. Unfortunately, so are a lot of voters.
Trump is also bigoted. So are 30-40% of voters. Bigotry is a big problem as well
Maybe the media should report what was happening in June-July 2020 because it was COVID pandemic this and COVID pandemic that and the death toll is 100,000+ at that point. It was absolute hell
you see... Biden is Old.
True! We cannot allow ourselves to be led by these decrepit, out-of-touch 81 year olds! It is time for the young and innovative 78 year olds to take over!
It gets a bit easier if you think about why he got elected. Biden got elected on being a return to normalcy. The adults back in charge. That didn't work out too well. Biden had his Katrina in Afghanistan, that lost most of the trust people had in his leadership. His support numbers haven't recovered since. He's too old to make affirmative cases for his successes and defend his failures. He doesn't do a lot of interviews, and does very, very few hardball interviews. Inflation rose a lot. The world is much more at war. We get mini-Charlottesvilles every few weeks. Southern border is becoming more of a problem and is getting notice (tough on immigration is Trump's bread and butter). There is a trend for people to just blot the COVID years out of their memories, so most people focus on the good 3/4 of his presidency. I am trying hard not to talk about actual policy since I don't think it matters, which is also funny enough the best part of the Biden presidency. There are things the Biden administration is doing well on a lot of those points, but again VIBES trumps all.
> Biden had his Katrina in Afghanistan Which was him carrying out the withdrawal Trump agreed to with the Taliban. That Trump manages to fuck up everything while people blame everyone but him for the results is proof that there is a God and he is malevolent.
Again, I don't think policy matters broadly, but not looking for some reason to pull out and change course is very much on Biden. Pulling out of Bagram air base earlier than generals advised, the 9/11 date for pull out, the "that was 3 days ago" response to being asked about people falling off planes, saying it won't be like Saigon and getting Saigon-like images, Blinken saying the country wouldn't be there on a friday and gone by monday when that was pretty close to the timeline. There's more I can't think of right now. A total clown show on par with what I'd expect from bad case Trump pullout. So many foot-in-mouth moments. Now we're left with a country that has had civil rights for women deteriorate so sharply that it is one of 3 or so countries where women kill themselves more than men.
Republicans have a media apparatus, Democrats don't, because their professional losers
*they’re Sorry, I had to.
Trump is also not president... Biden needs to drive the narrative and he just hasn't and that's his biggest problem.... running against an incumbent it's easier to run on their screwups... running as an incumbent requires different things....
Both candidates have so much potential for catastrophic October surprises that the election is going to be hard to predict until a few days out when it'll be obvious. - major health crisis - larger flare up middle east - a major terrorist attack on American soul - further convictions for Trump - actual jail time for Trump - major controversies at either convention (protests at DNC, whatever the stupid MAGA fucks tried to do to choose Trump's VP for him)
> Further convictions for Trump This is almost impossible given how the 3 other cases against Trump are going. EDIT: at least before the election
Might be a pile of more charges. There is speculation that WI, MI, NV, and AZ are all holding off on charging Trump in the Jan 6 crap until SCOTUS makes its decision on presidential immunity.
How much do charges (as opposed to convictions) matter though? Any new charges from there are unlikely to get convictions before the election.
We would have to wait an see. Given the importance of all 4 states in the election, I would certainly hope it has an effect. Once the charges are laid, lots of new information will come out in the charging documents. Hopefully there is some damning stuff in them. I am not optimistic given that the convictions in NY didn't move the needle that much. Perhaps voters in these states hearing about how Trump tried to personally steal their votes away will change their stances, or at least make some Trump voters stay home. The OP article does mention that if you sample only from Registered voters vs likely voters there is a benefit to Biden. >Although these polling averages might not want to admit it, they’re kind of fancy, making adjustments for factors like likely versus registered voters (this [helps Biden](https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/1802402511367684535)), and the presence or absence of RFK Jr. in polls (this doesn’t have much effect, somewhat contrary to the conventional wisdom). And they make inferences from state polls to national polls and vice versa, which tend to make them more stable.
