What do you expect he has done nothing for what matters rent, food, houses, healthcare, income and the homeless are out of control but hey we might get weed put to schedule 3…woopie
American Rescue Plan reversed much of the damage done by the pandemic
Unemployment at historic lows
Expanded access to healthcare coverage
Passed bipartisan infrastructure bill
CHIPS Act
Inflation Reduction Act has brought inflation back under control
Rejoined the Paris Climate Accord
Passed sweeping student debt relief for millions of students burdened with predatory loans
And yes, rescheduled cannabis after a century of prohibition
All in just one term.
Wow, you’re right, he’s done nothing, guess I’ll just vote for the dude with 91 felony charges who talks about being a dictator on day one, or maybe the dude with the brain worm. Really tough choice.
Don’t get me wrong I’m not voting for the orange turd, but none of those things has changed anything rent is still 50% of my income and food is still double what it used to be electricity is high, gas is high child care is impossible I Guess I should have signed up for school loans
The president has little say on the laws that Congress passes. Vote for your local senators and representatives! The only way to realize change is to vote in your local elections!
It is local and state government that is important to making changes! Republicans have figured this out decades ago and have been gerrymandering and packing courts for decades.
The president can’t waive a magic wand and make any change he wants.
I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it again and again; of course you don’t like the Democrat candidate; but you’ve got to swallow your damned medicine or the outcome will be exponentially worse.
Yeah, I voted for Hillary. I hate her so goddamn much. But you know who I hate more? The orange asshole. So I did what I had to do, I swallowed my anger and voted for the bitch. No protest vote, no skipping out on it, just sucking it up and doing what had to be done. If more people had followed my example, and the example of many others, we wouldn’t be rapidly watersliding dowe the lubed-up slope to outright, unapologetic fascism.
While I agree with your message, can you please refrain from name calling Hillary? In particular using that word. She’s not perfect, no one is but that term is unnecessary.
of course you don’t like the Democrat candidate; but you’ve got to swallow your damned medicine
Tincture of Mercury and a regular bloodletting will give us the strength we need to fight off the Trump Virus.
So I did what I had to do
You did, but when the Dem Party regained office in 2020 they didn’t.
Dems had an opportunity to give DC statehood in 2021. Two free senators, a house seat, and an easy 3 EC votes. This legislation was queued up and ready to go and the Dem majority just… didn’t do it. So now 660k Americans are once again going into 2024 fully disenfranchised, in an election when every vote counts.
This isn’t the only way in which the Dems sabotage their own success. But it can’t be ignored how a party that zealously backed guys like Henry Cuellar and Bob Menendez during primaries, long after they’d been outed as crooks and frauds, are the biggest threats to their own success. Never even mind the horrifying genocide in Palestine or the slavish devotion to fossil fuel subsidies or the shameless pandering to crypto-bros.
If more people had followed my example, and the example of many others, we wouldn’t be rapidly watersliding dowe the lubed-up slope to outright, unapologetic fascism.
Every election gives the fascist party larger voter turnout. This isn’t an issue of apathy, but of escalating tensions. Election turnout over the last six years has been reaching century-long highs but its a two-edged sword. Republican activists have been very successful in building up their own local majorities.
More people are following your example. Even in the face of gerrymandering. Even in the face of voter caging. Even in the face of shameless criminal-but-unprosecuted efforts at disenfranchisement.
But that includes conservatives. More and more of them, every year, as Trump drives an enthusiasm for the GOP I haven’t seen since Reagan.
If Biden and Trump really are tied among Gen Z voters, I’m afraid Gen Z voters just don’t understand the American election system. If we don’t get Biden, we get Trump, which would be infinitely worse for most of the causes they are angry with Biden on.
I’m afraid Gen Z voters just don’t understand the American election system
Maybe they’re fucking tired of pretending they can influence anything in this rigged bullshit of a world? Trump looses and still doesn’t get any justice in court, there is still no healthcare and minimum wage remains at 1856 levels because FoReFatHeRs of some bullshit, while jeff bezos fucks them in the ass along with their boss and landlord. Tiktok gets banned because the government doesn’t want them to laugh at „israel bad” memes and the climate still falls apart after 10-20 years.
