Board 8 > Politics Containment Topic 342: Biden: His Time

(+) Yeah! (+)

Reminder: we need 51 Ds in the senate even with Harris as the tie breaker because Manchin is a Republican.

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https://twitter.com/normative/status/1326035765646807040

Absolutely correct imo. The GOP thought they could control the crazy, and at the end of the day they were helpless as it became Trump's party.

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LordoftheMorons posted...

https://twitter.com/normative/status/1326035765646807040

Absolutely correct imo. The GOP thought they could control the crazy, and at the end of the day they were helpless as it became Trump's party.

They knew they could not control Trump, which is why they ran 16 candidates against him in 2016. They could not stop him.

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LordoftheMorons posted...

https://twitter.com/normative/status/1326035765646807040

Absolutely correct imo. The GOP thought they could control the crazy, and at the end of the day they were helpless as it became Trump's party.

Mainstream conservatives never learn. The planter class thought they could control the secessionists. They couldn't. The German conservatives thought they could control the Nazis. They couldn't. And so on and so forth.

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red sox 777 posted...

They knew they could not control Trump, which is why they ran 16 candidates against him in 2016. They could not stop him.

They thought they could control him when he was just riling up their base with birtherism

They also assumed he would lose the primary until it was too late, which is why all of the mainstream Republican candidates focused almost exclusovely on taking down each other rather than Trump (besides Jeb!, who was just not good enough at attacking).

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UshiromiyaEva posted...

Reminder: we need 51 Ds in the senate even with Harris as the tie breaker because Manchin is a Republican.

This is hyperbole. Manchin is definitely very conservative for a Democrat, but when the important votes come up he sticks with the party (see Obamacare repeal).

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Not_an_Owl posted...

but when the important votes come up he sticks with the party

https://twitter.com/Sen_JoeManchin/status/1325951672145883138?s=19

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I don't trust Manchin at all for any progressive legislation.

Like you can probably count on him for a $15 minimum wage but anything beyond that sounds sketchy to me.

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UshiromiyaEva posted...

https://twitter.com/Sen_JoeManchin/status/1325951672145883138?s=19

If you get rid of the filibuster, there's no reason to have a Senate.

At least he understands!

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Just convince him to vote yes on PR statehood and then make him unnecessary

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Not_an_Owl posted...

If you get rid of the filibuster, there's no reason to have a Senate.

At least he understands!

straight up admitting the point of the Senate is to obstruct the legislative branch lmao

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HeroDelTiempo17 posted...

straight up admitting the point of the Senate is to obstruct the legislative branch lmao

That's why it's called the Senate. That's what the Roman Senate was too. Aristocratic, rich, deliberative, and designed to obstruct all progress.

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It's amazing how much Trump's trajectory this election matches Hillary Clinton's 4 years ago. Talk about karma.

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Lms. Please

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https://twitter.com/crampell/status/1326148515475677184?s=21

lmao

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Interesting theory about why the polls missed by so much this year:

https://twitter.com/dylanmatt/status/1326170992519995392?s=21

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I think the polls were so wrong because a lot of "undecideds" were just Trump voters who didn't want to admit to voting for the guy who got 200k people killed.

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LordoftheMorons posted...

Interesting theory about why the polls missed by so much this year:

https://twitter.com/dylanmatt/status/1326170992519995392?s=21

Polls adjust for response bias.

There has to be a disconnect in self described independents who voted trump vs biden.

Which doesn't really make sense. Neither of those parties are "liberals"

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And that theory definitely does not explain how the maine senate race was so absurdly off

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masterplum posted...

Polls adjust for response bias.

There has to be a disconnect in self described independents who voted trump vs biden.

Which doesn't really make sense. Neither of those parties are "liberals"

They adjust for response bias for specific things (demographics, party). If its a variable theyre not asking about (like high/low social trust, as theorized here, or taking the pandemic more seriously and thus being more likely to be home and answer the phone) the bias will remain.

I did also see Nate Cohn (who has worked on the NYTs polls) mentioning this theory as a possibility in an interview he did.

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masterplum posted...

And that theory definitely does not explain how the maine senate race was so absurdly off

Given the magnitude of that one Im guessing there are some explanations very specific to that race (with the general polling miss explaining like a third of the gap or something).

