Would young Americans really vote for Trump today? (gelliottmorris.substack.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Why I’m skeptical of some puzzling polls

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[-] [email protected] 32 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

There was actually some news recently that these polls might actually be wrong here: apparently there's a large amount of people lying that they're Hispanic/young in online polls. This was discovered both because: 1. The "20% of youth are Holocaust deniers!" Poll that made the waves wasn't reproducible and 2. There's some BIG inconsistencies being found in many polls too, like some polls somehow managing to have a cohort of Hispanics that are 20% nuclear submarine engineers.

Basically, we might have a vicious cycle making polls wildly inaccurate here: youth (and Hispanics?) are harder to poll -> pollsters value the data more vs other demographics-> people lie to obtain the rewards being offered to get this data -> youth/Hispanics become harder to poll.

Polls usually can handle some "lizard man's constant", but everything falls apart if there's significant lying.

[-] [email protected] 31 points 6 months ago

"National head to head polls"

Which is meaningless since our elections ARE NOT "National".

States like Washington, Oregon, and California are going to Biden. Full stop.

States like Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana are going to Trump, full stop.

So the ONLY polling that's worth following is in the states which may be questionable and, frankly, there aren't a lot of them.

Arizona - Trump +7
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/arizona/

Georgia - Trump +6 to +7
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/georgia/

Michigan - Tied to Trump +3
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/michigan/

Nevada - Trump +6 to +10
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/nevada/

New Mexico - Biden +8 but from August, not useful.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/new-mexico/

North Carolina - Trump +9 to +10
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/north-carolina/

Pennsylvania - Biden +1
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/pennsylvania/

(this one has been flipping back and forth)

Virginia - Biden +4
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/virginia/

Wisconsin - Trump +3 to +4
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/wisconsin/

Here's what that looks like on a map:

293 to 245 Trump.

Biden CANNOT win without Michigan and Wisconsin, two states that Clinton infamously neglected to campaign in and lost. Getting them, with this equation, puts Biden EXACTLY at 270.

[-] [email protected] 33 points 6 months ago

Polls out this far from the election are essentially meaningless, so there's also that

[-] [email protected] 45 points 6 months ago

And also, this was news to me, but apparently they're for the most part still doing polls by calling people on the phone from a random number. I cannot possibly imagine that that's true but that's what the article says.

They're like micro optimizing for individual per cents, and then doing something which will eliminate 80% of Gen Z from their polling, and when you ask them about it they apparently say "¯_(ツ)_/¯ IDK we do phone"

[-] [email protected] 31 points 6 months ago

Yep. For the last half a dozen elections, the polls have overestimated Republican strength, and underestimated Democratic strength. I think it's in large part because the pollsters still haven't managed to figure out how to poll people who simply will not answer unknown numbers.

[-] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago

Also, the Republicans rig the voting machines sometimes.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Polls were really bad in 2016, but the seem to have largely corrected that. 2018 polling just before the election was accurate. 2020 was projected as close and it was, there were a few problem states, but nothing like 2016. 2022 was again very accurate.

Polling around the presidential election or maybe just Trump is less accurate, but it's been getting better since 2016.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Not quite. Polls underestimated Democratic support in 2018, 2019's special elections, 2021's special elections, the 2022 midterms, and last year's elections. It's been remarkably consistent how far off they've been.

Do I prefer that to the other way around, as happened in 2016? Sure. But they've clearly over-corrected, and are having significant trouble getting back on track due to the difficulty of polling young people.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

Which is why you keep following them to spot trends.

When I started following these states, it was roughly 50/50. Now it's almost all Trump and the gains are increasing, not decreasing.

Right now, Biden has a chance of winning Michigan and Wisconsin, best to know that NOW rather than Sept/Oct/Nov.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

Are you a campaign manager or a pundit getting paid to talk about politics? There's honestly no reason at all for the average person to care about polls this far out

[-] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago

There are some circumstances you may want to make certain preparations based on the possibility that one candidate or the other may win, and polling trends can help you determine what sort of plans and preparation you should be making.

One example that comes to my mind is that prior to Trump getting elected, my wife was concerned that a trump presidency could lead to Republicans killing Roe V Wade and/or making it more difficult to access birth control, and so she opted to get a longer-lasting IUD prior to the election.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

Ok, but didn't the polls have Clinton winning leading up to the 2016 election?

[-] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago

The popularity polls, yes. She also won the popular vote by a significant margin.

Trump won some battleground states by slim margins, mostly because Clinton did a terrible job of deciding where to campaign. Also a lot of sketchy voter suppression tactics made those battleground state wins questionable.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

They did, but she was doing her own analysis of the polls and had some concerns that made her think the race was going to be much closer than the polls suggested.

You shouldn't just blindly take the polls at face value, you also need to be thinking critically about them, theres a lot of ways to misrepresent data, a lot of issues that can crop up due to how the polls are conducted, etc. and when she took all of that into account, the polls suggested to her that it was going to be a much closer race than most of the media coverage was saying.

She was still a little surprised that Trump actually won, but it wasn't totally out of left field.

