In my town yesterday, there were Harris door knockers crisscrossing each street and waving and saying hello to each other.
ALL of them had an app they were looking at to tell them which houses to visit based on prior voting patterns and registrations.
I spoke to many of them. NONE of them had seen any trump folks at all.
NOT A SINGLE trump ground worker in a pretty swingy swing state. Nice job RNC, you really did a great job for your father-in law!
A lovely retired couple came to our house and I told them to not waste their time on me and she recoiled instantly. I smiled and said, NO NO NO, we are not your problem, go speak to someone who needs to be convinced and she and her husband broke out in big smiles. They said that all but one house they visited was very receptive to them.
I got no less than 4 text messages yesterday with the EXACT location of my polling place. No clue how they knew my address but they certainly did. Someone in the digital Harris campaign is very sharp.
But it all comes down to the results tomorrow. Hopeful but on edge.
We gave it all we had. America has to do the rest.
I don’t see how the polls can capture the full effect of a single issue - abortion - on this race. It’s not only Democratic women who want, or need, to have abortions, or who have things go wrong with a pregnancy. And I think we are finding out, the hard, tragic, way, how often pregnancies do go wrong, with tragic effects. And in all the reporting, not once did the stories say whether those women were Dem or Repub. They were just women, humans, and they have men who love them. I think, hope, pray, people are going to be surprised.
That’s one thing I liked about Chris’s conversation with Chuck Todd today was Chuck saying that he doesn’t give ANY credit to the poll aggregators, ie RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight for that exact reason!
Which *many* writers on Substack have written about and I’ve REPEATEDLY asked Chris to discuss! I am confident that Harris will win by 303 EC votes at the *least*, given the trash Republican polls and the underreporting of female voters and disaffected Republicans (especially suburban Republican women).
Q: Pundits have said that far right and right wing polls, pushing positive numbers for Trump, have been inserted into the mainstream, hoping to affect groups such as 538 and the overall consensus of the nation. How much, if any, does this affect groups such as 538, and how do they counter balance?
A: I have heard that a lot lately. I think a flood of GOP polls could influence, say, the Real Clear Politics averages because they tend to weight all polls equally.
I am more skeptical it will change the 538 averages because I believe they give different weights to different polls based on track record. And I think they don’t factor some polls in at all.
I like the Washington Post swing state polling averages because they purposely only use high-quality polls in it.
Don’t know how I missed that! Thanks, Sam! And clearly Chuck Todd, and *his* pollsters, don’t agree with the quote from Chris on 538, but it sure seemed to me like Chris was nodding in agreement with Chuck on *both* of the aggregators being too easy to manipulate…
I think that the polls in 2024 have overcompensated for their undercounting Trump support in 2016 and 2020, and are now undercounting Harris. The gender gap will be the demise of Trump, given the Dobbs decision that he initially took credit for, then walked back as women bled out when doctors were too frightened by state laws to help. That and his absolutely *abysmal* closing week that no poll is taking into consideration…
Polls are like NFL pre-game predictions, horse race handicappers picks, and CNBC stock analyst calls. They are entertaining, but they are determinative of nothing. The real question is, why do we pay them so much attention?
Who thinks people are totally honest with pollsters? Even face to face polling depends on honesty and how questions are worded.
The country's going in the wrong direction is presented to make it sound anti-incumbent...it very could be the country is tiring og magat lying, division, and an orange felon running for president. The real story is in the "tabs"...aka demograhics...
I wish I could sleep through the next few days. Recalling the stress and utter disappointment of 2016 over the past few days has been a lot for me. Trying to ignore the polls but then stoked when Selzer came out - an avalanche of emotions over here.
Crossing all of my crossables that we as a country are smarter than we were in 2016.
In simpler times, polling was a useful way to see the state of a race, and perhaps a tool for candidates to use to identify weaknesses in their campaigns. Now, in this sectarian world we live in, it’s become weaponized and used as a tool to suppress opposition votes, and drive news stories.
It’s in exactness, once a feature is now a bug. There are plenty of sources of data it could draw from to help to tell the election story as it is happening. Early voting, funding size, the variance between the number of women voting vs the number of men, as early voting begins for example. But it does not
There is a certain laziness by media and pundits that don’t want to, or don’t have time, to actually delve into the details in an attempt to be more accurate. Also, as both Nate’s have pointed out, polling companies, not wanting to be wrong, have deliberately excluded data of outliers they simply didn’t believe. This is a great example of how the toxicity of politics has socially engineered the pollsters to be not pollsters.
