Right now Nate Silver’s models modestly favor Trump, while more blue-friendly G. Elliot Morris’s model… also modestly favors Trump (at the time of this writing). My overall view of these forecasters is that, except when people were using them to convince Joe Biden not to drop out of the race, they can be safely ignored. The election is too close (and polling too inexact) for them to be useful. The main use they have is making the outcome a known unknown to anyone that isn’t very motivated in their thinking. There’s a lot of motivated thinking out there, though.
There’s a projection out there that when polls are favorable to Democrats then Republicans become defiant, while when the polls are favorable to Republicans then Democrats become extremely anxious. I think both of these reactions make a good deal of sense. For Republicans, if Trump is behind there is almost nothing anybody can do about it. Trump isn’t going to change his strategy or his tune. It’s just not going to happen. All you can do is hope for the best, and there are some strategic advantages to projected confidence. Not the least of which it will provide you with an excuse later to disregard the results, if you are so inclined (and they appear very inclined). On the other hand, Democrats have a less obstinate candidate in Kamala Harris and if polls aren’t favorable she can and will tune her message or change her strategy by doing things like, say, going on Fox News.
We’re approaching the point, however, where the election is basically set and there isn’t time for Harris to change what she’s doing. We could be passing that corridor as we speak, in fact. At that point, it probably does start to make more sense to project confidence whether you feel it or not or whether it’s supported by the data or not. Make no mistake, though: It’s not supported by the data. For my part, gun to head, I believe that Harris is going to win but when Mom asks I still tell her it’s a 50/50 race. In my gut I believe more optimistically that Harris will win, much as I believed Hillary Clinton would 8 years ago.
Nate Silver has 24 reasons that Harris might win, which I recommend reading if you don’t genuinely think that Trump could win or just don’t understand how he possibly could given… everything.
Notably most of these reasons actually have little to do with Harris herself. I count three that involve decisions she’s made and two or three that she is specifically hurt by more than another candidate would be, but that are out of her control. There are a handful more that could qualify but I’ll put in the “Joe Biden” basket instead. Which is to say this list argues forcefully that whatever challenges Harris faces, it would be harder with Biden. It also argues that replacing Biden with someone else may have been a better move, though my view was and is that it was never going to be anyone but Biden and Harris.
By and large I’ve been reasonably pleased with Harris’s campaign. I thought she would be a power in 2020 but crashed on take-off. When she was selected for VP, I shrugged and thought she was tomorrow’s problem. Perhaps it was motivated thinking because I was anxious to dump Biden after the debate1, but I presented something of an optimistic case for Harris. She might not be a strong candidate in general, but she was well suited for an abbreviated campaign against Donald J Trump where she didn’t have enough freedom to set her own tone.
My appraisal ended up being wrong. However much she spent 2019 and 2020 stepping on rakes, she completely understood the assignment, had a very clear eye of what went wrong in 2016 and in her own 2020 campaign, and was able to strike her own tone very quickly. She didn’t use the prosecutor voice that I thought was a good fit, but instead took a “looking forward” posture that worked even better. None of this is to say that I think she has run the perfect campaign (I liked her disavowal of 2020 posture but she never came up with an answer to an answerable question) or that she is a great candidate (she’s not great off-the-cuff), but she is a solid “B” or maybe even “B+” when I was expecting a C. And the public really does seem more comfortable with Trump than I was hoping. Unfortunately, it’s also the case that she is facing some stronger headwinds than I had hoped she would. I was never confident that she would win, though. Only that Biden was almost certain to lose.
Will it be enough? I don’t know. I feel about Harris the same way I did about Biden in 2020. He wasn’t my first choice, or my second, but he was the best of the viable options. Biden had to go. There was never any way you were going to skip past the Vice President (and even if they had been she was very adept at consolidating party support). In the end, you go with what you got.
- Disclosure: My view up to the debate was that Biden’s age was a liability but one voters would get over when it came down to it and it was still preferable to the only alternative, Harris. I could have overlooked the debate but the campaign’s response to it indicated to me that there were hard limits on his ability to campaign and be president at the same time. I had assumed up to that point that Biden would kick campaigning into high gear as the election neared, but as Team Biden talked about earlier bedtimes as the best solution, I came to the determination that the public’s concerns actually had foundation. If the debate were a one-off the public would likely get past it, but the campaign’s response convinced me that it wasn’t and that the public perception wouldn’t change because… it was accurate.
