I Don't Know If Joe Can Do It

[ewdotson]

I think a common mistake by people, including many liberals, who believe the polls were way off in 2016, is that people think polls predict winners and losers. They do not. They provide data from which others make predictions.

Consider a hypothetical poll which says D+1 where the outcome turns out to be R+1. The "poll" got the winner and loser wrong, right? Shit poll! No, the polling error was a margin of 2, which is OK. In another hypothetical, the poll says D+9 and the result is D+2. Everyone thinks this poll was great because it accurately "predicted" the winner. But in reality, the error margin there is 7, and polling was much worse than in the first case.

It's why no one seems to realize that polling in 2012 was actually a little more off than polling in 2016, because they think the 2012 polls accurately "predicted" the winner, but in reality, they showed Obama with a much smaller lead than he actually had.

I think lots of people just do not get this.

Also, people seem to really struggle with the idea of probabilistic prediction models and that it would actually be a *flaw* in the model if the favored candidate always won.

 

[MrSquished]

Then there's teh mail in ballot factor of votes being discounted:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/tens-of-thousands-of-mail-ballots-have-been-tossed-out-in-this-years-primaries-what-will-happen-in-november/2020/07/16/fa5d7e96-c527-11ea-b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR3mP3Vn5167ACmpXcXXTooAc6M1C4x0BQTUvXxE6Ue0gpQWqL8msmfLi68

 

[K1052]

Damn who knew, pollsters beat up people for giving the wrong answer to poll questions.

I mean it's over the phone so...like they can't beat you up. Some Trump voters might be shy from publicly proclaiming their allegiance but nobody has been able to demonstrate they are lying anonymously to pollsters..

 

[fskimospy]

They are prediction models, when have they ever been totally accurate? We cannot and should not expect predictive models to be totally accurate. Last I checked, human behavior has some variability in it.

We don't expect them to be totally accurate, which is why they all make probabilistic forecasts. The thing is several of those models (but not 538!) gave Clinton a greater than 99% chance of winning. Sure it's possible that we hit that 1%, but it's very unlikely. More likely the answer is that those models were excessively confident because they didn't take into account that polling errors were correlated. If polling errors weren't correlated then the 99% prediction would have likely been right.

 

[fskimospy]

No, 4% Is an 8% swing. It’s the States that matter. If the individual State leads are less than 8%, then this could happen, but given the mathematical probability that this would happen again is slim. If of the 9, now we call it 9, swing States, Biden leads in all but one. In 7 he las close to a 10 point margin. Unless these get closer to 5 points, it will be ugly for the red team. We saw in 2016 that the overall polling was right, 4% lead for Clinton, she won the popular vote by 2.1%. The electoral college spells a different path. Individual States matter. We would need to have a repeat of three to five States polling to be off by the error rate to get a tRump win again. Not sure that can happen. Not relaxing by any stretch of the imagination, but it looks very grim for tRumpanzeeism.

One other important thing to realize is that when a poll has a +/- 4% margin of error it does not mean that all results within that +/- 4% are equally likely, or even very likely at all. The 95% confidence interval encompasses values within ~2 standard deviations from the mean. Nearly 70% of values are within 1 standard deviation of the mean though so that extra standard deviation is only encompassing about 25% of cases. In short, this means actual results closer to the poll's stated numbers are considerably more likely than results at the outer edge of the confidence interval.

 

[ewdotson]

As I recall, Wang thought Silver had a methodological flaw that amounted to double-counting the correlations. Turned out he was wrong, but as long as one isn't driven by ideology, that's ok! It was an opportunity to learn. But yeesh, some folks seem to be very wed to a narrative that isn't well-supported.

 

[fskimospy]

As I recall, Wang thought Silver had a methodological flaw that amounted to double-counting the correlations. Turned out he was wrong, but as long as one isn't driven by ideology, that's ok! It was an opportunity to learn. But yeesh, some folks seem to be very wed to a narrative that isn't well-supported.

Exactly! As Paul Krugman has said, if your predictions are never wrong then you're doing it wrong and playing it too safe.

 

[woolfe9998]

Besides not understanding the polling they also don’t understand the predictions. I think 538 gave Trump a 1/3 chance of winning on Election Day. Conservatives laughed about how “wrong” that prediction was.

However take another scenario with a 1/3 chance of happening like say playing Russian Roulette with a six shot revolver loaded with two rounds and no one is going to be surprised when the guy blows his head off.

Yep, this is the fallacy of hindsight. In order to accurately gauge a probabilistic assessment of a future outcome, you have to ignore the outcome itself and instead look at the data and reasoning behind the probabilistic assessment at the time it was made. Based on the polling data available at the time, 30% was a good prediction, while other analysts who gave Trump a 10% or less chance were doing a terrible job of reading the actual polling data in front of them.

 

[K1052]

It seems the Biden campaign has nearly closed the gap with Trump's for cash on hand: 242M vs 295M

Reports that big donors across the political spectrum are opening wallets. Wall St increasingly deciding Trump is doomed and others want stability because it's good for biz instead of *gestures at entire country* this.

 

[MrSquished]

I don't care what the polls say. I'm going to act like Biden is down in the polls until we get him actually elected.

