Is this the same poll that predicted a Hillary win?
Almost every poll at the time showed that everyone could beat Trump except for Hillary. The DNC is as responsible for the Trump presidency as the RNC.
Don’t see this repeated often enough. Good to see
How is this myth still not dead lol
Most probabilities gave Trump like a 25% chance to win. 1/4 is a very real chance.
That’s low, but still 25% still high.
Remember that most people thought Trump had no chance in 2016 also. So even if he only has a 25% chance of winning, act as though he’s got a 50% chance and you’re the deciding vote.
I legit thought the “powers that be” would realize how dangerous trump is and wouldn’t allow it. That’s the day I fully realized there truly is no Illuminati, no conspiracy, no dark shadow group in control, nobody in charge.
remember that the trump campaign spent money convincing people to stay home in 2016. their two messages were “clinton’s got this in the bag, your vote doesn’t matter” and “trump and clinton are basically the same anyway”. vote early and vote often, nothing is sure until after the post-election terrorism has died down.
I’m not worried about Trump potentially winning the Republican nomination next year. He’s finished. There are nowhere near enough believers in the alt-right’s QAnon deep state bullshit to prop his campaign up, and anybody moderate would have turned their backs on him after Jan 6th, Mar-A-Lago and all the federal charges now coming to light.
We should be more worried about DeSantis vs Biden.
Trump has enough believers in the QAnon deep state bullshit to kill DeSantis’ campaign. Trump knows that as long as he is running for office, all of the investigations into him will have to be more cautious to avoid looking like they’re persecuting the opposition. He will run 3rd party if he loses the nomination, and he will take enough voters with him to kill DeSantis’ chances in the white house
And I’m not too worried about it for those reasons.
When even Fox News are acknowledging the monster they created…
Idk where this is all coming from, because trumps numbers have only gone up compared to the rest of the Republicans and DeSantis has seen a nosedive in his numbers.
Most Republican primaries are winner-take-all. If enough clowns stay in the clown car, they will all split the anti-Trump vote and Trump can win states with 30-35% .
They should have an old guy scrap like in family guy with Herbert and the Nazi
We are basically gonna have this with Musk and zuck
Joe Manchin? Who looks at the gridlock in D.C. and says: “Yes, I want more of that.” Ask me when someone who didn’t vote against Roe v Wade decides to declare.
He’s not saying “I want more gridlock”, he’s saying “I want more of whatever personally benefits me, and I have to cause gridlock to get it, that’s just fine”.
Joe Manchin is such an anachronism at this point. If this were 10-20 years ago, he’d just be a middle of the road Republican. Since it’s 2023, he’s too far left for the
nazismodern Republican Party, and on the wrong side of just about every main stream Democrat issue. The only thing you can assume if Manchin runs is that he has some big donors that really want to see Trump win that will set Manchin up with a cushy job as a lobbyist.
VOTE VOTE VOTE
These polls are fun and all, but I don’t trust them, especially a over a year out. Things can change drastically.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the right pushing these poll reports to galvanize their own voters and make their opponents think they can relax.
When it comes to power, I don’t think it’s ever safe to relax.
Exactly. Fuck the polls, get out there and vote.
I remember 2016. All polls are bullshit. Assume the worst and vote in anticipation of the worst case scenario.
I had my absentee ballot sitting on the dining room table for about a month in 2016. I kept on procrastinating getting it in the mail and finally remembered the day before the election. I live in a swing state 😞
I’m not sure if it was counted and take my share of responsibility for what happened next. I’m definitely not the only one who didn’t take it seriously because of all the polls. Never again.
Makes me wonder which Republican has the best chance then. My bet is someone who is not at the lead of the fundraising pack as of yet. Nikki Haley? Chris Christie?
I’m hoping literally any Republican wins the primary and then trump runs third party. He could pull a Nader for the next three elections easily, stealing a few crucial % of votes. The party deserves it for creating that monster.
Totally agree!
I mean with any luck, they have painted themselves into a corner of hypocrisy and wedge issues so heavily they can’t win the presidency for another 12 years. But as we all know, Americans can’t just let OK, they get restless and just vote for change for changes sake eventually.
You make the mistake in thinking right wingers give a shit about hypocrisy and consistency - they don’t. Those are tools they use against their enemies, nothing more.
Right, but you generally need to collect some amount of independents and young people to win an election. Fingers are crossed that if turn outs are high, every election that gets harder and harder to manage.
Umm, 2016 showed us how reliable polls can be
2016 was the year a whole bunch of people were convinced that “protest voting” was an actual thing and that “both sides are the same so don’t bother voting”. Hopefully a few of those people have learned their lesson.
If there’s ANYTHING us Americans are good at, it’s not learning lessons.
Case in point: we Americans!