When one pollster actually does go out in a limb, the polling and media world are shocked. Calling it brave when actually it’s their job.
It’s only been in the last decade when Democracy has been under threat. This has raised the stakes about what roll polling plays in our lives. It’s as if someone, an angel perhaps, has told you that you are going to have an accident at some point, but we don’t know when. But you can look to polling to give you a clue. When the stakes are higher, inaccurate polling does damage.
When this election is done, if Democracy remains intact, I’d like a congressional commission to look into the polling industry with a view to regulating it. Putting in place standards, removing clearly biased polling companies, and actually prosecuting behavior which seeks to suppress voting, would be welcome.
In the meantime, I’d recommend taking a look at real time tools such as the following, which shows actual voting behavior vs prediction. Comparing the data here with polling has been beneficial. You can see common trends and differences. And because it uses better data sources you are more likely to craft a more realistic story than the media is telling you.
I agree with everything you have to say except the solution. I don't want to see government regulating the polling industry. Too much potential for one side or the other to put their thumb on the scale.
Great point. And it defines where we are at as a nation. On the one hand government regulation has helped to moderate extremism. On the other hand it has also created it. I’m not a libertarian, nor a nihilist. But I don’t have an answer.
Back in the "olden" days, polls were done by phone, period. Random-digit dialing. Nowadays, the majority of polls are "online opt-in" polls. These online polls are so easy to manipulate (especially by rogue websites from outside the US). Plus people don't always answer their phone anymore, with scam features. So these polls today are poor, I think: see 2022 and the so-called "red wave red wave red wave".
This is why I think we need to look at this Selzer poll more seriously. From the Selzer website "Selzer & Company conducts its polls using live interviewers calling both landline and mobile phones." As a result, Selzer has been very accurate with their polls.
I'm not saying Harris will win Iowa, but I am saying that polls nowadays are no longer using scientific methods like Selzer uses. They use online polling which can easily be manipulated (and I believe has been). Anyway, we will see in the next couple of days what will happen.
As a footnote, please check out how many early and mail-in votes there are, and the disproportionate amount of women are voting to men. The real-time numbers are the ones to look at more than online opt-in polls.
If the premise is 'polling is usually wrong', then logically it's useless. It's simply the political version of the two weeks of talking heads leading up to the Super Bowl. Do yourself a favor and ignore them, especially as they multiply....
I think the polling is wildly off because of a lot of reasons.
The first issue is the one in Nevada where they had a lot of people registered automagically in their driver's license renewals. This is creating potentially a lot of potential voters that may not vote or will not vote the way people expect them to vote.
I also point to Chuck Todd's discussion a few weeks back about polling and that pollsters are writing off "data outliers" that are not necessarily outliers because they do not fit their models.
Harris and other Democratic candidates are definitely beating the bushes to get out the vote as they came through our neighborhood late last week. Got to tell them I had already voted a couple of weeks back.
I am hoping for a pleasant surprise, but I fear that I am too optimistic.
The “wrong track” question is way too ambiguous. I would answer “yes, the country is on the wrong track question” because, for me, so many people still support Donald Trump. A convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, insurrectionist, cognitively impaired old man, pathological narcissist and racist. To name a few.
Totally agree, Joseph! I've been thinking this all along. The response to that question can mean so many different things, and cannot just be assumed to be a condemnation of the current administration.
We just don't know.
Our fingers are crossed.
In my town yesterday, there were Harris door knockers crisscrossing each street and waving and saying hello to each other.
ALL of them had an app they were looking at to tell them which houses to visit based on prior voting patterns and registrations.
I spoke to many of them. NONE of them had seen any trump folks at all.
NOT A SINGLE trump ground worker in a pretty swingy swing state. Nice job RNC, you really did a great job for your father-in law!
A lovely retired couple came to our house and I told them to not waste their time on me and she recoiled instantly. I smiled and said, NO NO NO, we are not your problem, go speak to someone who needs to be convinced and she and her husband broke out in big smiles. They said that all but one house they visited was very receptive to them.