1. Trump could win.
2. I think the GOP are much better at flooding the zone with sh@t from bad pollsters and the aggregators like 538 and Silver are not as good at discounting the sh@t as they say they are.
2a. Not all the flooders get labeled as partisan Republican. Trafalgar Group does (currently has +3 for Trump in PA which seems risible) but other groups like TIPP Insights and Atlas Intel and RMG Research do not but it takes approximately 2 minutes or less of Googling to find their elephant undies. TIPP Insight is filled with MAGA style clickbait on their website. Atlas Intel is connected a right-libertarian think tank that has been around since 1946. RMG Research is Rammussen’s new gig. Patriot Polling is two college aged Republicans I don’t know why these groups do not get discounted more.
3. Marist College (6 on 538’s pollster rankings) had a poll with Harris up 5 out on October 16th. I have not seen this mentioned by the Times, 538, or Silver.
4. Early voting is going well for the Democrats where it needs to go well. This could change or it could you know, actually be something but if something is good for the Democrats, the rule is that it must be discounted or denied seemingly: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/early-voteReport
I’ve been seeing non-GOP polls moving in the wrong direction. I will share them as they arrive if that will help.
According to Elliot Morris of 538 (who generally spins left), if you take out the partisan polls and the “zone-flooders” the trends don’t change:
https://x.com/gelliottmorris/status/1847384546129695223
OTOH, Morris now does have Harris as the slight favorite at the moment. Still close to 50/50.Report
It is a coin toss.Report
You can’t defend against accusations f liberal bias by reporting accurately on the political fortunes of liberals. Everyone knows this.Report
I look at the landscape and I have no idea what’s going on.
Ohio’s Sharrod Brown is running an ad talking about how he’s willing to work with Trump.
Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin is running an ad talking about how Trump signed her Made in America bill.
Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin is running an ad talking about how she wrote a law that Trump signed.
How do you read that? My immediate guess is that they’ve looked at the internals and concluded that Trump is going to win and it’s better to hedge than to lose.
But there is so much static and so much churn that that seems like… I don’t know. We knew that Trump was going to lose all the way back in August, right?
Silver talked about how Biden was on track to lose the Popular Vote by more than a couple of points by the time that he dropped out and how that would be a challenge to overcome for a seasoned politician, no matter who they were, if they stepped in and took over.
But Trump is Trump, right? He’s got one hell of a hard, low, ceiling.
What irritates me is that, no matter who wins, the post-mortem will be the easiest thing in the world to write. “Well, of course (insert name here) lost! Let’s list the reasons!”
And the reasons just come naturally.Report
Trump is almost certainly going to win Ohio. The other two are being moronsReport
That’s probably a comforting thought.Report
Or it is correct? I remember when everyone panicked in 2022 and it was wrongReport
If it gives you endorphins, “correct” should not be your first conclusion.Report
“Anything that confirms all your priors should be immediately suspect” – Scott AlexanderReport
Not necessarily moronic- even if Harris wins the Trump positivish adds help those Senate candidates appeal to squishy Trump voters. In WI and OH especially playing to that bunch is smart even if it gives us highly engaged leftier voters a sad. At the same time I don’t think it indicates that either candidate necessarily thinks Trump is going to win- just that saying vaguely nicish things about some aspects of him is a way to play for votes and good for them for doing so.Report
I think “he is an existential threat to democracy but I can work with him” is a very mixed message but your mileage may vary.
Everyone is ignoring early voting dataReport
Harris believed Biden’s accusers back in 2020.
It’s the way game is played.Report
I don’t think of it as ignoring early voting data as being un-reassured by it. And, frankly, since Complacency is one of the two great plagues of Democrats along with its vile twin Purity, I’m not worried about us leftists being anxious about the outcome. Anxiety is good. Go vote. Go encourage some low engagement acquaintance to vote. I’ve done several myself.
As for the Senators- I don’t give one flat fart what somewhat nice things they say the great Pumpkin so long as they end up in the Senate and neither should you.Report
I don’t think anyone is being complacent but I don’t think I need to take pollsters word for it at partisan polls flooding the zone having no effect because all they do is say it. They don’t quite show their work.
Quantus turns out to be for Rs as well
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/
Activote does their polling via app and that just seems like a bad system.
Garbage In, Garbage Out is a thing.
Anxiety is good to an extent but it also looks like silly season and there is nothing wrong with a little steel and confidence tooReport
I have no idea how it’s actually going to turn out. The polls are too close. The squishier indicators look nice but they looked fine in ’16 too. And on top of it I’m going to be on a cruise on election day with spotty internet access. It’s going to be a unique election for me to watch, that is for sure.
