There's nothing new in this week's YouGov poll of the presidential race:
YouGov still has Harris two points ahead of Trump in national polling. Oddly, Harris continues to lead by four points when people are asked who they'd prefer to have as president. Perhaps the "Not Sure" vote breaks heavily for Harris?
Also, Black support for Trump suddenly jumped from 12% last week to 18% this week, while white and Hispanic support jumped a couple of points for Harris. Odd.
Nice, but meaningless because of the undemocratic Electoral College.
There's been much written about how to eliminate the Electoral College. The most surefire solution is to have an election with the GOP candidate winning the popular vote and losing the Electoral College.
The GOP will amend the Constitution in a minute.*
*If they don't burn down the Capitol first.
That was my thought after the s***show in Florida back in 2000. The best outcome in 2004 (in addition to getting GWB out of office) would be a popular-vote minority / EV-majority win by a Dem, after which both sides could agree that this is a dumb way to choose a President.
This almost happened. Kerry needed about 75K people in Ohio to switch their votes from Bush to him, and he would have lost the popular vote and won the electoral college. (There are still those who believe that the 2004 Ohio vote was monkeyed with, but it was likely just the usual shit show that Democratic leaning districts get the worse equipment and fewer resources.) With two popular vote losers/electoral vote winners in a row from different parties there just might have been enough momentum to get rid of the Electoral College.
It might have been only ~65K votes that were needed to be flipped if it weren't for one British newspaper (name I'm forgetting at the moment). They did a project where they enlisted their readers to write to residents of one Ohio town, and explain to them why they shouldn't vote for Bush. If one did the correlation between registered Republicans and Bush vote by precinct, there was a good correlation, except that town which had a very significant excess 10K votes in favor of Bush. Never try to tell an American what to do, since we'll do the opposite just to prove our independence.
What? A foreign country (Britain) attempting to influence the results of an American presidential election? Why, that's outrageous! Isn't it? It was in 2016...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3981823.stm
Except that if the results favor a Democrat, you'll mysteriously lose Dem support for chucking the Electoral College. Funny how those things work.
Republicans have one the popular vote for president exactly once since George HW Bush won in 1988. That is one contest out of the 8 (2004), and the chance that they win the popular vote this year is near zero.
I think Dems would happily amend the constitution to change how we elect the president if, by some fluke, they win the college but lose the popular vote.
Also, a direct election would simply be more fair and Dems generally favor fairness in matters like this.
Incorrect.
That would require them to be popular.
As said elsewhere here, only one time recently has GOP won the popular vote. That and a supermajority vote in both houses needed, I'm not holding my breath.
Actually given the "popularity" of PACs and Voter ID laws, it seems GOP is coming after that "One Man- One Vote" nonsense anyway.
The fact that an election like this has to be fought out in a handful of states, leaving the rest of us effectively disenfranchised, is an abomination. We are prisoners of a history that includes the original sin of slavery.
Disenfranchised is right. First of all, neither candidate can be bothered to campaign in most of the states so the priorities of the residents of those states are ignored. Second of all, if you vote along with 49% of your fellow state residents then you get no say in the Electoral College.
Interstate compact.
Someone pointed out after the 2020 election that more people voted for Trump in California than in Texas. And more people voted for Biden in Texas than in New York. All of these voters are ignored, so disenfranchised is the right word.
As a resident of Michigan, let me assure you that we get no special benefits because our election is close. You are no less relevant as a voter than me.
So many people think this that it seems futile to point out that it's just bonkers, but here we are.
Take my state of California for instance. Lots of people will say my vote "doesn't matter" because California is widely expected to go for Harris. But the simple facts are:
- California has 55 electoral votes, more than any other state
- Those 55 electoral votes are extremely important. Harris almost certainly can't win without them, and Trump almost certainly couldn't lose if he got them.
- Each Californian's vote counts exactly the same.
- That hugely important result is the the result of Californians voting.
- Each of us has an equal share of that significance.
I think what trips everyone up is that we've gotten in the habit of thinking we're entitled to be the main character--that in a nation of something like 240 million eligible voters, each of us is entitled to be the one whose vote uniquely determines the outcome. and we should be salty if we don't feel that that's true.
It sounds pretty silly when you see it that way.
It's sometimes said that "no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." And it's true that one snowflake more or less isn't going to change anything. But that doesn't change the fact that that one huge result is made up of a whole bunch of tiny little inputs, each of which matters not a whole lot, but each of which still matters a little.
Except as well stated by someone else already the issues and promised results that candidates run-on is affected by where they need to get their votes from. That means the electoral college disenfranchises not only the locked out party's vote in a state but also to a lesser extent the majority party voters of the state too. Also it is highly unlikely that the composition of the national voting pool is unaffected by voters being aware of the effect of the electoral college.
538's average of national polls has Harris at +3.1. She's been +3 or better since August 21. YouGov has consistently shown a narrower gap than the average, with Harris +2 in every poll but one since Harris took the lead late in July.
> There's nothing new in this week's YouGov poll of the presidential race:
Except that the "convention bump" is further in the past, so the results perhaps need less adjustment.
In a different poll, Truth Social stock is worth less than it was a year ago.
The changes in subgroups (Blacks, Hispanic etc.) may just be noise. The uncertainty for subgroups is much higher than for the total survey so it is dangerous to overinterpret these changes.
This. Depends on subpopulation sample size, and a lotta times certain subpopulations, especially smaller ones, just aren't very heavily represented in the overall sample, so the standard error for them is larger.
I certainly don’t buy that Black support for TFG jumped up 50% in one week.