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I don't know if that works exactly. Some places (Georgia, Arizona) were almost perfect, while some places (Michigan, Wisconsin) were horrendously off for Trump. I feel like that explanation would lead you to expect a sort of uniform error throughout the states, right? Or am I missing something?

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Suprak the Stud posted...

I don't know if that works exactly. Some places (Georgia, Arizona) were almost perfect, while some places (Michigan, Wisconsin) were horrendously off for Trump. I feel like that explanation would lead you to expect a sort of uniform error throughout the states, right? Or am I missing something?

Im sure even if its true its not the whole explanation, but the average error was
pretty substantial in overestimating Dems (caveat: theres still a bunch of mail vote out so this average error will decrease a bit):

https://twitter.com/seantrende/status/1326175881350537216?s=21

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The polls were horrendous this year and I'm tempted to start ignoring them in presidential election years. 538 did what they could, but a lot of the data was incredibly bad this cycle.

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https://youtu.be/mpOnt1cByT4

truly the worst of the worst ghouls

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The issue with the polls seemed to be the turnout numbers they were estimating among white working class males. At least that's what I heard initially. The areas where Democrats met their numbers were all areas where there was big GOTV effort on the Democrat's part to counteract that.

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Suprak the Stud posted...

The polls were horrendous this year and I'm tempted to start ignoring them in presidential election years. 538 did what they could, but a lot of the data was incredibly bad this cycle.

Which is a bit odd since they were not nearly as bad in 2016 as the usual suspects tend to make them out to be.

Ashethan posted...

I think the polls were so wrong because a lot of "undecideds" were just Trump voters who didn't want to admit to voting for the guy who got 200k people killed.

I think it's much more likely that

A.) The type of people to even answer polls and not ignore them lean Democratic
B.) Trumpians could very well have trolled pollsters and lied to them

I haven't seen anyone talk about possibility B and I don't know if we have evidence for that, but it seems very likely.

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Suprak the Stud posted...

The polls were horrendous this year and I'm tempted to start ignoring them in presidential election years. 538 did what they could, but a lot of the data was incredibly bad this cycle.

I think the analysis 538 did was excellent. They explained that biden could withstand a 2016 polling error....

And he did

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StartTheMachine posted...

I think it's much more likely that

A.) The type of people to even answer polls and not ignore them lean Democratic
B.) Trumpians could very well have trolled pollsters and lied to them

I haven't seen anyone talk about possibility B and I don't know if we have evidence for that, but it seems very likely.

Still doesn't explain maine Senate

Like honestly I think that race is the holy grail because it makes so little sense which makes me think there is something systematically wrong with how polls are shaped. People voting for biden weren't trolling pollsters by saying they were voting gideon

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Suprak the Stud posted...

The polls were horrendous this year and I'm tempted to start ignoring them in presidential election years. 538 did what they could, but a lot of the data was incredibly bad this cycle.

Honestly I think a lot of it had to do with the stigma of voting for Trump. Whether or not its justified, who cares, but from my own personal, anecdotal evidence living in a highly democratic city....

The few people I ran into that were "undecided" were clearly voting for Trump if you had more than a five minute conversation about politics with them - even if they wouldn't admit it. I cant imagine being comfortable telling a complete stranger that if you won't even admit it to an acquaintance/friend.

Once again, anecdotal, but there's definitely a larger stigma of being pro-trump/conservative in this country than pro-biden/democratic. Not everywhere obviously but enough to make polls useless

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There was studies that said no one in large swathes rural areas respond to polls.

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Yeah I'd attribute it to a mix of bad sampling, again after 2016, and secret trump votes. Which also is up from 2016.

Whatever adjustments and fixes made were horribly wrong.

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This was much more than a 2016 polling error. They were only off by 1 point in 2016, and look to be off by 4+ points here. Maybe 5 points even, depending on how many more votes there actually are in CA/NY/IL.

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Obamacare being argued before SCOTUS now. Kavanaugh seems very skeptical about the plaintiffs' arguments to strike it down. Asked why Congress in 2017 would repeal part of the law but not the rest if Congress intended the repealed parts to be inseverable. It's a good argument - Congress itself severed the law in 2017.

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I think Trump is just an anomaly because 2018 was dead on.

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I think it comes down to making the wrong adjustments in the demographics of the voting population. The pollsters have lost sight who is actually voting and how it can differ from state to state.