I’m still predicting and hoping for a Harris win and for the Dems to run the table but after ’16 I simply can’t have any strong confidence about it.
One thought tho: Harris has a lavishly funded ground game and my understanding is Trump simply doesn’t. Will this be a good election for us to measure if that element actually makes a difference or if it’s pure election industry grift?Report
I think we may learn a lot in this election about campaigning and turnout.Report
“I’m going to be on a cruise on election day”
Hey, we are too! I’ll bring my OT monocle so you can recognize me if we’re on the same ship.Report
Small world! I’m cruising out of LA to Baja Mexico for a friends 50th birthday. I’ll keep an eye out for you. I hope your cruise goes very well.Report
Dang, unless things go wildly astray, we’ll be in the Caribbean.Report
That’s my normal haunting grounds for cruising but husbando wanted something new.Report
I’d probably rather not do Caribbean at this point in my life… but for various reasons simplicity of travel was a factor. So I get the sentiment.Report
Just for grins, the NWS’s long-term model has a tropical storm sideswiping the Keys and Miami/Dade on Monday, Nov 4. Farther north along the coast on Nov 5.Report
As long as it keeps to that time table, we should be ok — we should be somewhere south of Cuba by that time. Of course, they’re also saying there’s a low probability for a tropical storm in the western Caribbean week after next… The Ocean is a fickle…beast.Report
I’m making my best effort not to pay attention to any of the polling at this point. Early in person voting opens here next week. I”ve set aside time to go cast my ballot. After that I will have done all I personally can do and the outcome will be what it will be.Report
The most important thing that we do know at this point is that no matter which way the election goes, nothing will be resolved.
The outcome will be razor tight hinging on a few regions in a few states, and the losing side can plausibly claim that next time, with just a little more effort, they could win.
Andcsecond, the positions and issues are binary with no room for negotiation or compromise: Reproductive rights, the status of queer people in society, the rights of immigrants legal or otherwise- these don’t have any room for creative negotiation or triangulation.
So buckle up, we are in for a bumpy decade or three.Report
Twitter user VB Knives had a pretty interesting insight:
Report
One would think that the thermostatic trends will be against whoever wins but I don’t know that you could call the result pyrrhic. It’s still 4 years holding the most powerful office on the planet.Report
Someone pointed out (so don’t blame me if it’s wrong though I can’t think of any counter-examples) that this could be the first time since 1988 that a president comes into office without their party effectively controlling both houses of congress.Report
I remember the late 90’s somewhat fondly (ah, to be a newlywed in the post-cold-war era…) and I remember 2015 and 2016 somewhat fondly (ah, to be a blogger on the internet right before the most important election of our lifetimes…) and there are worse things than Gridlock.
I mean, I remember the early 80’s fondly too, but a lot of that is merely being an adolescent.Report
It’s possible but I think the House could be a Democratic pickup and there is a far but not implausible chance of Democrats retaining the Senate in a 50-50 with Walz as the tiebreaker.Report
If Harris wins, it’s probably without the senate.
If Trump wins, it’s maybe without the house.
Either way, they won’t have control of both houses. The only way someone does is if Trump wins and Dems fall short in the House.Report
Maybe, maybe not.
1. Negative partisanship might mean we are headed for an era of one-term Presidents. This is a distinct possibility
2. The trillion dollar question with Trump is whether he is one of a kind. So far the next generation of mini-Trumps or local Trumps has fallen flat on its face. Maybe some will squeak a victory this November but most, if not all, of the non-partisan polling a good deal of the R-partisan polling has shown safe leads for the Democratic candidates for Senate in swing states. Arizona was a very narrow Biden victory in 2020.
So what happens to the GOP if Trump is one of a kind in his ability to excite low propensity voters in ways Vance and Hawley are not?Report
Horses for Courses.
The only person who could have beaten Clinton in 2016 was Trump.
The only guy who could have beaten Trump in 2020 was Biden.
2024? Well, there’s all sorts of hypotheticals swirling around with 2024.
Remember the 20 minutes we thought DeSantis was likely to be the nominee? (“DeSantis is even worse than Trump!” was floating around for a second or two.)
Could DeSantis have beaten Biden? Could he have beaten Harris?
I’ve heard it argued that Harris is an unnaturally weak candidate… is that true?
I mean, is she the only one who could beat Trump in 2024?
Or is Trump the only one who could beat her?