Sure, trump wins and everything gets even worse but stop criticizing people who don’t want to vote when their promised „democracy” is terrible and even worse. They simply don’t believe in their freedom anymore and it’s the fault of their country which viscously takes everything from them. Letting it go to shit might just be their form of a protest. First boomers fucked everything up for them and now they’re screaming „save us”.
Fair enough. But running away stomping and screaming never helped anyone. This is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s incremental change. Not voting or voting for Trump will never bring about the change they are looking for.
It’s not. The incremental change is vastly different with Biden and Trump. Biden has made tons of big and small changes that no one remembers because all the focus is on Gaza and Ukraine and Trump.
This is completely tone deaf to the things that Biden HAS been able to accomplish. I’d encourage you to research his presidency before you accept and parrot all of the bad things you hear.
To name just a few:
Unprecedented student loan debt relief
Improvements to Medicare including the ability to negotiate drug prices and capping prices of certain medications like insulin
Extremely low unemployment, just a few short years after the pandemic
Pardoning of minor federal marijuana convictions and initiated the process of having marijuana rescheduled
A push to make birth control pills available OTC without a prescription in the wake of conservative attacks on reproductive health rights
Renewed focus on infrastructure spending
Policies friendly to green energy
And that’s not mentioning the things that could have happened were it not for constant obstruction of Republicans - specifically, efforts to better protect our borders and efforts to curb gun violence.
The president is not a king or autocrat no matter how much Trump and Republicans might disagree. His policy decisions must be focused in order to make any progress at all. He can’t simply wave his hand and make everything a magical utopia.
So before you continue complaining about the lack of progress, I implore you: take ten minutes to do some Google searches about the things that are important to you and the reasons why more progress is not being made. You might be surprised at weary you learn.
It is critically important that we do not give up ground and backslide because the conservative media machine is so powerful that it makes it seem like nothing good has happened.
That individual likely isn’t going to reply. Assume maliciousness before ignorance. That said, please keep replying like this. We don’t know how big our impacts are though hopefully we are able to change a mind and correct the bad narrative trying to take hold.
Fair enough. But running away stomping and screaming never helped anyone. This is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s incremental change. Not voting or voting for Trump will never bring about the change they are looking for.
Precisely why conservatives are winning. They have been working towards their goals for 40+ years and they don’t give up. They vote.
Definitely. Conservatives are seeing huge victories that have been in the making for decades, even while in minority. The overturning of Roe being the biggest of them all. They are patient and they make sure to vote every time. It’s part of the conservative culture. The liberal voting culture is the opposite. It’s flailing and inconsistent, and much of the constituency can’t even be bothered to show up on election day. There may be more Democratic leaning voters overall, but that doesn’t matter when they don’t show up to vote.
yeah and if i point this out to the 20 something leftist demo, instead of being like ‘oh yeah they win because they vote, maybe we should vote too’ they just call me facist or boring or whatever insult. the left is pathetic in terms of messaging and aligning interest groups, and general has no coherent or consistent belief structure.
i mean i used to be more leftist myself, but god it’s pathetic. i wish the left had the conviction and consistency of the right, then they’d actaully achieve something… like they did in the 60s… but you know that’s ‘history’ and the left is totally allergic to that concept as well because it’s ‘colonialism and oppression’
I’m the opposite. Used to be center-right, now I’m truly left. Trump and Covid really made me realize that these people are absolutely out there. There’s no reasoning with them. It’s all ideology, zero common sense. But they do vote consistently. That is for sure.
Do you want to teach and encourage them to give up so quickly in the face of long-lasting international issues? That’s what you are doing and I hope they see that. This Isreal and Palestine thing did not start in October.
Please redirect your attention to election reform. Fix the system.
I’m sorry, I must be misunderstanding you. You aren’t asserting that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in Gaza started within the last 12 months, are you?
Because if you are, then I strongly encourage you to look a little bit deeper into this whole thing. It’s been going on for decades.
A ceasefire, by definition and historical example, is a temporary stopping of hostile activity. Often this is to have a chat between leaders. If we assume all ceasefires occur for peace talks clearly this one didn’t end well.
So no, this isn’t a new war. This is the same war and same set of conflicts. Though the original reasons have probably been lost with time, or evolved further into bullshit.
Lol, word it however you want, but they weren’t fighting the day before, or the week before. The fighting that we are witnessing now wouldn’t be happening if Hamas didn’t attack them on Oct. 7
The joke of 2020 was people screaming about how Trump was very obviously guilty of very real crimes and we needed to get him out to prosecute him.