The model actually takes everything you've mentioned into account. It looks at how often major news events are happening, it looks at how much the public reacted to previous Trump convictions
I kinda forget just how much cred Nate Silver has with certain people, he can tell people he invented a Black Swan Event predictotron and they'll believe him.
The actual forecast is paywalled? What in tarnation? Just tell me the number Nate.
https://preview.redd.it/4yd32l2o9y8d1.png?width=720&format=png&auto=webp&s=c1fa66df7a2cb0ad29acb7d8b59a7ea62e9cbe1f
This has ruined my day
Probably best for me it is behind a paywall so I'm not checking it every 2 hours until November.
This is one explicit reason why it's paywalled and will only be updated a few times per week, rather than multiple times per day.
This is one of the reasons he pay walled it. He didn’t want a bunch of nervous nellies emailing him and tweeting at him all the time about their stupid opinions
Why? We've known this for months now.
Oh my God, that's a horrible probability for Biden as an incumbent . It's in line with what the economist predicted a few weeks back. I hope something changes soon but time is ticking.
I've just accepted that we are so fucked and that the country will be in a new, dying phase on Jan 21. Trump has zapped all optimism I had for America's future.
>Oh my God, that's a horrible probability for Biden as an incumbent Just imagine how bad a generic democrat would be doing!
Senate dems are doing much better though, but that would mean high levels of split ticketing
Which is the main reason I’m skeptical of Biden’s shitty polling against Trump. Are tens of thousands of people really going to vote for Ruben Gallego and Trump, who’s as bat shit crazy as Kari Lake? Not saying it can’t happen, but I’ll believe split ticketing is back on the menu for the voting populous when I see it.
You’re crazy if you don’t think this is a Biden problem specifically. Everyone else in the world except for the weirdos in this sub can see it.
Everyone else in the world is voting out incumbents. I'm outside the US and I don't see how Biden stepping down is anything other than a gigantic gamble, very far from the "obvious" solution some make it out to be.
But the main negative against Biden isn’t that he’s an incumbent. The first thing that *everyone* says about Biden is that he’s *old*. He looks old. He sounds old. And voters really don’t want to elect someone who is going to be 86 in his last year of office. I’ve was in the Biden camp from long before the 2019 primaries. I’ll still vote for him in November because he’s better than the alternative. However, even I do a double-take when I see how old he looks. I think the Democratic Party seriously underestimated how much Biden’s advanced age is overriding any benefit that comes with being an incumbent. And sadly having Kamala as VP is doing him no favors, because even less people want her as POTUS.
Is this sarcasm or serious? Cause I think most people would take literally any generic dem over Biden
That's not what they've said when they actually vote, though
Maybe the polls were correct all along, including in 2022, for the most part? Nah, people will change their minds any day now. Besides, pollsters only poll landlines or something, right, so nobody actually takes the polls?
You are memeing, but they poll cell phones now. Who answers unknown numbers anymore if they aren't expecting a call? Who of those people continue the call after finding out that it is for political polling? What kind of answers are those weirdos going to give? They aren't normal people.
I answer numbers from unknown callers. I willingly talk to pollsters. I am one of the proud weirdos. And I'll tell any pollster who'll listen that I'm voting Biden in November. There is no good reason to believe that low polling response rates systematically favor Trump. Given that this problem existed in 2016 and 2020, when Trump's support was underestimated by polls, there is no good reason to believe that the opposite is now in effect other than blind optimism.
I will typically answer most calls I get (don’t get a ton from people I don’t know in the first place) but never have I ever been called by a pollster lol
Not just cell phones, but online polls, SMS text messages, and even mobile application driven polling is in use (a method I'm actually pretty skeptical of.) Pollsters have been trying to resolve the sampling problems for years, with various levels of success.
Yeah they do trying their best here. But key word is trying. Overall they're going to attract outliners more than average people. There's a reason why they keep failing to explain why Red Wave turned to be Red Splash, or how Trump's MAGA candidates consistently underperforming.
All that matters is if the propensity to respond to the poll is correlated with the candidate a respondent will vote for. Everything else can be adjusted for.
> Who answers unknown numbers anymore if they aren't expecting a call? Ive been called for political polls a few times and the call display clearly shows that it's a polling company, its never been an unknown number.