How do we keep nominating the only person who could lose to this other joker?Report
The GOP have spent the better part of the last 5 decades marching to this exact point. When TFG looses they will find another demagogue so they can achieve their fever dreams.Report
Trumpism exists in every corner of the GOP.
Every week brings a new horror of illiberalism from one of the GOP run states, having nothing to do with Trump.
Can a DeSantis or Abbot win nationally?
Hard to tell, but we know for a fact that for at least the foreseeable future, the governing majority of about half the states will be Trumpists.Report
Josh Marshall on flooding the zone: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/are-right-wing-pollsters-flooding-the-zone/sharetoken/893b671b-a39b-47b6-a11a-233c08d084edReport
The guy whose closing argument is, “A dead professional golfer had a huge cock!” has a 50/50 chance of winning a Presidential election.Report
He could have made that point on the Hawk Tuah gal’s podcast, too.Report
Idiocracy was set 500 years in the future.Report
FWIW, I don’t think Trump exactly has a 50 percent chance of victory, it is probably a bit less despite the aggregators and Nate Silver. It is really the bloody electoral college that gives him an advantage. If Trump were running in the popular vote, this would be like when the Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan for the third time and were mocked for it.
That being said, peoples views on the economy are radically out of joint with the actual state of the economy and people have soured on immigration and it seems impossible for the media not to normalize Trump even when it tries hard not to.Report
They don’t seem to be trying very hard to avoid normalizing him.Report
Concurred completely/Report
My 50/50 is an uninformed prior, since I’ve concluded that polling and polling aggregators are very weak evidence of anything this cycle.
Perhaps ironically the polling aggregators mostly seem to agree with me.Report
Let’s look at the polls after the weekend of anxiety where the only things coming out were from right-wing pollsters:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/
Morning Consult has Harris up 4 in its October 17-20 poll, Ipsos/Reuters has her up 3. TIPP Insights (right-wing) went from +2 to + 1 to Even in three days. Trafalgar Group and Insider Advantage (both risible in their blatant right wing partisan undies) have a bunch of swing states even or try to have Trump winning but he is winning in states where early voting data shows strong Democratic turn out.
ActiVote, the polling app which swears it can’t be gamed has Trump with +9 in a 400 LV poll between October 7-20.
Why am I supposed to take any of these clowns seriously or at their word?Report
Vibes man.Report
The ‘weird’ thing about the poll wars, at least to me, is the obvious desire for confirmation that your preferred candidate is going to win.
And the ‘weirder’ thing about this cycle vs. 2016 is that calling the election a statistical dead heat has driven that sort of poll watcher completely mad.
And the ‘weirdest’ thing of all is that 50% of those sorts of persons will be 100% validated in their unhinged understanding of what polling models do.Report
Here’s the thing that keeps bugging me: there should be some number of polls wrong in the opposite direction.
Let’s say that the final numbers are 48.8 to 49.2 with a handful of votes to the crank parties.
This strikes me as a situation where 80% of the polls should predict 49.2 to win and 20% of the polls should have predicted 48.8 to win.
Or, hell, 90% and 10%.
Just based on nothing but sampling error.
But if 100% of the polls predict 49.2, there is a problem somewhere.
People are *STILL* pissed off at Silver for saying Trump had a one-third chance in 2016.Report
Statistics are funny things aren’t they? Afterall, polling is just a form of statistical modeling, and as long as pollsters are transparent about methodologies, we can understand their models and in turn their conclusions.
You don’t see lots of polls “wrongly” predicting the other way because they don’t choose models that would land them there. What with news and reality having a liberal bias and all.
And Silver was not wrong in 2016. Something having a probability of 33% can – and obviously did – happen. It just may be distasteful.Report
I’m sure you remember this Upshot article: We Gave Four Good Pollsters the Same Raw Data. They Had Four Different Results.
We had three Clinton picks and one Trump pick for this data.
This doesn’t strike me as one side getting things wrong and the other side getting it right.
It strikes me as four reasonable models reasonably measuring a reasonably close election.
I don’t think that the 2016 polls “got it wrong” because they predicted a Clinton win.
I think that the 2016 polls “got it wrong” because *ALL* of them predicted a Clinton win. About a quarter of them should have picked Trump.
Hell, maybe even a third.Report
Silver got to 1/3rd somehow didn’t he?Report
Silver said that there was a 1/3rd chance of a Trump squeaker, 1/3rd chance of a Clinton squeaker, and a 1/3rd chance of a Clinton blowout.
