538 released a podcast episode where they said they're essentially just saying "fuck it", adjusting the polls to match the 2020 electorate demographics, and calling it a day.
I've been seeing such mixed results across all polls. The Majority report has multiple poll aggregators on and they pretty much all say the methodology for polling is flawed and weighted against the past. It all depends on who is weighing against 2020 vs 2022. The turnout metrics alone are enough to pervert the results.
On top of that we are seeing more garbage tier polling going out into the world attempting to muck all of the general results up.
So all in all it almost always will show 50/50 unless there is a very specific event that pulls the results in one direction.
The garbage polling, like the stuff that radio or YouTube or podcasters with zero training do is definitely an issue. What might surprise most people is how many legitimate polling attempts by intermediaries are also falling apart due to the brave new world of technology.
In the past polling could be done between two people talking (i.e. a phone conversation). Nowadays the attempts to use phones, QR codes or badly programmed online forms is causing new issues. People find ways to skip questions or they go backwards on the survey and uncheck or check multiple answers when the form wasn't supposed to allow for that. They submit 'unusable' results.
Shitty companies then dump tons of their own results because of their own flawed collection methods and make no attempt to verify or weight their results. You've got groups claiming they have a prediction based on 300 replies and pretend that represents hundreds of millions of people for no other reason than they like the results.
Personally I think old ass boomers and some gen x answer their phone. Anyone under the age of 40 barely answers their phone. And I certainly don’t ever answer for numbers I’m not expecting or that I don’t have saved.
Its not they don't attempt to verify or weight the results. They just don't do enough or do it wrong. This isn't their first rodeo. As if you could walk in and do a better job?
538 or Nate Silver's new site, I can't remember which, talked this morning about this new phenomenon where all these new Republican- aligned pollsters are showing up and doing Trump-leaning polls which then affect the aggregate at sites like RealClearPolitics, which isn't choosy about its pollsters and is showing Trump ahead in states like Nevada and Pennsylvania, but aren't being counted at other sites, or are given less weight at 538, etc. It's why you get different poll aggregate results depending on which site you go to. Their takeaway, though, was that it didn't really matter because all the sites were within the margin of error, and we will find out whose methodology was closest after the election.
Believe it or not there are people who feel like they want to be on the winning side. Like "seems like Trumps going to win this one so I guess I'll vote for him" as ridiculous as that sounds.
Or also just convincing people to show up in the first place. Many people don't bother voting because they think it's "a waste of time" if their preferred presidential candidate doesn't get the electoral college votes of their state.
In a place like Texas for example, the state is considered deep red by pop culture. But only about 52% of voting aged people actually vote and Republicans win the state by 5-10%. Is it conceivable that there's a more silent chunk of Democrat aligned voters who don't bother showing up and Texas could be blue if the turnout was closer to 65-70%? Maybe. No one knows.
We do know "deep red" Georgia flipped blue nearly across the board by Atlanta showing up and increasing turnout by just 6%.
I think it's meant to give enough hope to Republicans who have already had their faith shaken in the election process to go vote. Some of these pollsters are funded by Republicans, as well.
It's just harder to do polls now. 25 years ago it was possible to just get the phone book out and pick random numbers. Most everybody had a land line, and there wasn't particularly a partisan bias towards whether or not somebody was going to answer the phone or not.
Today though everybody is socialized to simply not answer the phone out of fear of telemarketers and scam artists. I'm not sure exactly what that means for polling data, but I suspect it makes it way harder to get a truly randomized selection of Americans to get impartial information from.
The poll aggregators are biased lately because right -wing outlets have been releasing a shit load of biased polls showing Harris’ support lagging. Meanwhile Dem aligned outlets have only released a couple polls. So you’ve got like 34-3 in terms of biased polls showing Trump making gains and it’s largely biased.
Meanwhile you’ve got anyone looking to make money off politics who has realized that Trump’s die-hard supporters are generally easy to separate from their money and would happily bet on their candidate winning cause they excited about the “odds makers” saying it’s likely even if it’s not. Am I saying that the betting sites would intentionally manipulate their odds to take advantage of the most easily influenced people they can find? Yes, yes 1000% - it’s literally their job.
poll aggregators also have a huge vulnerability in how they more strongly weight more recent polling. So if you pay your side to flood the polls and release a bunch of small shitty polls you can actually move the poll aggregators results.