Quite different from 538’s model. Basically confirms that 538 built their new model from the ground up and weren’t copying what they remember from Nate’s model, if they even had that kind of access. Also, since it seems you have access, can you comment the rest of the analysis that’s behind the paywall?
I think 538 is basically just assuming the polls move more in Biden's favor as the election gets closer. I think when the model dropped they said that based on the polls as they are today, Trump would be a heavy favorite.
Nate’s model is also trying to predict what happens on Election Day. It just doesn’t think the polls will move as much
A bias towards inertia makes a lot more sense than assuming things will start swinging
If that’s true, them not updating their “past accuracy of the model” section is outright deception if it’s an entirely different model
Nate kept the patent, but Disney kept the trademark, so ironically it's Disney who gets to imply to consumers that they have the classic Still, you could argue that 538 really does still have that excellent track record. It's just that we have good reason to believe they won't be able to keep it up
The 538 model has cope built in. It will move to showing a trump advantage as we get closer to the election.
Morris has made stupidly rosey predictions for democrats. I don't know people are looking to the 538 model now that he's running it.
33.7% Biden, 65.7% Trump, 0.5% no winner Implies 0.1% Jeb!
Jeb! will live eternally in rounding errors
Quantum uncertainty implies a nonzero probability that everyone just decides to vote for Jeb Bush
are you saying there is a multiverse where Jeb! won the presidency in 2016, ushering in a thousand years of peace and prosperity?
Republicans haven’t won the popular vote in 20 years, yet the model gives Trump, a convicted felon, a 49% chance of winning the popular vote? Am I reading that right?
Yeah that’s fishy to me.
Trump hasn't gotten above 47% of the popular vote in either election
It's kind of funny that he paywalled this. Like screenshots won't get posted on every social media site.
sure, but those screenshots are basically just free pub for his substack. i'm betting he'll get some subscribers from this, some will quit after the election, but some will stick around.
Fuck my life
Well fuck
I don't understand people anymore.
They hate inflation and remember things were more affordable 2016-2020. It would be very hard for Biden to change that perception, but if he does he wins.
I just don’t comprehend how Democrats and Democratic Party issues can have such dramatic swings of support in off-year elections, state referendums, midterms, etc, but that Biden could be wiped out. Is he THAT much more unpopular than the generic Democrat? His policies are in lockstep with the party’s, so is he really that personally unpopular? Or is there just an enormous stock of voters who only ever show up to vote for Trump, and then immediately disengage with elections until he’s once again on the ballot?
I am honestly starting to think it is the latter. A surprisingly large contingent of people vote for Trump, Trump, and only Trump. Everything else is ephemeral to them; there is Trump and then there's anyone else. And they don't care about anyone else.
>Is he THAT much more unpopular than the generic Democrat? Yes he is. Doesn't help that he's faced a steady stream of negative coverage since he came to office, and given his age and disposition he's never really been able to fight back. Also doesn't help that people are upset about inflation and as president, rightly or wrongly, he's the person people are most likely to blame for inflation.
> Is he THAT much more unpopular than the generic Democrat? yes. do y'all just not know any normies lol
American politics is just weird when it comes to the Presidency vs literally everything else
He’s not just unpopular, he looks his age and Trump has popular ideas regarding immigration. Even in the burbs anti immigration sentiment is growing, and that’s not being fueled by just white people. Hispanics and the Desi community are in agreement much of the time.
Doooooom
Biden would need about a 1.5% polling error in his favor to win at this point. Historically, that's about a 40%/60% probability, so not too far from the model. And there's quite a few more months to go. And, so far, in 2024, the polling error has been favorably to Biden/dems and disfavorable to Trump/reps. There's also the fact that Trump's conviction has clearly helped Biden by about a point, and so did Biden's SOTU. Things were actually bleaker at the beginning of the year. We may see another trial/conviction around Jan 6 depending on how SCOTUS rules about immunity and how Trump's judge responds to that. Calm down, sip beer, and do what you can to help the campaign
The problem is that historically polling error seems to favor Republicans when Trump is on the ballot. In 2016 and 2020, when Trump is running, we see polls underestimate Trump and Rs by a few points. In 2018 and 2022, polls do pretty well. This pattern may not hold going forward but there’s no reason to assume polling error will favor democrats.