Then we… didn’t. Ninety-one indictments and the bulk of them have been deferred or dropped. The single remaining case in SDNY isn’t stopping him from campaigning and isn’t meaningfully threatening his ability to assume office.
Sure, trump wins and everything gets even worse but stop criticizing people who don’t want to vote when their promised „democracy” is terrible and even worse.
I’m living in a city where the school district was simply taken over by the Governor. All the HISD school board elections are rendered meaningless. The superintendent is just a charter school flak who exists to dismantle public education. No democratic accountability. Outright looting of the ISD’s budget. The Feds have expressed no interest in interceding in interstate embezzlement.
And we’re told the only way to stop this is to vote. Vote for what? Nobody currently running wants to stop this dismantling of a foundational element of modern civilization. Hell, even the Dem-endorsed new Houston Mayor is just along for the ride on this shit.
stop criticizing people who don’t want to vote when their promised „democracy” is terrible and even worse.
How exactly do you think a democratic election that runs on votes is supposed to work? What exactly is not voting going to do, other than ensure that the folks who are voting for the candidate that is more inclined to do more damage to this country wins?
Even if you dislike both candidates, not voting isn’t going to fix anything. Vote for whoever is least likely to destroy the country and make it hell for certain people, and then focus your efforts locally and trying to inspire change on the local level.
American-Muslims should not vote for Biden. Will Muslims vote for a professed Zionist? Also, Americans see the US has no business in other countries, and the man openly admitted in smug speeches he wants to tell everybody else on the planet what their politics should be. Why do rich people want to pay more taxes just to spend it in rabbit holes? Don’t give Joe Biden any more of your money. The federal government has too much power. Federal power needs to be scaled back. I think Americans are done with elitism. One thing Trump isn’t, he is not an elitist, or a warmonger. Joe Biden has proven he is a foreign asset, gives away taxpayer money to his international bosses, foments conflict, and the Intentional Court Of Justice should look into genocide charges against Joe Biden. I believe he is a war criminal and a liar. I can see why people like Joe Biden hate “make America great” because they are globalist, and seem to care more about meddling in the politics of the world, pleasing foreign donors.
Neither Trump or Biden will reduce the power of the federal government. Some departments may take a hit and others will get a boost but it won’t be reduced. Way too much money to be made be keeping the beast of corruption for the rich moving.
Trump who you are voting for by not voting for Biden, absolutely is a globalist… With just the shittier parts of the globe.
Wasn’t trump the president who moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem? A move done to rally his base. Trump is absolutely pro israel and would love to see college kids shipped to a war zone so they can witness the atrocity of the war they are protesting…
Trump has actually… Proved he’s a foreign asset. Put in literally cannot wait for him to retake power so he can absolutely steamroll a legitimate democracy.
Fuck it wouldn’t shock me if Trump sold our military to the highest bidder.
Trump is absolutely an elitist… He has a fucking skyscraper with his name on it in downtown Chicago… What part of that screams… Salt of the Earth? What planet are you living on?
No he isn’t. Joe Biden is an elitist who warns about MAGA people voting in a democracy. He is anti-democratic and anti-free speech. He colludes with Big Tech to suppress speech. Joe Biden is an establishment politician. He spent at least 4 decades in the US government, and it accepted among the establishment in the US government. These lifelong elites stay in government and take up new positions in the government. The US government has been hijacked by foreign interests, which means people like Joe Biden don’t work for the American people. Sure he may be the “Big Guy” in Ukraine, he will not delegate policy to Zelenskyy, but he is comprised, and clearly intimidated by Israel. Israel is a tiny country; the US is a superpower. Why is a small country telling a superpower that meddles in the politics of other countries, to not meddle in their own policy, while at the same time, telling the superpower, they will fund the small country’s war machine against civilians? Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds? Imagine what China is thinking. What does the US want in Gaza? This is nonsense and should not be tolerated.