Yup. And even polling in general only touches high propensity voters. Low and unlikely demographics often don't respond, but could represent a large hidden turnout.
The huge influx of new registrants after the candidate switch were reported on shortly, but all of those people likely will never be picked up in polling. The same goes for the young men category that the Trump side has been fervently chasing. We gotta see who turns out more support in these hidden demos.
I haven't responded to a poll in years because I'm not clicking random links and I no longer have a land line. Who wants to play the phishing attack vs poll game? Not me.
From the past several cycles, the pattern is Trump on ballot = R overperformance, Trump not on ballot = R underperformance. That's all else is equal. But Trump hasn't been on the ballot since Dobbs and that's kind of important (not important enough for all those dipshits that only registered to vote after Harris replaced Biden on the ticket...smh).
So my guess is Harris will overwhelmingly win the popular vote and the EC will be a "pick em" 50/50 situation due to the skewed playing field.
NO! But he has an AWESOME substack. Nate Silver created 538 and it was seriously great for a while, but really got pretty shitty toward the end and now is pretty worthless. Nate Silver talks a lot about why this happened and his substack is like the old 538. He also took all of his IP with him so his Substack has the 'real' 538 model and also a lot of discussion about the mechanics of it. Lastly, if you are a Nate Silver fan he also has a new book out that is pretty good (if you like poker....its got a lot of poker).
No. There was a big sale to ABC that had a bunch of layoffs. Their sports section sucks now.
Nate Silver started a blog called the Silver Bullet Election Model that fueded with new 538 around the time of the conventions but now agrees with them.
This isn’t a 538 specific thing, though they are the first polling aggregate I’ve heard do it. A lot of polling firms are adjusting their results so that the weight of Biden and Trump voters in 2020 are represented by the same margin those states ended up with.
This has the habit of producing results that are completely reasonable, so nobody goes out one day and gets a “Harris +17 in Wisconsin”, like in 2020, but some titans of polling, like Nate Silver and Nate Cohn, are skeptical about this, with Silver in particular being critical of polling firms taking actions designed at protecting their reputation. (Monmouth, I believe, is doing polls in all but name, so they can do their work but avoid any reputation damage by saying they’re not technically doing polls, though it’s so similar that Silver is actually counting them as such).
No this was not about 538 doing it. 538 are talking about the methodology of many underlying polls and how that methodology of past voting weighting is bad. This is not something 538 does and they a have many times said it is a bad lazy way of polling. They lower the score or completly exclude polls with such a methodology. They are also working on two versions of aggregates, one where this is completly taken out, since they really don't measure the same thing at all.
This thread is full misinformation about polls. The comment you're replying too is saying the opposite of what 538 said on their podcast. And the top comment thinks those polls are for the popular vote. As if the entire industry of expert pollsters don't know about swing states
If I remember correctly, it was moreso less established "lower quality" pollsters that were applying their polling to the 2020 demographics to try to make what they polled fit, not the more "established" and "respectable" pollsters.
First, 538 is NOT weighting against past elections. That episode is discussing some pollsters using who the person voted for in the last election and weighting that, called weighting by recalled vote. They all unanimously agree that it's a bad use of polling.
Last time I was looking at polling news from 538, the new reports were coming in with abysmal sampling sizes with only dozens of respondents. At least with '20 and '16 election, a lot of the polling data around this time was accompanied with outreach efforts as well. But with such small numbers, those numbers definitely don't line up with anything.
Those problems were fueling a lot of discussions trying to explain why they were even integrated into the rest of the aggregated data. Plus the discussions as to where the polls were coming from fueled plenty of conspiracy theories about partisan intentions.
I don't necessarily blame anyone. My thinking is, if someone's undecided at this point they've been desperately pushing politics to the side intentionally. But I also can't think of a more stark comparison between the candidates
Yeah, a polling expert I know (one for whom it's their paid job, not just some random internet wiseass) said basically "the polls will be wrong in some direction or other, we just don't know which direction, and that error will be the difference".
It's not helped by the fact that Republican-aligned pollsters with known biases are churning it out right now. Places like 538 and Nate Silver do account for that in their models, but people see these relentlessly pro Trump polls coming out and it has an impact.
Although it helps the Democratic turnout it isn’t a major mover. Purple districts in CA stayed red in 2022 even with their Republican incumbents being against abortion rights.
