POTUS/General Election Thread 2020 + Aftermath

[Montmorency]

Polling around the world tends to be more left than the results. UK, USA and Australia all showed stronger shifts to the left in polls vs the actual election results.

Why do you think there is a systematic tendency across elections?

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...partisan-bias/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...te-polls-been/

If you skim through those articles, you will see that in US presidential elections the national polling bias changes every election, often toward alternating parties, and state polls may have their own bias divergent from national polls' bias.

The 2012 Obama-Romney election was the latest episode of significant Republican bias in polling. Usually problems with polls can be explained in methodological terms. For example, in 2016 it was found that a major factor underrepresenting Republican support in polls was nonweighting of education (i.e. non-college voters, especially non-college whites). These and other oversights have been adjusted for this cycle.

Partisan bias in sub-presidential races also constantly fluctuates.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...ard-democrats/


Another recent non-American case, but where the polls were off:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...-were-way-off/

Emmanuel Macron’s 32-percentage-point victory in France’s presidential election runoff may end up being touted as a triumph for French pollsters, who consistently gave him a huge advantage. But it shouldn’t be. The polls leading up to the contest between the centrist Macron and his far-right opponent were the least predictive in French history, underestimating Macron’s support, rather than Marine Le Pen’s, to the surprise of some. ... The average poll conducted in the final two weeks of the campaign gave Macron a far smaller lead (22 percentage points) than he ended up winning by (32 points), for a 10-point miss. In the eight previous presidential election runoffs, dating back to 1969, the average poll missed the margin between the first- and second-place finishers by only 3.9 points.

Sorry, but this just seems like one of those common political myths.

[ReluctantSamurai]

I don't pay much attention to polls, just a big distraction, IMHO. What bodes dire for Fearless Leader is that since 1900, only one president has ever won a second term when a recession started in the last term of presidency...William McKinley in 1900.

https://www.newsweek.com/heres-all-p...ssions-1493467

Since then, the four presidents who ran for a second term during such an economic downturn—William Taft in 1912, Herber Hoover in 1932, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992—were unsuccessful.

Old article, but the warning is the same...nothing sways voters like a recession.

Similar article in Bloomberg:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...year-recession

The sudden turnaround in the labor market raised the possibility that the economy could grow fast enough between now and November for Trump to defy the historical record and win another term.

I don't know which Kool-Aid Bloomberg was drinking to make that statement, as it took at least four years to climb out of the last recession in 2008, and the economic situation in the US is tied to the pandemic like flies on on dung heap. And it isn't getting better anytime soon.

[Montmorency]

I don't pay much attention to polls, just a big distraction, IMHO. What bodes dire for Fearless Leader is that since 1900, only one president has ever won a second term when a recession started in the last term of presidency...William McKinley in 1900.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/17/polit...ump/index.html

The official portraits of former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were removed from the Grand Foyer of the White House within the last week, aides told CNN, and replaced by those of two Republican presidents who served more than a century ago.

White House tradition calls for portraits of the most recent American presidents to be given the most prominent placement, in the entrance of the executive mansion, visible to guests during official events.
That was the case through at least July 8, when President Donald Trump welcomed Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The two stood in the Cross Hall of the White House and made remarks, with the portraits of Clinton and Bush essentially looking on as they had been throughout Trump's first term. But in the days after after that, the Clinton and Bush portraits were moved into the Old Family Dining Room, a small, rarely used room that is not seen by most visitors. That places the paintings well outside of Trump's vantage point in the White House. In their previous location, the pictures would have been seen daily as Trump descends the staircase from his third floor private residence or when he hosts events on the state floor of the White House. Now, they hang in a space used mainly for storing unused tablecloths and furniture. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The portrait of former President Barack Obama is not expected to be unveiled for a formal ceremony during Trump's first term, a sign of the bitter relationship between the 44th and 45th presidents. Trump has accused Obama of unsubstantiated and unspecified crimes, and has questioned whether Obama was born in the US for years.

The Bush portrait has been replaced by that of William McKinley, the nation's 25th president, who was assassinated in 1901, and the Clinton portrait has been replaced by one of Theodore Roosevelt, who succeeded McKinley, three people who have seen the portraits this week tell CNN. Trump has shown more of an affinity for those predecessors than his more recent ones.

[ReluctantSamurai]

The Bush portrait has been replaced by that of William McKinley, the nation's 25th president

You can bet your a$$ he knows the significance of William McKinley

[Papewaio]

Why do you think there is a systematic tendency across elections?

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...partisan-bias/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...te-polls-been/

If you skim through those articles, you will see that in US presidential elections the national polling bias changes every election, often toward alternating parties, and state polls may have their own bias divergent from national polls' bias.

The 2012 Obama-Romney election was the latest episode of significant Republican bias in polling. Usually problems with polls can be explained in methodological terms. For example, in 2016 it was found that a major factor underrepresenting Republican support in polls was nonweighting of education (i.e. non-college voters, especially non-college whites). These and other oversights have been adjusted for this cycle.