People look at the big picture in polls(X candidate is leading in polls) and then say they’re wrong when Y candidate wins, but it’s way more nuanced than that.
The 2016 polls were not that far off. Hillary won the popular vote, as the polls predicted. The key states she lost, she lost by small margins within, or not too far from, the margin of error.
If you look at FiveThirtyEight’s final prediction for 2016, Trump had a 28.6% chance of winning. That’s between a 1 in 3 and 1 in 4 chance! But the media narrative was that Trump had 0 chance, and what happened happened.
I mistrust polls. Is this a legitimate poll or is this propaganda aimed at Biden voters? The message is that you don’t have to bother voting because your choice is leading the poll. Vote anyway.
Monmouth University is practically the gold standard of polling.
If a poll in favour of their candidate is gunna stop people from voting I doubt they were gunna vote in the first place lol
For reference, one of the best ways to track US polls is here: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/
That’s a terrible tracking tool, except for all of the others.
What’s a better tool?
538
Doesn’t 538 have an editorial slant? I was talking about a site that just reports poll results from all the polls and takes an average. I couldn’t find that aggregate analysis and daily poll reporting on 538.
Swoosh?
I can’t find this when I Google it, it only pops up Nike stuff. Do you have a link?
RCP has a tendency to post even the most crackpot polling firms which gives the entire site a rightward lean.
what exactly do people who spam VOTE on every article about polls think they’re contributing
Agreed with the others. Nothing is guaranteed and the only thing that matters for election results is votes. Another Trump presidency would be indescribably bad for humanity. We have to take these polls for a grain of salt and VOTE. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with reminding others of this.
Because polls like these can make people complacent. If they think they’re choice is guaranteed to win, they won’t bother voting.
What exactly do people who complain about people who spam VOTE think they’re contributing?
Humm… where have I heard this before?
After 2016, anyone who believes in polls is a fool.
Vote now on your phones!
The 2016 polls were not inaccurate though. They said Trump had a small chance at victory, and he pulled it off. They never said it was impossible, they just said smart money was on Hillary.
Ya, if I remember right FiveThirtyEight had Trump at around 30% chance in 2016, so slightly unlikely but not exactly a crazy longshot.
They were one of the few that gave him that large of a margin, iirc. The rest were in the 90’s for Hillary.
The national polling was also pretty accurate, it was the state polling that missed. Trump squeezed out wins in 4 states by a combined total of 50,000 votes. Nationally though the numbers were within their prediction.
Believing is one thing. Anyone who changes their behavior because of polls, I wanna meet this fucking idiot and find out what’s going on in that dumb brain
Vote every time. Polls mean nothing. Vote.
Absolutely! If polls were deciding the outcome, Hilary would win in 2016.
Only twice in three elections. This means Trump had a one third chance to win that election. Which, sadly, he did.
If the weather forecast says 30% chance of rain and it rains do you question the validity of the forecast or do you think “I guess I ended up getting some of that rain”?
Also, national polls mean nothing. We don’t have a national election.
Trump lost in 2016 by 2.1%, he became President by winning in WI, MI and PA. 2 states Clinton failed to campaign in and a 3rd she alienated.
The total number of votes that elected Trump were just 22,748 in WI, 10,704 in MI and 44,292 in PA.
77,744 people made Trump a President. The rest of us knew better.
Serious question, which state she alienated and how?
Pennsylvania. She gave a speech in neighboring Ohio where she said:
“We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
That echoed through coal country, and while nobody expected her to win states like West Virginia, it absolutely killed her in PA.
https://www.npr.org/2016/05/03/476485650/fact-check-hillary-clinton-and-coal-jobs
https://pagop.org/2015/08/03/clinton-pledges-to-continue-the-war-on-coal/
It was a self inflicted injury, which was so, so avoidable.
She COULD have rolled it into a victory like this:
“I’m going to tell you something right now that not a lot of people know… my great grandfather was a coal miner in Durham, England. Moved to Scranton with his six kids dreaming of a better life for all of them. I’d like to see a better life for your fathers, brothers, and sons that doesn’t involve risking their lives underground for a few scraps of coal that they’ll never share in the profits on.”
True story: https://www.palatinate.org.uk/hillary-clinton’s-great-grandfather-was-a-durham-miner-says-local-historian/
Instead? “Imma put a bunch of you out of work. U mad bro? LOL.”
Hilary Clinton is the definition of hubris.
I agree except for that last point
77,744 people made Trump a President. The rest of us knew better.
Sorry but that’s not how math works. 63 million people made trump president, and only 66 million of us knew better. That huge number of trump voters is the horrible reality of American politics weve had to come to terms with. Luckily some of the trump supporters learned from their mistake, but there’s still millions of them out there, not <100k
I don’t think YOU understand statistics, lmao
Millions out there, countered by millions of Democratic voters, and over votes on both sides in states like Texas and California.