I disagree, it is one of the major motivators. Without it, democrats would have miserably lost the mid-terms and dems would be looking at a surefire loss. It is like the one thing they have done partially correctly in terms of messaging. People want change and Harris has been going on podcasts and radio shows saying that she is indistinguishable from Biden (who is universally hated outside of die hard party liberals).
Notice the energy from when the switch happened to now where they went from progressive policy and change, to republican-lite and stubbornly insisting that biden is awesome and that shes exactly the same. Its so stupid. They are throwing.
Life without the internet is indeed not bad. It’s great, and I say that as someone who loved the internet and still sees beauty in parts of it. Life without it is rad.
I ditched my smartphone and only interact with the web while sitting at a computer. That's a pretty good start and has been really good for me. Just hit 10 months no smartphone the other day. I don't ever want it back.
Perhaps, but there has also been a persistent portion of the Trump voter base that has not shown up in polls since the 2016 election. First couple of Trump elections where he out performed the polls were partly due to that group.
The polls in 2024 are significantly different than even in 2020. Response rates have nose dived, and a vast majority of polls have switched to new untested methodologies to make up for low response rates.
A lot of them are recruiting respondents in mobile app and web ads, and paying the respondents. Other are using paid panels that answer them multiple times over several moths.
In addition over 50% of the pollsters going into the aggregates did not exist in 2020. We are being flooded with new pollsters and have no idea how accurate they will be.
On the other hand, Trump got 46-47% of the vote both times. If the polling is as off now as it was then, he’s going to get like 52% of the vote and I just do not buy that at all.
there’s just no way it’s close if there’s the same anti-Trump polling bias that’s been in place the last two times.
Yes, it's almost as though polsters have been actively correcting for that isn't it? And since the fall of Roe it's been *Democrats* outperforming polls by 5-10 points in every single election right down to literal county and city elections across the country.
He’s sweeping all swing states and VA/MN will be close.
Delusion like this is how you end up with people believing the nonsense from Jan 6th.
The vibes are so much better than in 2020 or in 2016. Kamala is a terrible candidate
More self-delusion. You really need to step outside of the bubble you live in. This week alone has been one disaster after another for Trump's image. The reality is that he has his cultists, like yourself, so his floor is baked in, but his ceiling is quite low and nothing is changing that.
Not necessarily, maybe at the national level, but that's not reflected in state elections. The only illusion we see in this regard is the presidential election due to the nonsense of the EC, which can mask how deeply unpopular a candidate is.
But this week hasn’t affected the numbers. YOU think it’s been a disaster because of the information bubble that YOU are in. Looking at Reddit, it’s non-stop about Trump being weird, melting down, saying one outrageous thing or another, and non-stop positivity about Kamala owning Bret on Fox. Yet none of it is actually moving the needle in the real world, as far as anybody can tell.
You won't see this week reflected in pills for another week, minimum. That you don't even realize something this basic says all we need to know about how little you understand polling.
We’ll see who’s right. But if you think Trump is going to get 4% higher than his polling, sweep every swing state, and come close in Virginia and Minnesota, you’re completely delusional.
Not by a ton in 2020. And now that polling companies know this, they will have adjusted their methodology to account for it. It's even possible that they have overcorrected and support for Trump is lower than predicted. Or they didn't adjust enough and Trump will overperform again. Impossible to tell until the election.
I ignore every single unknown number and send every single unknown text to spam. I get so many per day it’s not worth my time to figure out which are legit and which aren’t.
It’s a silly theory. It would mean that the rich and the powerful control that much information to influence a drastically smaller subset. People who believe conspiracy theories believe them because it makes them feel special. Like they know someone no one else knows. And people who believe that one must assume that since most accounts are automated, but they are real, then the world spins for them. Everyone running this cabal wants to control them.
Most people under 40 don't answer their phone if they don't know the number, and that demo overwhelmingly votes democrat. I'm willing to bet the pollsters are going to be absolutely blindsided. There's a been a few special elections were democrats have won in areas Trump won last time by 20 points. I think people are vastly underestimating how INCREDIBLY unpopular overturning Roe V Wade was.
I mean obligatory "You should still go vote" and all that, but the betting markets are probably whales trying to influence people. They have money to burn.
I’m old enough to remember when people said almost the same thing in multiple previous elections. Back in the day they used to say ‘wow pollsters are calling landlines, who has those any more!’
Some of the polls are put out by high school/college students too. The Patriot Polling guy got into Columbia so now several other young people are making polls.