Partisan bias in sub-presidential races also constantly fluctuates.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...ard-democrats/


Another recent non-American case, but where the polls were off:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...-were-way-off/



Sorry, but this just seems like one of those common political myths.

I wouldn't use French politics as the basis. They have a very strong united but small right wing base, and a very broad disjointed left. In the first round it is quite common to have the right wing candidate poll higher than most if not all of the left wing candidates. Then in the final round all the left wing voters rally around a single choice.

What works differently in the USA is that it isn't a two round system nor a preferential voting system. Nor is there compulsory voting either, and by all means it seems stacked with gerrymandering (straight out corrupt in most nations) and making it difficult to vote. So whilst the polls are of a random sample of the voting age people, it doesn't reflect how many are going to actually vote.

UK has a slightly different issue where it is difficult for the younger lefter crowd to take time off to vote at the elections.

Australia - election boundaries are set by an independent commission, voting it is on a weekend, postal votes are common, preferential voting is (technically) compulsory with a fine for not attending. The votes still tend to be more right voting than left than indicated in polling. This might be due to the preferential voting and the more extreme right wing groups with a smaller base not getting polled (literally had an idiot Senator from One Nation in on 12 votes - need a massive sample size to capture that in a poll).

[Idaho]

The tactics seem pretty clear from trump and pompeo: attack China/communism and conflate those with "enemies within".

I've become slightly obsessed with watching right-wing nut job YouTube and Twitter. The level of detachment from reality is terrifying. There is a clique of people who genuinely think trump is some kind of moral genius who is the only defence we have to communism (the latter being I'll defined other than is being "Stalin" and "bad").

[ReluctantSamurai]

The level of detachment from reality is terrifying. There is a clique of people who genuinely think trump is some kind of moral genius who is the only defence we have to communism

What's actually scary is that these people are too stupid to realize that if he gets re-elected, what you're seeing in Portland Oregon (and coming soon to a city near you), will be repeated as long as he can get away with it. Won't hear these morons bitching about a loss of personal freedoms until such tactics involves them. Republicans should also be concerned as this is definitely not the kind of federalism they espouse. But it's not surprising since Fearless Leader admires such people as Putin, Kim Jong-un, and others like them.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

What's actually scary is that these people are too stupid to realize that if he gets re-elected, what you're seeing in Portland Oregon (and coming soon to a city near you), will be repeated as long as he can get away with it. Won't hear these morons bitching about a loss of personal freedoms until such tactics involves them. Republicans should also be concerned as this is definitely not the kind of federalism they espouse. But it's not surprising since Fearless Leader admires such people as Putin, Kim Jong-un, and others like them.

It is not the kind of federalism conservatives such as myself espouse. Max Boot, George Will, P.J. O'Rourke, Jennifer Rubin...conservatives true to their principles have great trouble supporting that yutz.

But make no mistake, Trump has taken the reins of the party and the GOP now embodies -- overtly or tacitly -- has own brand of Demagogic Pseudo-fascism. Trumpers want to kick ass and ignore the names because they have to oppose the people who are really destroying America -- liberal socialists.

The GOP needs to be handed a soup-to-nuts electoral debacle that keeps the party out of power for the better part of a decade. THEN, perhaps they will re-think the "kill the left at all costs" mantra crap that is gutting American conservatism.

[Hooahguy]

I give credit to the Lincoln Project for actually committing to not turning around to oppose Dems after the election if Biden wins:

The group is preparing to vehemently oppose efforts by GOP senators to obstruct and stymie Biden’s agenda, should he win the presidency, Weaver confirmed.
...

But will the Lincoln Project remain committed to concrete expansions of voting rights after Trump is gone? Weaver said yes, noting it will keep advocating for automatic voter registration and a restored Voting Rights Act, and continue fighting efforts to “make it difficult for black people or poor people to vote.”

Even though I love their ads, Ive been wary of the LP. If they actually follow through with this then maybe Ill begin to trust them a bit more. I think having two main parties that operate in good faith is good for America, so if they can rebuild the GOP (or something else) into a party that doesnt want to turn us into a dictatorship, then more power to them.

[a completely inoffensive name]

I give credit to the Lincoln Project for actually committing to not turning around to oppose Dems after the election if Biden wins:

Even though I love their ads, Ive been wary of the LP. If they actually follow through with this then maybe Ill begin to trust them a bit more. I think having two main parties that operate in good faith is good for America, so if they can rebuild the GOP (or something else) into a party that doesnt want to turn us into a dictatorship, then more power to them.

They arn't looking to take back the Republican Party 'after Trump', they have crossed the Rubicon so to speak they can't return. They are looking to bolster a conservative faction within the Democratic Party.

Once Trump is OOO and the Dem coalition is in power they will be running campaign ads targeting moderate and conservatives Dems to push out Progressive agenda. They are still neocons at heart.

[Montmorency]

I wouldn't use French politics as the basis. They have a very strong united but small right wing base, and a very broad disjointed left. In the first round it is quite common to have the right wing candidate poll higher than most if not all of the left wing candidates. Then in the final round all the left wing voters rally around a single choice.