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TheRock1525 posted...

I think Trump is just an anomaly because 2018 was dead on.

I think there's something to this but it's hard to know.

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Also, even if the 2010 Congress intended for the whole law to be inseverable, the 2017 Congress was not bound to follow them and could repeal or change their laws - which is what they did!

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We need to be really careful taking about national polling error given they still have tons of biden vote by mail outstanding.

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masterplum posted...

I think the analysis 538 did was excellent. They explained that biden could withstand a 2016 polling error....

And he did

Yeah, again, I can't blame 538. It looks like they'll get 48 of 50 states right and like you said, they put out an entire article like a week before saying "the reason we are confident Biden wins is because he withstands a polling error like 2016". But this is the second straight presdiential election where there has been a polling error like 2016. There might be something to Corrik's theory where a subset of Trump voters straight up refuse to answer polls because they are FAKE NEWS (thus creating a self fulfilling prophecy). But whatever it is this is now the second straight presidential election where the polls are off 3-4% points while in 2018 the polls were nearly perfect.

Their house analysis was also wayoff, but go look at any individual house race. Almost no polling, and if there is polling it is usually from a poorly rated company.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/house/indiana/5/

This was supposed to be one of the most competitive house races in the entire country. Five total polls, only one since mid August, and all companies are rated a C or worse. It makes races like this impossible to predict when the polling is so bad.

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There is a lot of vote still out there, but Nate SIlver is currently estimating 3-4% points when it is all counted so that is at least where I was getting my number from.

Of course, some individual races were impossibly bad. Maine senate, Wisconsin presidential, etc. There might be some specific issue with those polls, but I don't know enough to extrapolate what it is.

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Nevada is going to wind up being a larger margin than Clinton won it in 16 it looks like. In fact there isn't a single swing state that Biden underperformed, from a quick comparison.

Georgia batches are getting smaller and smaller. They must be waiting for a recount if they haven't called that yet.

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red sox 777 posted...

Obamacare being argued before SCOTUS now. Kavanaugh seems very skeptical about the plaintiffs' arguments to strike it down. Asked why Congress in 2017 would repeal part of the law but not the rest if Congress intended the repealed parts to be inseverable. It's a good argument - Congress itself severed the law in 2017.

yeah, i doubt SCOTUS will strike it down but they may strike down the mandate. just the fact that congress can easily make that decision on their own says there should be no issue.

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I dont think the national polls on average will look that bad when all is said and done, and most key races will be within the margin of error. Its also important to remember that most very safe states only get a handful of low quality polls, so you have to look at the swing states. Wisconsin was a wreck though, as were a few others. In 2016, Wisconsin had the excuse of being underpolled - I believe there were no polls right before election day, but this time there were loads. Iowa and Ohio were other really bad ones.

However, you do have to wonder how some of these individual polls get through, like that +17 in Wisconsin. Even as an outlier thats mad. And this does not happen the same way in other countries - in the UK youd have egg on your face if you were off 5%, but here were looking at individual pollsters off by 10%+. Is there not an American equivalent of the British Polling Council, designed to ensure standards? Im going to guess the answer is no. I suspect if a lot of these junk polls were dealt with you would have a much clearer picture.

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The +17 was from an "A+" pollster according to 538, and there was also a +11 from a different "A+" pollster in the leadup to the election.

I don't know the details of how 538 assigns those ratings and also that rating only says things about the pollster historically.
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Eh, we are already a week from election day - California is showing 89% in per 538. NY is showing 84% and IL is at 90%. There's not enough votes left to move it much beyond Biden +4, if it even gets to that, and the polls ended at Biden +8.4.

That Wisconsin +17 poll was rated A+ by 538. Actually, I suspect that when this is all done, we'll find that 538's pollster quality ratings end up being slightly negatively correlated with accuracy.

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https://twitter.com/CalebJHull/status/1326208083262124034?s=19

lol

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Ashethan posted...

I think the polls were so wrong because a lot of "undecideds" were just Trump voters who didn't want to admit to voting for the guy who got 200k people killed.

Pretty much this

There's other factors to consider like Dems maybe being overrepresented in polls, but never undersell the power of shame and cognitive dissonance

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lindsay graham makes my skin crawl by this point

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehA6bCn6k_0

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