Yeah, since they're such a low number of respondents in total...
Jump in Black support for Trump: RFK jr dropping out and endorsing Trump?
No matter what happens in the televised shit show they call a debate, the political media will use it to bring Harris down. They want Trump back.
At all costs. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/leslie-moonves-donald-trump-may-871464/
Don’t get money out of politics, We’d bankrupt the media !
I expect that a big shuffle in the cross-tabs means that the polling companies have fully shifted to "likely voters" now. There are still 8% "Undecided" or "Other Candidates" in the mix, probably about three to one "Undecided" who are probably mostly Republicans waiting to see if Harris "slips up" and says something they can define as "Commanist!".
If she doesn't, she has a chance to corral a good number of them. Everyone who's going to be in the tank for Trump is already there. He's what you call "a KNOWN quantity" by now.
West and the Greens each get about a percent of actual "lefties", including "From the River to the Sea" dead-enders.
[Caveat: I agree that the Palestinians are being slaughtered egregiously by YesAYahoo, but am CERTAIN that Kamala Harris will do much more to help them than the Orangeutan ever would. So, the "Uncommited" caucus is just plain stupid.]
Not stupid, they're useful tools.
Well, yes, stupid.
Blinded by grief, more like, and amplified by bot networks.
You have to subscribe for the full page, but I think the free portion of Nate Silver's page has a well curated rundown of what is happening in the swing states.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/nate-silver-2024-president-election-polls-model
D+3.4 nationally, but extremely tight in the states that matter. Pennsylvania D+1.1 for example.
He has a special part about Electoral College bias, D+2 to D+3 only has a 63% chance of Dem victory.
Overall I think it only makes sense to watch the swing states, national lead means little. We can win at D+0 to D+1 (11%) and we can lose at D +3 to D+4 (12%).
Right now it is a total squeaker.
This also, too. And what's gonna make the difference is TURNOUT among DEM "LEANERS." The notion of "peeling off" some Republican votes is mostly a fantasy -- at best a few of them may just not be able to stomach voting for the Felon and they'll leave the line blank -- but (1) they are few and (2) they are much more expensive to reach than Dem leaners who need just a little push to get them to the polls.
GOTV! Volunteer, postcard, walk precincts, offer rides! We need to SWAMP them in November so there's no possibility for Republican ratfking.
+++
You should not make much out of variation in minority poll numbers - statistical uncertainty is high because of small sample size. The errors for 12% of the population are much higher than those for the total.
You mean the polls that predicted easy victories for Hillary and Joe iirc they had Biden by a few points in Fla, and GOP was going to crush it in 2022- those polls?
Yeah, I don’t make much of them
Presidential elections are resembling quantum mechanical systems more and more - eerily unpredictable until the ballots are counted when they 'collapse' to the 'measured' value.
Mother Jones says that Trump admits he lost in 2020.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/09/trump-is-finally-admitting-he-lost-the-2020-election/
NBC too:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/live-blog/harris-trump-election-live-updates-rcna169374
I'm amused (okay- shocked) with Biden running there were voters okay with Tweeto, but now they've switched. So they could stomach Tweeto's "qualities" with Biden ???
A lot of people confuse physical vigor with capability, Stephen Hawking's example notwithstanding.
I’m going to vote for Harris, of course, but her win by a small margin is just delaying the inevitable conflict. They won’t give up. They won’t change. They are an enemy and we’re headed for catastrophe regardless.
YouGov:
I just don't believe a paid panel of people is a good way to measure the sentiment of the public. Even if you think you're weighting your panel to match demographics, you cannot get around participation bias, the very bias that random calls are supposed to minimize.
Why would an unpaid panel be any more accurate? There’s a participation bias for unpaid participants too, namely, they select for people with nothing better to do with their time will self select to participate. (We call them lonely in other spheres.) People who have multiple jobs and can’t afford to spend their few spare moments engaged in unpaid tasks for others’ benefit won’t answer unpaid surveys (but might do so if the per minute rate of payment is comparable to that of Uber or other short tasks)… and meanwhile people with lots of spare time on their hands, perhaps sitting at a desk in a job for which they’re already getting paid or sitting in front of a TV retired from work and bored with midday reruns, will disproportionately answer unpaid surveys just to fill up their days. (The latter two groups exist in my own family, which answers every survey they ever get and are definitely not representative of the nation as a whole.)
Unpaid surveys generally over-represent:
(1) seniors because they’re retired and bored
(2) students because they have all their bills paid for (no need to earn money) and have lots of time between classes to kill
(3) housewives because they’re home and free and bored during normal business hours
(4) the lonely because they don’t have anything else better to do, paid or unpaid
(5) the educated and politically opinionated because they find the actual survey intellectually stimulating
All of those groups are not large percentages of our population. So it’s foolish to think unpaid surveys elicit more accurate responses than paid ones, which at least offer busy people another reason to participate besides escaping boredom. For those people, answering surveys is labor, and labor should be compensated, no?
(I’m also in favor of paying people to vote or giving them a refundable tax credit for voting. Voting exacts costs on people - accruing all the paperwork needed to register in advance, transportation to the registration place and then later to the polling place, daycare for the kids, time taken off from work, time lost waiting in line or deciphering the form instead of doing something you enjoy, etc. If voting was cost free, more people would do it. And I think society should compensate citizens for costs they incur to sustain our way of life, just like how the government would pay you if it needed to encroach on your property for some reason. Don’t even get me started on how juries should receive a living wage for the duration of their trials. Encroaching on your limited time on earth is no different than encroaching on your property.)