Joe Biden is the problem. Explain how Trump is an elitist? An elitist ignores the will of the people. Trump is a populist president, which is what democracy is. Trump talks to the people. Joe Biden hides behind a teleprompter and still misses up. His handlers control his interactions with the public, which is very limited and runs from critical questions. An elitist tells you shut up and take it. Elitism is the enemy of democracy, not populism. Americans don’t care about Biden’s proxy war in Ukraine or supporting Israel. Americans don’t want to be forced to buy overpriced, unreliable electric vehicles. That is an elitist. There is no reason to vote for Biden. Democracy must show the will of the people, and Joe Biden needs to be taken down by democratic will. The only people who vote for Biden are donors and never-Trumpers who don’t realize what a fuck up Joe is. Where will you be when Joe loses?
This level of misinformation should be removed from lemmy. I get that free speech is a thing that needs to be upheld, but to a certain extent- it shouldn’t be used to try and convert people into morons.
Remember though, it’s a poll. And polls are used now for nothing more than manipulation. People in this thread have already torn apart its findings. As they do any time a poll is shared with the intend to misinform.
Now, where Hillary’s problem was she took states like Michigan and Wisconsin for granted and failed to campaign there, Biden’s problem is he’s taking too long to campaign there, and he’s burning money in states that his advisors are telling him are in play (Florida, North Carolina) when they really are not.
Biden can’t wait until the convention in August to start the campaign proper, and that seems to be what he’s doing. That only gives him just 78 days to mount an effective defense. 2 months and change.
The system is old and ossified. No one on the left, save for progressives, seems interested in shaking things up. It’s too bad, I would have rather had a leftwing populist revolution. At least workers would get paid fairly…but this is backwards-ass America so, instead, we’ll get what we deserve.
It’s definitely worrying as I sit here North of my American brothers and sisters, to see the sheer amount of “Yeah but Biden sucks”. Sure 100% agree, but you’re welcoming in Orange Hitler if you don’t vote, or vote Republican.
So definitely worrying sleeping beside this particular elephant.
The elephant will do damage to the whole fuckin world if he gets elected, including but not limited to wielding the military in a way that I bet will cause disasters we didn't even really have on the radar as possibilities before they arrived.
So don't worry. Being close up to the carnage probably won't make it any worse, and being far away wouldn't make it any safer.
including but not limited to wielding the military in a way that I bet will cause disasters we didn’t even really have on the radar as possibilities before they arrived.
Everyone who paid attention during 2020 and has read the Project 2025 plans should know that this will happen.
But it doesn’t even have to be malicious, though he will for sure be malicious, stupidity is enough. A million people died because Covid was so much worse here than it could’ve been, all because he was too petty to say “Put on a mask, save your country” which his base would’ve inevitably eaten up.
But no, his stupidity caused a million avoidable deaths.
Based on what? We have Joe Biden’s voting record. Decades worth of voting records. Joe Biden wants to maintain NATO, which is an organization of bullies. He was “The Big Guy” of Ukraine, fomenting conflict and destabilization. No peace deal, Biden. Trump actually spoke with Kim Jong-un, while the neoliberals said it made America look weak. Trump was willing to have diplomatic talks with Putin, the neoliberal called hims a Russian asset. At his worst, he killed Qasem Soleimani. Neoliberal like Joe Biden wants to put US military bases all over the planet, in harms way, resembling the outpost strategy of the Roman Empire. Joe Biden is an elitist, a warmonger, a foreign asset, a liar, and I believe a war criminal.
Joe Biden is dictates more of your life. He wants you to drive electric vehicles, he wants to control the stoves you buy, and wants to tell business how much they should charge, he expects to pay for green energy. He is a boondoggle president who believes he knows better than the people on the ground. EVs is one of his boondoggles, leading car manufacturers to rush in to take advantage of the next big thing with tax incentives. EVs are a money loser. We have one EV manufacturer here, despite local and federal tax incentives, went bankrupt. Trump is the man of the people in more ways Joe Biden is. Joe Biden is an elitist. He wants to run everybody’s life on the planet. He wants to dictate the politics of foreign countries. That is a dictator. Joe Biden’s policy is elitism. Elitism is dictatorship.
Joe Biden is a progressive. He is an activist. He is as much of a progressive as FDR was. We don’t need activism, we need pragmatism, not confusion, and pointlessness.
This is honestly one of the most stupid things I’ve read in recent times on Lemmy. This take is so brain-dead that I worry for you. For any of what you wrote to make sense it takes a level of propagandization that would make Reagan and orange Hitler cum in each other’s pants. Thank you for setting the bar so high for morons everywhere.
a colective social-capitalist. What does that mean? believe capitalism is the best economic system to have, though not perfect, it can be utilized, based on reason, for the common, & greater good. I abhor the self-centered individual rights of Western culture and law.