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

There's plenty of reason to care. It's a sign Biden's campaign is not yet effective, and Trump is. While most incumbents don't really step up the campaigning until closer to the election, it gives an idea of the ground they need to make up.

It's also worth considering the Trump has been and continues to be great at campaigning. You can not like the guy, but his ability to get large crowds excited at multiple events per day can't be ignored.

There's likely going to be something that really swings the election still, but hoping a random event helps your party is poor strategy. In Trump's case it's unlikely a poor comment is going to hurt him, like the deplorables or binders full of women comments. Hoping for a conviction to change things is an OK backup plan, not plan A.

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

There absolutely is. You follow them continually to establish a trendline.

Since I've been following these key states, I've watched them go 50/50 to virtually all Trump, to all Trump by a wider margin.

Following polls over time lets you see the momentum.

By the time the election comes around, there should be no surprises.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

If your goal here is to not be surprised, I hate to tell you polls have margins of error that mean surprises are inevitable. Also, many polls are not infrequently found to be outside their SE when the actual results come in.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Again, you can reduce the margin of error by plotting the trend line.

It's the same science for watching climate change:

If one candidate is trending up towards election day and another is trending down you can tell which way it's going to swing.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

Unless the Electoral College magically goes away, this will be a rough election for a majority of Americans. Lots of long-standing issues are coming to a head with the realization that we've already been fascist for a while.

[-] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago

There IS a plan to move to the popular vote, but it only kicks in if we get enough states to represent 270 electoral votes.

As of now it's at 205 enacted with 88 pending.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

[-] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago

Fuck substack

[-] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Genuine question, what's wrong with it? Isn't it basically just a blog/self publishing platform?

[-] [email protected] 24 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Its had some "nazi bar" issues, i.e "we dont like nazis, but its cool if they come to our bar with their nazi friends and spend their nazi money here. If more Nazis show up, the more the merrier!"

They back tracked from the above a ways after outrage, but it's soured people on the platform.

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[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Yeah this is exactly what it is.

The commenter above likely read something they disagree with on substack and has chosen to hate the entire platform because of it.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

They let like 2 Nazis on, taking the viewpoint basically (1) it's in the spirit of the 1st amendment to allow even reprehensible speech (2) guys it's like 2 of them and the number of people reading and being convinced by them is likely to be 0

And the entirety of the knee-jerk fediverse politics community saw an opportunity to take a pointless stand on something, and in their eyes shone the promise of being able to make some smug self-important postings about how something good is actually really problematic and you're just not enlightened enough if you don't agree

And now Substack is literally Hitler even though it was doing a whole bunch of great things, outside of the 2 Nazis

[-] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

When you sit at a table with 2 nazis, there are three nazis.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

And a table. A Nazi table.

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

2 Nazis walk in to a room of 1000 people and there are now 1002 Nazis in there, right?

[-] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago

If you let them stay, yes there are.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago

If the 1000 people are fine with the nazis being there, yes.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

2 Nazis at the University

OH NO FUCK IT'S LIKE 73,284 NAZIS NOW

(Edit: In all seriousness, I know you already know this, but the problem with the "3 people at the table" analogy is that, A, there are 500,000 people involved, not 3, and if you aren't talking to the people at the table, or hearing from them, but merely existing on the same electronic computer without any interaction unless you decide to pursue same, which obviously most people won't do because they're fucking Nazis, then the risk of becoming suddenly a Nazi because they are next to you on the hard drive is in most cases pretty slight.)

[-] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I think the problem is that a lot of political discourse is super constrained, most of these polls are “do you like trump or like Biden” there’s no option to express the opinion of “I hate both of them but one slightly more”. Of course that’s going to create weird results! If they have to twist the answers to get there displeasure across and scare the DNC in to taking them seriously, that’s what they have to do.

I think there is possibly a dissonance being created by how lobby money influences the thinking of campaigns. Say voters care about reducing fossil fuel dependency, say they care about ending support for Israel, say voters care about ending for profit health insurance, say voters care about breaking up corporate oligopolies, these are all toxic pills to many donors. Campaigns don’t feel they can endorse or condemn these things, so they refuse to even engage with the topics. These incredibly important political issues are just... removed from official political discourse, thus such things are kept out of the polls or reduced to anemic platitudes, so people can’t accurately express what they care about.

Younger voters are pissed at the democratic establishment and there is no statistical data based way for them to measure why. So the democratic establishment is left flailing in the dark, boxing with ghosts because they’ve blinded them selves to issues that pit their continents against donors. WHICH ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUES FOR MOST YOUNGE VOTERS.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

I don't know how the polling would catch them, but the idea that people under 30 are more progressive socially or economically is probably a huge simplification. I only have anecdotal information, but what is see is they are spilt, and largely along gender lines, with both sides taking the idea of a breakdown of government as we know it almost as a moot point.

[-] [email protected] -3 points 6 months ago

I recently saw a poll of current 18 year olds that showed the women are very democrat leaning, while the men are very right leaning, though not as extreme as the female lean was. Young people are leaning left more than ever, but primarily due to the women

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this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024

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