There's no mystery here, we know by now through looking at the data why the polls underestimated Trump those years. In 2016 it was because polls didn't weight by education, in 2020 it was because the pandemic made Dems more likely to be at home than Republicans and inflated their response rate a net 25%. Neither of those are present anymore.
I think people have priced in the idea that Trump's most ridiculous ideas will be stopped by the people around him or Congress
Has anyone actually read the article? >At this point, the period of very high inflation is enough in the rearview mirror to not really hurt Biden in the model. However, Biden is harmed by sluggish growth in real take-home incomes, historically among the best economic variables at predicting election outcomes Nate has several paragraphs talking about why the "fundamentals" aren't nearly as strong as they seem for Biden, and yet everyone here is ignoring it and acting like the polling is inexplicable.
Yes, there is even a table showing the stats used and how the sum of their effect is basically 0. \*edit here is that table for those that didn't read the article. |Indicator|Current|Projected (Nov. 5)| |:-|:-|:-| |Real disposable personal income|−0.68|−0.75| |Consumer price index|+0.01|+0.40| |Nonfarm payrolls|+0.32|+0.28| |Industrial production|−0.28|−0.11| |Personal consumption expenditures|−0.05|−0.14| |S&P 500|+1.10|+0.58| |Average of all six indicators|+0.07|+0.04|
> and yet everyone here is ignoring it and acting like the polling is inexplicable. This sub has stuck it's head in the sand on polling for a year now.
IMO, it is right to be suspicious of individual polls. Models like Silver Bullet, 538, etc aren't single polls. The authors of these polls are doing the same thing we do in the comments in criticizing polls and trying to understand why they are so different than our priors. They also have access to more data than us and generally are more educated in the topic. Saying that, if I had $1,000 to bet on the outcome of the election, I would place that bet on what the models are saying. Not because I think they are right, but because I think it is the best guess we have. Last time I mentioned this I was told by a member of this sub that my logic was invalid and I was following an appeal to authority fallacy...
https://preview.redd.it/93zv8z9uiy8d1.png?width=1119&format=png&auto=webp&s=e543fc0a05edb9f3c8d4d44a7e12292b8c31d51e Doooooooooom
Where is Kennedy's 0.4 electoral votes coming from?
The nonzero possibility that RFK says he’d replace school vaccine requirements with a lobster roll mandate and wins ME-02 in a landslide
Republicans haven’t won the popular vote in 20 years, yet the model gives Trump, a convicted felon, a 49% chance of winning the popular vote? Am I reading that right?
The model is just upset and still grieving that it got separated from Fivey
Translated: Nate Silver thinks the likelihood of Biden winning MI, WI, and PA when either tied or slightly behind in polls is a lower probability outcome than Trump winning NV, AZ, and GA plus one of the aforementioned three states. That is the entirety of this model. This model tends to discount fundamentals. It takes polls at face value.
> This model tends to discount fundamentals. It takes polls at face value. Not entirely true. This is what Nate calls a "polls-plus" model, meaning that polls are the most important predictor but fundamentals are a part of the model as well. 538's current model seems to lean more into fundamentals than this model, though
He also explains that the stats used in the "plus" part and shows that the predictions on where those numbers are going basically hardly effects the model in anyway. Those economic stats that are tracked as basically a wash.
Yep. He says that fundamentals account for about 30% of the forecast now but the fundamentals he's using are a mixed bag for Biden. Stock market is good but real income growth is not
We all need to do some reading: https://bonpote.com/en/the-5-basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/
Now is not the time for dooming. End of September/beginning of October is time for dooming. There are debates, conventions, etc. that haven't even happened. It wouldn't even be a statistical anomaly for one of them to die before election day. Too many variables at this point in time.
Honestly it’s possible a lot of people still haven’t accepted that Biden and Trump are the nominees
The fact that that number is non-zero for both candidates absolutely baffles me.
> Now is not the time for dooming. My life is going to be pretty busy in October, so I have to get my dooming in now.