Who the fuck describes themselves that way? This has to either be a troll or a bot. And if it really is a person, they aren’t worth engaging with. Just report, block and move on.
Joe Biden does not stand in the way of democratic processes. I assure you, he won’t falsely claim voter fraud or incite an insurrection if he loses the election. Trump has done that in the past. He’s also proven to be a liar and a rapist. Besides, elitism does not make a dictator. While dictators usually are elitist, in actuality, they define themselves through a totalitarian regime aka them being able to do as they wish without consequences. Something Trump and his Supporters have also claimed they want. Very recently.
And sure, Biden might not make politics for everyone and he most definitely is not the best man for the job, but he doesn’t just make politics for rich white men as Trump does, who, for example, wants to undo anything the Obama and later the Biden administration did for social security, healthcare, etc. You know, the structures average people profit most of. Those who are not the “elite”. Not to speak about Trump’s and the Republican Party’s stance on various minorities.
As if democrats never cried rigged elections. Joe Biden is an elitist in democrat clothing. He suggests that large segments of the American population are too stupid or evil to vote. They’re called “deplorables,” useful idiots by Hillary Clinton. These are the elites who tell you to shut up and take it. Does that sound like pro-democracy to you? Nope.
Sure, Biden might be an elitist in democrat clothing. As I said, he definitely isn’t perfect and definitely not the best man for the job. But you know what he is not? He is not a far-right, misogynist, racist, homophobe, elitist, openly anti-democratic, bought-by-russia rapist, liar and traitor who wears most of those traits very openly.
I voted for Clinton with a funeral dirge in my heart at an empty polling place. Then I voted for Biden.
I despise Neoliberals. I’m a socialist. If I can swallow my pride and volunteer to be fucked with no lube instead of being hit by a fascist freight train yet again, you can too.
That said, this country is over, Rejecting the Reagan giveaway was the last chance to begin righting this ship now halfway under water from decades of celebrated antisocial avarice made legal. I’m voting Biden to minimize needless cruelty and scapegoating of vulnerable groups as we collapse from capitalist greed rot and firesale. That is the extent of our vote’s power as our owners bought both parties on economic policy allegiance decades ago, so be kind with it.
We don’t need to collapse AND have our chosen Nero in the white house using their bully pulpit to blame it on everyone from undocumented immigrants to pregnant women to lgbtq, etc and getting them murdered in the streets for what Wall Street profiteers, safe in their guarded towers and luxury bunkers, have wrought.
The impending food shortages and mass homelessness crises will be bad enough.
Presenting the poll results for registered voters, with candidates limited to Biden or Trump with no RFK involved, both of which are decisions which will swing things towards Trump and away from reality, is a decision that I'm hard pressed to explain any other way than that they're looking for the worst numbers they can present.
It's not even like the answers to the more accurate question were even any better for Biden. To me they look more or less the same (i.e. serious trouble for Biden). My only explanation is that a lot of these likely voters don't know their ass from their elbow (e.g.
Oooooh
This is interesting.
Look at the question "What one issue is most important in deciding your vote this November?"
It leads off with:
The economy (including jobs and the stock market)
Inflation and the cost of living
Abortion
Immigration
Crime
Gun policies
... and then, way down below, is "The state of democracy/corruption" (with 6% still bucking the trend to vote for it), and "The Middle East/Israel/Palestinians" (2%).
Lo and behold, a whole lot of people voted for one of the first two options, and also tended to answer questions about how they felt about the economy overall, and whether they felt overall happy with how things were going, accordingly.
I would be interested to see how this poll was presented exactly (especially whether written or verbal, and what order for the questions), and what the numbers would be if there was a similar weight of questioning and emphasis given to "The state of democracy/corruption" as a major issue. Maybe the results would be the same. Maybe not. I'd be interested to see it.
I know you’re not necessarily making this argument but you mention that the most important issue for voters includes…
and “The Middle East/Israel/Palestinians” (2%).
In Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin the margin in 2020 was less than 2%. Michigan and Nevada were under 3%.
It’s a small number, yes, but this argument that it “won’t matter because people vote on domestic issues” ignores these thin margins, imo. It really might matter more than people think.