It was the 77K in those three states that threw it to Trump, and note, in 2020, Biden did not repeat Clinton’s mistake.
Yeah I get that, but what I’m saying is it’s not like the rest of the US knew better than that 77k figure. 77k is just the difference in votes, it doesn’t represent the only 77k people that did wrong
This is true. 77k vastly undercounts the number of idiots that voted for that guy.
I mean, pollsters actually do account for how elections work in their models. There are all sorts of actual reasons polls have failed to be reliable lately, but if you think it’s because they just count total responses across the country, that isn’t the case.
Not really, case in point is this very poll:
“In the national survey of 910 voters, 47% of voters said they would definitely or probably support Biden, while just 40% said they would back Trump.”
Which is meaningless, because unless 47% of voters flip the correct states, it won’t matter how much Biden wins.
Remember, Clinton won the popular vote. Gore won the popular vote AND Florida. It didn’t matter.
So, I think you’re probably right, in this case. But you’re just quoting the reporting on the poll, which is very misleading. It makes it sound like there is no statistical model involved at all. From the methodology on the linked full poll results: “The full sample is weighted for region, age, education, gender and race based on US Census information”. Like I said, I think you’re right - I doubt if they mean weighting for “region” to imply they did an electoral college analysis - but until you look at the actual poll and it’s methodology, you can’t just assume that an article reporting on the poll is giving an accurate impression. There are polls that do account for state breakdown, and the reporting in an article on such a poll would probably be just the same as here.
It seems the focus of this poll was to get some initial idea what kind of impact a third-party run with Manchin and some Republican running mate would have, and looking at weighted national numbers is probably “good enough” for that purpose, at this time. Definitely not a basis to conclude Biden has it in the bag, and the poll itself doesn’t seem to be trying to claim that.
Sorry I’m going on, but yeah, big picture, you are correct, at least in this case.
Oh, there’s no doubt a statistical model to represent the entire country. The problem with popularity contest polling like this is the election isn’t a popularity contest.
Now, a similar survey running down each contested state and calling out the electoral college votes, that would be useful.
Anything that leads with “a national poll…” can be safely disregarded.
Trump became president because the Russian state interfered in our elections. Full stop.
Also true, but it wouldn’t have happened if Clinton had actually campaigned in states she took for granted and didn’t say stupid shit about coal.
Nothing Clinton said about coal was “stupid shit.”
She just told people the truth, and people prefer to be lied to over hearing uncomfortable truths.
Same happened to Al Gore: he told people the truth, and people went absolutely bonkers over that.
By contrast, Trump told people exactly what they wanted to hear, even though it was clear to anyone that he was lying to them or promising them things that he could never, ever fulfill - and people loved it.
Telling blue collar workers your goal is to end their industry is, indeed, stupid shit.
We complain bitterly on the Left about Republican voters voting against their own self interest… well, when you have a Democratic candidate telling them the intent is to put them out of work? What do you expect them to do?
Yep. Polls are getting less reliable anyway, because so many of them rely on landlines, and some segments of the population are less likely to respond to surveys than others.
From the article:
Interviews were conducted in English, and included 319 live landline telephone interviews, 480 live cell phone interviews, and 111 online surveys via a cell phone text
But you are right on polls not really meaning that much. Especially over a year away.
Also, you have to take into account the weirdos who answer unknown numbers on their cell phones
That’s a valid point. Not many people do. Pollsters have a tough road ahead of them, because actually doing a scientifically valid poll is getting harder.
Which is telling, because the land line polls tend to over inflate Conservative voices, and it still has Trump losing in a landslide.
Just like the last time he won an election
To be fair, Clinton won the popular vote by a large margin, it’s just that the House has not been expanded in 100 years despite the population more than tripling, so some states have outsized impact during a presidential election.
District sizes have nothing to do with Presidential or Senate elections, they are state wide.
Congressional districts are divided among states based on the census, and then become the count of electoral votes, which in turn award the presidency. So they have a lot to do with presidential elections.
Increasing the number of congressional districts would also necessitate increasing the number of votes needed to win.
Right now, each state has 1 per Congressman and 1 for each of 2 Senators.
538 total with 270 needed to win (50.18%).
So if you add house members, let’s say we do something crazy and double it for everyone:
976 electoral college votes (538-100 because the Senate votes are fixed. 438*2 then add the 100 Senators back in).
Now you need 488 to become President. The problem remains, all you did is change the scale.
The size of the electoral college is based on the size of the House, because the House (currently) has a fixed size, the states each get a set number of electoral votes, that do not actually match the populations of those states.