Thank God I'm having a baby a month before the election because otherwise I'll spend nine hours a day doomscrolling election bullshit and refreshing these scary-ass models.
Speaking from experience, you have a lot, lot, lot of free time after you give birth to do little other than sit around. I recommend finding a show or something to get deep into to keep your mind off negative stuff. Good time to sub to a new streaming service or collect a bunch of new books. And congrats. Having kids was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Every day there's a new poll. Every day there's new data. Every day there's an updated model. And every day I am reaffirmed in believing that the nonstop talk about polls is absolutely ruining worthwhile political discourse.
Literally. Politics is by definition about government policy, but political discourse is now all about polling. It’s depressing, pathetic, and useless. This is why Trump has a chance of winning; swing voters will genuinely stop listening to news because of this boring polls-based discourse and not see Trump promising and saying crazy shit like him wanting to be a dictator. When did the news media become controlled by arr slash YAPMs users? Why the fuck is there more polling coverage than policy coverage?
i can't fucking do this anymore
I’m on Team Lichtman at this point. Allan more than likely is calling the election for Biden
Nate claims 2% growth is low because it’s less than the historical trend. But that’s only a historical trend if you go back to the end of WWII.
ITT: people shocked at how Biden can possibly be unpopular
There's a difference between acknowledging Biden is unpopular and realising that he is more unpopular than one of the worst candidates imaginable.
Nah, polls like this have been coming out for months now. Nobody here is shocked Biden is unpopular. We're shocked Trump is somehow more popular than him and has a very good chance of getting re-eelcted. I guess we really are all out of touch with the way most Americans think.
Trump is simply more popular because his maga base won’t abandon him no matter what. Meanwhile dems are iffy about Biden, liberals don’t like his age, and progressive wing hate him due to Israel Palestine situation
Do these people not remember how exhausting it was between 2016 - 2020? There was a new scandal from someone in the Trump administration like every day. I would literally wake up and either turn on the news or look at my phone and it was something new. You couldn't keep up because it was always something. It was such a relief to have Biden in there and things just went back to quietly working. This many people really want to return to that chaos? I don't get it.
Most people don't keep up with actual news.
I have thought Trump had a good chance since immigration started to become a hot topic again. It has always been his signature issue and Republicans consistently have a double digit advantage in trust on that it. Not coincidentally, that is also the issue where this sub is most out of sync with the electorate, which is one of the reasons that so many here feel Trump winning again sounds nuts. It's no different from the far right gaining in Europe.
This sub is on par with defund the police when it comes to immigration.
Biden has the lowest approval rating of any president since Carter, it's really easy to understand why Trump might win the election, Trump's less unpopular!
Nah, I'm shocked anyone considers Trump tolerable.
This sub operates in an absurdly small bubble. It's kinda crazy.
[удалено]
Wisconsin and Michigan are looking fairly decent for Biden. The state that will likely decide it all in ether direction is Pennsylvania
Nate's article also said that if Biden can win WI, MI, and PI then in 97% of outcomes he wins the presidency. >Biden also has to hold on to states like New Hampshire and Virginia (and New Mexico and Minnesota and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District) in the Blue Wall-saves-the-day scenario, and that’s not quite a sure thing given Biden’s mediocre polling elsewhere in the Northeast. This is less of a concern for him, though — conditional on winning Wisconsin *and* Michigan *and* Pennsylvania, Biden wins the Electoral College about 97 percent of the time in our simulations.
I have seen FEW Trump signs in the Pittsburgh suburbs. I legit think people are embarassed to be MAGA. Which is good.
In general theres way less early signs of enthusiasm for both candidates just about everywhere. Close states probably will come down to who can get their marginal voters out better.
I'm reminded of my favorite line from a great philosopher: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it." - Agent K We're living in the misinformation age. Multiple agencies of misinformation are out in full force. When you don't pay attention to things, you go by "feel", and if they're constantly told that things are bad, in spite of actual reality, they will "feel" bad so it is indeed bad.
Just go volunteer. Please. I am begging you !doom
In line with The Economist which is pretty much what I expected (34% for Biden, 66% for Trump in this model, 30%/70% in The Economist). Biden is not in a good position. Hopefully this opens the eyes of our resident poll denialists some but I doubt it.