Why was the polling gap in 2017 France greater than in all national elections since at least 1969? 10.2% compared to a prior average of 3.9%. The nearest polling gap was in 2002 between Chirac and Le Pen pere. What's the theory here?

And further down in the article, a look at other Euro elections:

Some analysts have argued that people are afraid to admit that they are voting for a far-right candidate such as Le Pen because they don’t want to give a socially undesirable response. That theory was bolstered twice last year, both when the “leave” vote in the U.K. referendum over leaving the European Union did slightly better than polls suggested and when Trump outperformed his polling. But the “shy insert-far-right-candidate here” theory doesn’t hold up when you look at a larger sample of European elections. And it didn’t hold up in France: There was no systematic bias in the polling against the far-right candidate (Le Pen).

As my colleague Nate Silver has pointed out, right-wing populist candidates and parties (in local and parliamentary elections) have, on average, pretty much matched their polling averages3 in European elections since 2012.

Indeed, the French presidential election is the sixth consecutive European election in which the populist right-wing candidate or party underperformed its polling.

None of this is to say that there aren’t “shy voters” in the electorate. It’s just that we may be thinking about them in the wrong way. Instead of undercounting conservative support because people are afraid to give a socially undesirable response, the polls may simply be missing unenthusiastic supporters — people who aren’t excited about their candidate enough to answer a poll but still vote. In fact, when the idea of a “shy” voter was originally formed in 1992, it had nothing to do with right-wing populists. Instead, pollsters were underestimating the strength of the mainstream and relatively milquetoast Conservative Party in the U.K.
[...]
Maybe we should talk less about “shy” voters and more about “apathetic” voters or “reluctant” voters.

What works differently in the USA is that it isn't a two round system nor a preferential voting system. Nor is there compulsory voting either, and by all means it seems stacked with gerrymandering (straight out corrupt in most nations) and making it difficult to vote. So whilst the polls are of a random sample of the voting age people, it doesn't reflect how many are going to actually vote.

Here is the Florida GOP and the federal courts conspiring to suppress the votes of ex-felons, upon whom the former have been striving to impose an unconstitutional poll tax in the form of conditioning voter registration on payment of fines. They've been at it for 1.5 years, since the Florida electorate approved reenfranchisement in a referendum. For extra Kafkaism, Florida does not even maintain proper records on what fines a given applicant owes, with the cherry on top being that the backlog of applications cannot be completed before the 2024 election at current staffing levels. Of course, trying to vote without the satisfaction of the state would be another felony...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/...-poll-tax.html

You all might recall that I was much more sanguine about the success of reenfranchisement in early 2019.

Process factors beyond the immediate scope of polling, such as Democratic-intending voters going through more trouble voting or getting suppressed by the government, can certainly skew results in theory, assuming pollsters don't try to correct for it. But does it in practice? And to the extent it does, it would have to - in the US - manifest in specific states where these are extant factors. They wouldn't be in all or even most states. You would expect it in Southern and midWestern states in particular. Supporting evidence might be the polling in 2018 that had Dems as mild favorites for the Senate and Gov seats in Florida, but turned into narrow Republican victories. For most recent presidential elections Florida polling has indeed had a Democratic skew. On the other hand, Florida polls - like state polls in general - had a Republican skew in 2012 (when Obama won the state again). This occurred in the context of a national Republican skew in polling that cycle, which implicates internal polling design and not government action.

At all levels, the valence and magnitude of bias change every election, and tends to be associated with identifiable methodological choices that can be adjusted. If one simply assumes a particular static bias, their predictions of electoral outcomes will not be very accurate going by history. Systematic polling bias for left parties has to be measured and analyzed, not just hypothesized.

Australia - election boundaries are set by an independent commission, voting it is on a weekend, postal votes are common, preferential voting is (technically) compulsory with a fine for not attending. The votes still tend to be more right voting than left than indicated in polling. This might be due to the preferential voting and the more extreme right wing groups with a smaller base not getting polled (literally had an idiot Senator from One Nation in on 12 votes - need a massive sample size to capture that in a poll).

The problem is that in the second-party preferred vote the mainstream center-right and center-left parties each typically pull about 50% of the vote. That means polling in aggregate will fall within a single polling error at least. Every election. These are close elections. From what I can see on Wiki Australian polling is precise.


Bottom line is, Biden is multiple polling errors (MOE) ahead of Trump currently, and if that continues to hold until November then going by the entire history of polling a Trump victory would be a vanishingly-unlikely event. The real bias might be the lure of licentious, if often relevant, speculation on tail-end probabilities.

(I will admit that there is clearly an elevated vulnerability in this cycle to unprecedented "rigging" measures, but almost definitionally polling cannot account for lawlessness on such an unprecedented (in our context) scale, so that's kind of beside the point of just how such a hazard might manifest. No poll can weight for a coup, for example. And in practice, as I've been saying, to the extent the electoral process functions semi-normally, sufficient key states to do not have Republicans in charge of the electoral apparatus that the threat remains a mostly-rhetorical one.)