This is due to a law passed in 1929 called the permanent apportionment act, which froze the size of the House, despite the fact that we’ve added two new states since then.
So States like California have less electoral power than they should, while states like Rhode Island have more than they should. Well, technically Rhode Island should have more as well, every state should have more.
Increasing the number of congressional districts would also necessitate increasing the number of votes needed to win.
Right now, each state has 1 per Congressman and 1 for each of 2 Senators.
538 total with 270 needed to win (50.18%).
So if you add house members, let’s say we do something crazy and double it for everyone:
976 electoral college votes (538-100 because the Senate votes are fixed. 438*2 then add the 100 Senators back in).
Now you need 488 to become President. The problem remains, all you did is change the scale.
Except that California should have like 60x as many votes as Wyoming.
If you increase the members of congress, then that’s going to increase the number of electoral college votes needed to win as well. So, proportionally, it all stays the same.
Polls have evolved since then you know.
I’m not saying they are perfect, but they understand, generally, that landlines aren’t key anymore. It’s literally their job.
The polls showed him losing solidly to Clinton right up until he won though… The numbers are looking worse this time, but still.
It’s a little more complex than that. The national polls had him losing solidly to Clinton on the popular vote, which actually happened. The real polling errors occurred at the state level, in a few key states.
This actually kind of sucks because then if/when the votes don’t look close to how they expect according to polls they automatically assume something fishy happened.
And yes, I realize many will think that regardless.
Overinflating conservatism in the US is par for the course. See: the three-fifths compromise and the electoral college.
The electoral college isn’t bad per se, it’s just been allowed to become bad in a way that hints at a deeper issue.
Notably that the House has not been expanded in 100 years, even as the population has expanded, and two states have been added.
We need to un-cap the house and get it to the point where it’s actually representative again. Doing so would take a single act of congress.
Allow me to evangelize the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which aims to bypass the Electoral College and elect the president by popular vote.
Which still doesn’t fix the problem with the House not being representative.
It’s bad per se and also ludicrous. It gives way too much power to states with small populations, which tend to be rural and very right wing. But it is also ludicrous, we should all vote for the person selected to rule the nation, and every vote should have equal weight. Those same states - the right has a hugely unbalanced say in the senate for the same reason, small rural states have massively disproportionate representation. Reforming presidential elections can be done by amendment or by efforts like the popular vote compact, by agreement between enough states. The stupid constitution forbids amending the way the senate is apportioned, so there might have to be a court fight over changing that rule.
Again… The outsized power of smaller states is 100% an artifact of the permanent apportionment act of 1929. It decreed that the size of the House would be set at 435 members. And then we added two states and tripled the population.
And the House is still 435 members. Some congressional districts have more than a million people. How the hell can a Representative actually be said to represent 1 million people?
To fix this would take a single act of congress. Just a simple repeal of one law, and the adoption of a new apportionment standard. That’s it. Then the popular vote would mostly line up with the electoral college, because the votes would have to line up. Because it would actually be representative of the actual population.
Just massively increase the size of the house to match the actual population.
I agree the house needs expansion, however I also think that would only moderately address the electoral college skew toward rural states. Also it is in my opinion irrelevant as it does not address the core problem: the president should be elected by a direct national vote, each person getting one vote of equal weight to every other vote.
Because the electoral college includes the sum of all Senators and Representatives in a given state, rural states with low populations presidential votes carry much more weight than urban states with large populations. You’re right about the House not expanding, that’s also shifting things around - but a huge reason the electoral college exists at all was to assure the southern states that the institution of slavery would be protected in order to get them to ratify the Constitution. It shifted power to shitheads on purpose.
The electoral college is bad.
It is unneeded in the modern era.
The electoral college didn’t shift power to slave states. That was the 3/5ths compromise.
No, the electoral college was created because the fastest way to travel in the 1780s was via foot. There weren’t even good roads between the new states. So it could take months to get from Georgia to Washington, DC.
We don’t have that problem anymore, but changing things like that would require a constitutional amendment. Something that is fairly hard to do in today’s political climate.
And it still wouldn’t fix the problem with the House not being representative. But one act of congress to repeal the permanent apportionment act of 1929 would fix both issues.
Massively expanding the size of the House would make it representative, and it would make the electoral college better represent the populations of each state.
The Electoral College did give the slave states more power, by way of the three-fifths compromise: the number of Electors depends on the number of Representatives, which depends on the census of inhabitants, not vote-eligible citizens, including, at the time, 3/5 of the slave population. So a state like Virginia, with more slaves than free people, got a boost compared to a state with only free residents.
It sure did shift power to the slave states. The Senate gives equal power to each state, regardless of population. That’s why, as states were allowed to join the union, they were done for quite some time in pairs - one slave, one free - in order to maintain a balance in the Senate.