I got no less than 4 text messages yesterday with the EXACT location of my polling place. No clue how they knew my address but they certainly did. Someone in the digital Harris campaign is very sharp.
But it all comes down to the results tomorrow. Hopeful but on edge.
We gave it all we had. America has to do the rest.
I think women are going to save us.
Thank you!
I don’t see how the polls can capture the full effect of a single issue - abortion - on this race. It’s not only Democratic women who want, or need, to have abortions, or who have things go wrong with a pregnancy. And I think we are finding out, the hard, tragic, way, how often pregnancies do go wrong, with tragic effects. And in all the reporting, not once did the stories say whether those women were Dem or Repub. They were just women, humans, and they have men who love them. I think, hope, pray, people are going to be surprised.
With the polling, how much are the polls "wrong" could be because of all the right wing leaning polls flooding the market?
A lot.
That’s one thing I liked about Chris’s conversation with Chuck Todd today was Chuck saying that he doesn’t give ANY credit to the poll aggregators, ie RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight for that exact reason!
Which *many* writers on Substack have written about and I’ve REPEATEDLY asked Chris to discuss! I am confident that Harris will win by 303 EC votes at the *least*, given the trash Republican polls and the underreporting of female voters and disaffected Republicans (especially suburban Republican women).
I believe he addressed it in a recent mailbag.
Boy, I’ve read every Mailbag over the last 4 weeks, hoping that Chris would opine, but I’ve never seen it.
Q: Pundits have said that far right and right wing polls, pushing positive numbers for Trump, have been inserted into the mainstream, hoping to affect groups such as 538 and the overall consensus of the nation. How much, if any, does this affect groups such as 538, and how do they counter balance?
A: I have heard that a lot lately. I think a flood of GOP polls could influence, say, the Real Clear Politics averages because they tend to weight all polls equally.
I am more skeptical it will change the 538 averages because I believe they give different weights to different polls based on track record. And I think they don’t factor some polls in at all.
I like the Washington Post swing state polling averages because they purposely only use high-quality polls in it.
Don’t know how I missed that! Thanks, Sam! And clearly Chuck Todd, and *his* pollsters, don’t agree with the quote from Chris on 538, but it sure seemed to me like Chris was nodding in agreement with Chuck on *both* of the aggregators being too easy to manipulate…
I think that the polls in 2024 have overcompensated for their undercounting Trump support in 2016 and 2020, and are now undercounting Harris. The gender gap will be the demise of Trump, given the Dobbs decision that he initially took credit for, then walked back as women bled out when doctors were too frightened by state laws to help. That and his absolutely *abysmal* closing week that no poll is taking into consideration…
Polls are like NFL pre-game predictions, horse race handicappers picks, and CNBC stock analyst calls. They are entertaining, but they are determinative of nothing. The real question is, why do we pay them so much attention?
Who thinks people are totally honest with pollsters? Even face to face polling depends on honesty and how questions are worded.
The country's going in the wrong direction is presented to make it sound anti-incumbent...it very could be the country is tiring og magat lying, division, and an orange felon running for president. The real story is in the "tabs"...aka demograhics...
I wish I could sleep through the next few days. Recalling the stress and utter disappointment of 2016 over the past few days has been a lot for me. Trying to ignore the polls but then stoked when Selzer came out - an avalanche of emotions over here.
Crossing all of my crossables that we as a country are smarter than we were in 2016.
Try some good comedy movies
In simpler times, polling was a useful way to see the state of a race, and perhaps a tool for candidates to use to identify weaknesses in their campaigns. Now, in this sectarian world we live in, it’s become weaponized and used as a tool to suppress opposition votes, and drive news stories.
It’s in exactness, once a feature is now a bug. There are plenty of sources of data it could draw from to help to tell the election story as it is happening. Early voting, funding size, the variance between the number of women voting vs the number of men, as early voting begins for example. But it does not
There is a certain laziness by media and pundits that don’t want to, or don’t have time, to actually delve into the details in an attempt to be more accurate. Also, as both Nate’s have pointed out, polling companies, not wanting to be wrong, have deliberately excluded data of outliers they simply didn’t believe. This is a great example of how the toxicity of politics has socially engineered the pollsters to be not pollsters.
When one pollster actually does go out in a limb, the polling and media world are shocked. Calling it brave when actually it’s their job.