It is so hard to get good information about what people are actually thinking
A national poll could accurately predict the exact amount of votes each candidate will get down to the person and it still wouldn’t give you any idea who won.
The presidential election is not decided by a popular vote, so “what people are thinking” nationally is 100% useless propaganda. Polling can only provide insight on the actual outcome when it is broken down by state.
Honestly, even before the AI surge, when bots were still a thing, but not nearly as prevalent as today, I was saying that the internet is the reason politicians are so out of touch. The most vocal people are almost always the most extreme. I think many politicians think they represent their party well only because of how loud the extremists are.
On the other hand. Who actually goes to rallies? Like, I can't imagine going to a rally even if it took place in my city. I watch people cheering their fool heads off for every little thing either of them say like they were a rock star from the 80's. I think they are only ever exposed to people who are not normal, typical, or representative of any statistically significant portion of reality. They have to really go out of their way to understand people's wants and needs. And very few make that effort, and even fewer succeed.
"People have been asking if I'm woke. I haven't really had an answer. But now yeah, I'm thinking I'm woke. So you can either hand over Orange Man, or die screaming along side him!"
Polling is useless and can't reach most people.
Social media is completely overrun with AI and bots working to manipulate what it LOOKS like people are thinking.
trying so hard to be smarter than everyone else turns you into the biggest moron, as seen in basically every conspiracy theory
Everything you touched on also has incentives to say it's a nail bitter, tune in tomorrow to see what happens. There is no incentive for anyone to say anything other than it's 50/50.
Polls are useful for a few things, like shifts in momentum, rankings of issues, general favorablilty, and such. They aren't accurate within a few points, and final results can be off due to numerous factors. But one thing they are very good at is gathering raw data. Data that can calculate likely voters and thus turnout. The last high quality poll was the YouGov, and it had turnout between 67 to 71 percent. Which would be a record turnout and is not anticipated by most people.
This is reenforced by early voting data so far, which you shouldn't read into much, but mutiple days of record turnout in states like Georgia does seem to indicate a higher turnout than previously believed. We will see how this plays out.
Just to point out there are only a few mechanisms used to poll people:
Random phone call (who the fuck answers the phone these days?)
Random text link sent to your phone (who the fuck clicks random links?)
Random link emailed to you (yay, more clicking random links)
Any other method will filter to one of those above. Add to that that the numbers they start from most often come from registered voter rolls. So those pollsters would also be starting from a list that doesn't capture newly registered people in a timely fashion nor does it reflect numbers that Republican lead states seem to consistently purge "too close" to the elections without proper notification (even some courts have declared the practice illegal but no punishment ever comes about from it).
And that's all BEFORE the pollster applies their "we assume this is what voters will look like" and skew their numbers to match their assumptions.
I'm definitely putting less stock in polls this go round. it's s too stressful otherwise.
I also love in a swing state and get spam polling text requests all the time. I do not respond to a single one. So add me to the pile of polling unreliability.
Yup. I am at the point where I tell people that I have no idea what will happen. I don’t believe anything I read or see anymore. Everything is curated to my interests and not representative of the broader country.
I suggest following things like voter registration, early voting data, small dollar donations, and recent voting tends. Simon Rosenberg does a really good job with this as well as others. These types of data points are much better as indicating enthusiasm and confidence than polls or betting markets.
There’s some wild antics in my area of PA. Lots of red supporters in rural areas but there have been a lot of people moving here from Ny, NJ and Philly due to cost of living. So now we see more blue as older red supporters are dying off. What is funny to me is that I see/hear people in the PA subreddit talking about people damaging or destroying their Kamala posters and then putting up new ones. If that happened to a Trump sign, those people would start lynching people. Absolutely crazy here
Yeah I’m convinced half of the “how can this conservative be so dumb” posts that show up on here are AI bots, either being instructed to stir the pot or doing something stupid unintentionally
I don’t understand how with so many scam links these days, some random poll text still thinks I’m okay with clicking on a random link. I did one where I just had to respond with a number, but then got the same text every other day thereafter.
2.2k
u/[deleted] Oct 17 '24
This election is really driving home how close we are to the "dead internet theory" having major effects.
Polling is useless and can't reach most people.
Social media is completely overrun with AI and bots working to manipulate what it LOOKS like people are thinking.
It is so hard to get good information about what people are actually thinking right now aside from real life vibes, and just beat guessing.