I didn't go into it at any length but I think the number of people who, in the actual election, will have the Gaza war impact the way they vote is way higher than 2%. About 13% of Democrats voted "uncommitted" in the Michigan primary, which presumably they wouldn't have done because of crime, immigration, or whatever other "non-most-important" issues according to this poll.
I think hanging out on Lemmy can give you the impression that more people overall care about Palestine than the number that actually do. But the number definitely isn't 2%. I'm not at all saying that the real number is 2% and so it doesn't matter; I'm saying the number is definitely higher than 2% and so this poll is random-phone-number-calling-barking-questions-at-people uninformative garbage.
Gotcha! Definitely agree about Lemmy being an echo chamber for this type of stuff but I also doubt it’s only 2%. Michigan is a good example, even if it was 2% it doesn’t mean it’s equally spread across states.
Also it would be a bit of a mistake to assume only the “most important” issue would impact voting choice, or more importantly, the choice to not vote
Yeah. That whole massive list of "most important" issues which were apparently listed out verbally to people, over the phone, by a bored call center employee, and the list's suspicious inclusion of multiple versions of "economic issues" with suspicious particular trigger words right at the beginning (where, purely by coincidence I'm sure, a lot of people decided their most important issues were), all form part of an overall picture of big parts of this poll not really meaning anything, let alone the foofaraw that the New York Times seems to want to make it into down to the resolution of individual percentage points.
I would be interested to see how this poll was presented exactly
Have you tried the article?
If that doesn’t answer your questions, it links to the poll questions and breakdowns…
But it seems like you just don’t believe in polls, which is weird because I honestly can’t remember presidential polling not getting in the margin of error of the real result.
This is the same shit that happened in 2016 and 202:
The polls say my favorite isn’t winning! Polls are lying! Everyone ignore the polls and act smug we’ll win!
If you’re somehow actually a Biden supporter, these polls should have you working harder to do the only thing that can help him beat Trump:
Pull him to the left.
Or you could spend the run up to the election telling people not to listen to polls and instead…
I dunno? Read tea leaves? What is exactly is your alternative?
Pretend we’re ostriches and stick our heads in the sand? We won’t be able to see any warning signs but you’re gonna ignore them anyways. So sure, you go first and the rest of us will stick our heads in the sand right after you, promise.
Read tea leaves? What is exactly is your alternative?
Other people in other threads have found more of the fucky things about this poll; it was a phone poll which 2% of people answered the phone for, which made no attempt to correct for "what ideological mentalities are likely to answer the phone to random numbers", and then on top of that explicitly made adjustments like increasing the weight of non-college-educated people for some pretty dubious reason.
Polls sound great. The fact that the election is even within 10 points, or 20, should lead to alarm in the Biden camp, and cause some deep soul searching for what went so wrong in the American system that we could be talking about electing Lex Luthor mayor and people are taking it seriously as an idea and it's even a question of who is going to win the election. I think education and media are the main culprits. Concrete things Biden is doing are not unrelated, exactly (especially on aid for Israel), but they honestly don't seem to make all that much difference, and a lot of people who are voicing concerns about him seem totally unaware of concrete things he's been doing.
I'm by no means saying don't be alarmed. I think we should be very alarmed. But yes, also, I think we should call out bullshit polls when they are as clearly bullshit as this one is (as part of examining the reasons why a respectable news outlet would even be reporting a close poll between Biden and Trump as anything other than the absolute looming catastrophe that it objectively is.)
If you're somehow actually a Biden supporter, these polls should have you working harder
That's actually a really good point -- I'll try to come up with some concrete things I can do to help Biden win sometimes later today. I just went to verify that I'm registered to vote (I still am), and I think maybe a good thing politically overall would be a little informational thing about who to vote for in Congress. Presumably some little tool already exists that can tell if your congresspeople have been voting for aid for Israel, inform your voting accordingly instead of just blindly checking the D box, things like that, but I don't know all that much about it.
IDK, I'll see what I can come up with later on today if I have some time. It's a good reminder that talking on the internet without some sort of action isn't always a good investment of time.
The fact that the election is even within 10 points, or 20, should lead to alarm in the Biden camp,
But…
It’s within 1 or points…
Unless… Are you ignoring everything but popular vote polls across the whole country?