It’s only been in the last decade when Democracy has been under threat. This has raised the stakes about what roll polling plays in our lives. It’s as if someone, an angel perhaps, has told you that you are going to have an accident at some point, but we don’t know when. But you can look to polling to give you a clue. When the stakes are higher, inaccurate polling does damage.
When this election is done, if Democracy remains intact, I’d like a congressional commission to look into the polling industry with a view to regulating it. Putting in place standards, removing clearly biased polling companies, and actually prosecuting behavior which seeks to suppress voting, would be welcome.
In the meantime, I’d recommend taking a look at real time tools such as the following, which shows actual voting behavior vs prediction. Comparing the data here with polling has been beneficial. You can see common trends and differences. And because it uses better data sources you are more likely to craft a more realistic story than the media is telling you.
Enjoy? AND VOTE FOR YOUR LIFE!!!
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/washington-results
I agree with everything you have to say except the solution. I don't want to see government regulating the polling industry. Too much potential for one side or the other to put their thumb on the scale.
Great point. And it defines where we are at as a nation. On the one hand government regulation has helped to moderate extremism. On the other hand it has also created it. I’m not a libertarian, nor a nihilist. But I don’t have an answer.
Only one of those polls shows the Dobbs effect, when a Red Wave was predicted.
Harris well over 300. They have completely misread the female vote’s size and intensity. This is 2022, not 2016 or 2020.
See you on the other side. Aka Wednesday.
Back in the "olden" days, polls were done by phone, period. Random-digit dialing. Nowadays, the majority of polls are "online opt-in" polls. These online polls are so easy to manipulate (especially by rogue websites from outside the US). Plus people don't always answer their phone anymore, with scam features. So these polls today are poor, I think: see 2022 and the so-called "red wave red wave red wave".
This is why I think we need to look at this Selzer poll more seriously. From the Selzer website "Selzer & Company conducts its polls using live interviewers calling both landline and mobile phones." As a result, Selzer has been very accurate with their polls.
I'm not saying Harris will win Iowa, but I am saying that polls nowadays are no longer using scientific methods like Selzer uses. They use online polling which can easily be manipulated (and I believe has been). Anyway, we will see in the next couple of days what will happen.
As a footnote, please check out how many early and mail-in votes there are, and the disproportionate amount of women are voting to men. The real-time numbers are the ones to look at more than online opt-in polls.
Alright. Why are so many people so obsessed on the polls. People make money doing them
They do serve a purpose. They can potentially reveal trends
I want to see someone call a race when there are three votes in
Having the government regulate them could be fun
Get some tea and honey. We need you for election day!
If the premise is 'polling is usually wrong', then logically it's useless. It's simply the political version of the two weeks of talking heads leading up to the Super Bowl. Do yourself a favor and ignore them, especially as they multiply....
I think the polling is wildly off because of a lot of reasons.
The first issue is the one in Nevada where they had a lot of people registered automagically in their driver's license renewals. This is creating potentially a lot of potential voters that may not vote or will not vote the way people expect them to vote.
I also point to Chuck Todd's discussion a few weeks back about polling and that pollsters are writing off "data outliers" that are not necessarily outliers because they do not fit their models.
Harris and other Democratic candidates are definitely beating the bushes to get out the vote as they came through our neighborhood late last week. Got to tell them I had already voted a couple of weeks back.
I am hoping for a pleasant surprise, but I fear that I am too optimistic.
This one is SO EZ to call, cmon man!!
3/4 of the country think and believe we are on the wrong track. The last thing people want is more of the same….
The “wrong track” question is way too ambiguous. I would answer “yes, the country is on the wrong track question” because, for me, so many people still support Donald Trump. A convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, insurrectionist, cognitively impaired old man, pathological narcissist and racist. To name a few.
Totally agree, Joseph! I've been thinking this all along. The response to that question can mean so many different things, and cannot just be assumed to be a condemnation of the current administration.
I've made that same comment. It's become a meaningless question.
Wait & see!
A question: If you're wrong about the election, will you admit it?
Dutch, my friend, numbers!!!
That's what was said in 2022, when there was supposed to be a "red wave red wave red wave."
Best of luck Richard!
The polling is so close it would suggest that half the country agrees with you. And the other half doesn’t.
Let’s see tomorrow! 😎