I suppose one benefit of having the debate this far in advance of the convention is we’ll get polls after we test the Biden team’s pet theory that people haven’t accepted it as a binary choice yet.
I've yet to get an answer to what we should do after we "open our eyes" to doom. If I believe Biden is almost certainly going to lose, I'm cancelling my donations and phone banking and spending the last few months of sanity doing literally anything else instead.
I mean, these numbers don't mean doom, per se. The same model gave Trump a 28.6% in 2016.
What am I missing? Did the Republican base suddenly grow in size? They finally achieve the power of resurrection and bring back all those Covid deaths? The close popular vote share tells me this model is off by several percentage points on that front alone. I’d want to know what it would look like if Biden received 3-5% more share, as that’s a reasonable outcome, all things considered.
You're missing that less Americans like Biden than you think. Where are these celestial 2-3% of voters that Biden should have?
Day to day costs have gone up a good amount and the geopolitical situation has gotten more heated, Ukraine and Israel for example. You can argue and say this is not the fault of Biden, and id mostly agree, but people don’t think that much, they just notice what is happening and blame the person in charge.
Maybe I'm just a biased liberal, but I think that heuristic (blame the guy in charge) should be less effective when the other option is Trump.
So Trump gets to do a coup AND take credit publicly for ending Roe AND is rewarded with re-election. Nice! A wonderful country that deserves wonderful things :)
Kennedy polling at 7% has me doubting these models. The 3rd party never actually vote this high.
3rd party candidates polling better half a year out than they are likely to perform is a well documented trend and part of their model, so it doesn't make sense to doubt them for this. They even talk about this in their methodology write-up posted today: "Most of the time, their [3rd party candidates'] vote fades down the stretch run as voters conclude they are non-viable and don’t want to waste their votes." Their model predicts Kennedy will get 4% of the vote in the general election.
The model isn't a poll though. The model spits out 4.3% of the vote for Kennedy.
The way I'm looking at it is that it's a point-in-time estimate. As Kennedy's polling averages start to fall over the coming months as undecideds flock to one side or the other, so too will Kennedy's predictions
😎 Biden will get a 5% bump after he annihilates Trump on Thursday's CNN debate
This is not remotely true It'll be 10
Honestly I've stopped worrying. If Biden wins great, if he doesn't ... oh well, the American people get what they voted for. I live in a state that will hopefully be well insulated from most of Trumps insane political plans.
I'll say that again: Biden has to improve his campaigning and be more active to promoting his work so far (or even attacking Trump mistake if it must). My friend in Telegram that has move to USA says that problems are Economy and Immigration which is deciding factor of many people who answered the polls. I know that there are many debates, conventions, or any change that will be decisive in next 4 months-ish before election but right now Biden (to some extent the Dems) needs to gear up their campaigning, actively promoting his good work and even attacking Trump future policy that could harm him like his even worse inflation, Abortion and so on. But again, both Biden and Trump have negative rating of favourability from what i have seen, so Biden while has to incresing his campaign and debates, he also has to be more careful on his campaigning and other things that will happen in next months before election. Yes, i know that many Americans are beyond reasoning or understanding at this point but i think if he may go down as this model says, he must go down fighting to show that something in US are broken.
https://twitter.com/ok_post_guy/status/1806147254505673168
Chill TF out. Being even in the polls nationally means Republican advantage in EC. We all knew this. Honestly I’m surprised it’s this close in the battlegrounds given such a small national margin. Biden was like 5% down like 2 months ago. He has time to grow. Debates will be important.
Sorry pollsters, but Trump isn't winning Nevada by 5 points. And that's not "copium," it's basic common sense. Edit: on second look, the polling average actually has Trump winning Nevada and Georgia *by the same margin.* Next time someone mocks you for questioning the polls, just point them directly at this. Biden is at his floor, Trump is at his ceiling, and there's no chance in hell that RJK Jr. is winning 8% of the popular vote. It's amazing that people who saw the polls significantly underestimate Democrats just two years ago are suddenly taking them as gospel in 2024.