You’d think that, if Silver was right in his analysis, that other pollsters out there should have had a few willing to say “yeah, we’ve got a Trump win”.
Maybe with a “it is more in sadness than in anger that I must report that our numbers show that Trump wins” at the beginning to make sure that they keep getting invites to the various cocktail parties.Report
I don’t think that that’s what the people with ‘models’ vs. simple aggregators are doing.
Modeling is a Data Science project on top of an aggregation project. People are getting mad about the ‘modeling’ aspect but they are getting mad about the wrong things.
The models aren’t predicting the vote percentage of 49.2%, they are saying that the models running multiple cycles show candidate #1 winning 49.2% of the time and therefore candidate #2 winning 50.8% of the time (technically most models are showing ~.2% chance of tie).
The models have, in fact, been on different sides of the 50% divide both among other models and the same model itself at different points of time. A quick google search showed Harris a month ago was favored 58% down to 52% *chance to win* among the modelers. Now the models are even more variable with some showing *Trump* has 51% to win with others showing *Harris* 52% chance to win. Which is why all of them are basically saying the outcome can’t be statistically differentiated from 50/50 (with a very small chance of a tie).
What’s dumb, IMO, is ‘preferring’ a model that favors your candidate *as if* it’s giving you a better chance to win — that model has in fact predicted that the OTHER candidate will win in with it’s own ‘biases’ nearly 50% of the time. Sometimes that very model will ‘predict’ a blow-out win for the candidate who will ultimately lose.
Sometimes the model will even predict the Trumwill ‘inside straight’ victory for Harris where she loses PA, but wins 7 other toss-up states. This scenario happens for *all* the models… Therefore, if Trumwill is correct, it will have been predicted even by a model that says Trump had a 51% chance to win.
In the end, one candidate will win and vindicate 50% a certain sort of person’s assumptions about the models.
Or do you mean something else?Report
I’m more remembering stuff like this.
(Huh. IBD/TIPP Tracking *DID* call a Trump win. So it wasn’t 100%. I feel a little better, I guess.)Report
Heh, anyone can build a model — as far as I can tell all the modelers are working with published data with various flavors of how they do the Data Science on top of the published data. The Data Science is proprietary with various degrees of skirt lifting to show a bit of ankle here or there.
538 (now that it’s got it’s shit together(?)) has a fun graphic that I assume(?) is regularly updated… as of today, there’s a scenario where Harris wins 519 to 19. So… take heart, Saul and Chip… they’re sayin’ there’s a chance.
I think you’re trying to make a meta-critique that the published Polls are not measuring voter sentiment correctly? That could be. That’s part of the Data Science as well… which includes historical analysis of previous polls by the same company vs. actual results vs. corrections. But that’s why the ‘Flooding the Zone’ nonsense isn’t really an issue for the ‘serious’ modelers because they aren’t using those polls and/or are applying adjustments.
Flooding the Zone is a Media play (to get the horserace people to talk about it) not a thing that influences the ‘serious’ modelers.Report
Flooding the zone strikes me as a great way to lose credibility when the results are wrong.
See, for example, 2016.
I have seen exactly one person eat a bug for being wrong about 2016.
I don’t know that any serious modeler exists anymore (defined as being willing to eat a bug).
Maybe Silver. Maybe.Report
you really don’t understand the human capacity for ignoring reality do you?Report
Among normies? It’s boundless.
Among autists? There used to be reason to hope.Report
That’s not what flooding the zone is or does, though.
It doesn’t impact the people building models.
Flooding the Zone is – by definition – unreliable polling by polling companies that are unreliable or new or obviously biased.
The polls themselves are the zone flooders, and generally don’t have credibility to lose.
Among the ‘weird’ people I mention in the first post is an obsessive fixation on only using ‘favorable’ polls to their outcome… that’s sort of an obverse of flooding the zone — and another thing that modelers manage when building their models.
… what exactly would you have a modeler bet eating a bug on in a 50/50 prediction?
FWIW, I *don’t* think that this kind of modelling will always yield a 50/50 result; it can and will show a candidate winning in a preponderance of scenarios a’la 2016. I’d be curious to see what a historical forecast of 1980 election would have shown using this kind of model. Would you get 99% bug eating forecast? or 85%? or what?Report
I attribute this mainly to the lack of overlap between people who follow politics closely and people who go to casinos. Or who just watch a lot of sports in the era of analytics.Report
Good point; that and the simplification of the National Aggregation of who’s ‘winning’ the polls… we have 50 variables that can confound the National Aggregation.Report