 

[ondma]

It seems the Biden campaign has nearly closed the gap with Trump's for cash on hand: 242M vs 295M

Reports that big donors across the political spectrum are opening wallets. Wall St increasingly deciding Trump is doomed and others want stability because it's good for biz instead of *gestures at entire country* this.

Well, he better start spending some of it. Here in the Twin Cities we are being flooded with fear based ads from the Trump campaign, and barely a peep in rebuttal from Biden. Maybe Biden is assuming a victory in Minnesota and spending the money elsewhere, but I think that would be a huge mistake. I am sure he will win the Twin Cities, but the question is whether this will be enough to overcome the much more conservative outstate votes. Of course the fear based ads (police will be abolished, your takes will go up, market will crash) are very misleading and bordering on outright lies, but I would not discount that they will have some effect if they are repeated enough times without any counter from Biden.

 

[ewdotson]

I don't care what the polls say. I'm going to act like Biden is down in the polls until we get him actually elected.

I think this is a very reasonable course to take, so long as it doesn't tilt into fatalism about Trump's invulnerability. Which you don't seem to be doing, but it is something I've seen.

 

[nOOky]

Well, he better start spending some of it. Here in the Twin Cities we are being flooded with fear based ads from the Trump campaign, and barely a peep in rebuttal from Biden. Maybe Biden is assuming a victory in Minnesota and spending the money elsewhere, but I think that would be a huge mistake. I am sure he will win the Twin Cities, but the question is whether this will be enough to overcome the much more conservative outstate votes. Of course the fear based ads (police will be abolished, your takes will go up, market will crash) are very misleading and bordering on outright lies, but I would not discount that they will have some effect if they are repeated enough times without any counter from Biden.

The defunding the police ads? I can see them being very effective to the base, but thinking people hopefully will not be swayed.

 

[K1052]

The defunding the police ads? I can see them being very effective to the base, but thinking people hopefully will not be swayed.

Trump is spending money to get votes that are already in his pocket. Hundreds of millions to that end. Those aren't the people he needs to convince.

 

[hal2kilo]

The defunding the police ads? I can see them being very effective to the base, but thinking people hopefully will not be swayed.

Fox news watchers will definitely be susceptible. That is there go to 24/7 news at this time.

 

[eelw]

Trump is spending money to get votes that are already in his pocket. Hundreds of millions to that end. Those aren't the people he needs to convince.

Indeed. His fear mongering won’t help him get back the swing voters he got in 2016.

 

[ivwshane]

You can call them shy and deny their existence. It's not so much that they are shy, they just don't want to be hassled, or beat up. I have some liberals in my own family that can get pretty nasty and in your face, if they determine a person to be a Trump supporter. I have several Republican friends that will admit they don't want any issues, that they will speak in the voting booth. So, no, it's not a myth.

So your family and friends consists of right wing pussies and safe space bitches? I would have never guessed that. /s

 

[ondma]

The defunding the police ads? I can see them being very effective to the base, but thinking people hopefully will not be swayed.

One would think so, but in the end a certain percent of people are going to vote based on emotion, and not only the base The Dems really need to get in front of this issue and explain what the term really means, and that Biden is *not* in favor of abolishing the police.

 

[hal2kilo]

With his background with some of his loyal union following, I don't think I will be much of an issue, sadly.

 

[fskimospy]

One would think so, but in the end a certain percent of people are going to vote based on emotion, and not only the base The Dems really need to get in front of this issue and explain what the term really means, and that Biden is *not* in favor of abolishing the police.

Almost all people vote on emotion. The good news is that almost no one who isn’t part of Trump’s base thinks Biden wants that.

That’s part of what has made Biden so strong. Trump can claim he wants to abolish the police but nobody believes it. All Trump’s attacks have bounced off him, and that’s why he’s flailing.

 

[K1052]

Nobody who isn't already an ardent Trumpist thinks Biden wants to defund the police. Trump has spent months trying to convince the electorate that Biden has dementia, is a secret cunning socialist, loves crime, is bad for black people, that he wants to defund the cops, that he's dumb but also craftily corrupt, etc. The polling gap has only widened in this time.

 

[hal2kilo]

Almost all people vote on emotion. The good news is that almost no one who isn’t part of Trump’s base thinks Biden wants that.

That’s part of what has made Biden so strong. Trump can claim he wants to abolish the police but nobody believes it. All Trump’s attacks have bounced off him, and that’s why he’s flailing.

He at least was quite in with the police and fireman unions before the latest kerfuffle. I mean the left could take issue with his previous policies regarding law enforcement. So if that's a concern, it's really non existent unless he's been unduly influenced by the Sanders faction (Fox claim).

 

[K1052]

Rational people already understand that "defund the police" is essentially a rallying cry for police reform to stop terrible abuses which the vast majority of the country doesn't like happening. They see the cops killing people and abusing protestors most of the country thinks "Hey, that's bad. The cops shouldn't do that".

 

[UNCjigga]

I don’t know if Joe Biden will be able to reign in cities like Toronto that are infringing on Americans’ religious liberty.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1284072755424616449

 

[K1052]

I don’t know if Joe Biden will be able to reign in cities like Toronto that are infringing on Americans’ religious liberty.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1284072755424616449

Um she just inhabits an alternate universe mentally where the US won the war of 1812 and annexed Canada. Stupid libs and their supposed reality...sheesh. Snowflakes.