If you’re doing that and not understanding why it’s a bad idea, then that explains why you think polls are bad, but you’re still wrong. Your just looking at polls that don’t matter because those are the ones you agree with
Me: Explains in detail what's suspect about this specific poll, while still expressing overall alarm at the state of Biden being in trouble in the election
You:
You know what, I don't even want to summarize it. This is why letting shills or bad faith people participate in the discussion in the first place is a bad idea. I could be using this time to talk with other people who are above-board about what they think, who read and respond to what's actually said, instead of me investing even a single minute in writing up a message "actually that's not what I said or even remotely close to it, and you're just misrepresenting me to make a bizarrely slanted attack on Biden and his supporters, which is your job apparently."
Feel free to read what I actually said, and respond to it, otherwise please piss off.
Lemmy is a small place man, the people who constantly rant against science if it doesn’t back up their opinions stick out. Especially when it’s a topic someone knows about like statistical analysis.
This isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation…
Actually, if you wanna educate me on science and polling, can you answer this question? That's one that I am genuinely curious about that I don't know the answer to; maybe if you're super up to speed on polling you might know.
I would be interested to go back and look at some of the polling that led up to recent special elections where Democrats won, and see how the poll results compared with the election results – if you follow polling in detail (which again, I don’t), do you happen to know where I could look to find that?
But yes, if you can tell me what race specifically, it would take two seconds to find a poll for you.
And I’m willing to do that if you can calm down with the insults and multiple replies if I don’t respond immediately.
It’s the work day homie, you gotta give people more than 5 minutes to respond before spamming them. But this is important, if there’s a chance you’ll start believing in science again, I can spend less than a minute googling something for you.
New York’s 26th Congressional District on April 30, 2024.
I was just going to do the first one, but that had 60k voters and Dems won it 2 to 1…
They barely cracked 10% turnout…
Not even getting into how the name “Kennedy” fucks up search results with the word “poll” in 2024
But there just wasn’t time between the state party saying the candidate, and when the state party held the special election for a poll. And I’m not sure how anyone would be surprised.
But, I’m really not sure why you want to explicitly and only look at Special elections, elections that occur “off season” with short campaigns and unpredictable turnout because nothing else is on the ballot.
But, I'm really not sure why you want to explicitly and only look at Special elections
It's fair. My point in looking at that, is to overall test the assertion that polls are indicative of how people vote. It kind of seems looking at the methodology for the OP article's poll, like if any accurate information came out of the poll about how the election would go, it would be more or less an accident (or a result of the fact that the poll and the election are both general measurements of how people feel politically overall, and not much more resolution than that.)
You could flip what you said around, and say that because the special elections are much less complex, and the polls were done much closer to the actual election than polls today about the election in November, I'd expect the polls to be much more predictive of how the election will go, than the OP article.
So, let's analyze. As you said, it's actually not that hard to find polls and results. I'll follow your lead and look at 538 (for the first three, which is all the effort I feel like investing in it).
Kinda looks like the polls have some methodology problems. I raised some plausible details for some of what those problems might be, and when we check, hey objectively do it seems like there are problems with the output? We find that, hey look, there are problems. Science!
(Incidentally, that poll for Utah claimed a margin for error of 4.26 percentage points, with the use of three significant digits of claimed resolution adding an extra layer of hilarity when it turned out their final answer was off by a factor of 267%.)
Dude you can't explore with me a question about the accuracy of polling and find out that the answer is that modern polling is objectively shit, which was my point all along even before I started even looking at the question, and then get all condescending about how I don't know what I'm talking about. 🙂
Well, I mean, you can if you want, I guess. I'm happy with my conclusions from the day, though, you being rude about it notwithstanding.
You knew what the answers were and thats why you asked for those specific polls as a "got ya"?
Not even slightly, no. Not sure how you got from what I said. I just picked the most recent 5 elections that have happened, and invited you to find polls for them. I genuinely had no idea what the results would be (and I wouldn't have predicted that the polling results would have been so wrong, bordering on absurd.)
Not sure how you got from me being unable to use Google and you have to teach me, to now I knew the truth all along and I just withheld it from you to trick you and so that means that all of a sudden it's not the truth anymore. But good luck with things, in any case.
I dislike doubting polls, but there’s just some odd stuff in here.
10% go for RFK Jr, and it’s equal siphoning from both parties? 10%?!
20% more people blame Biden for Roe being overturned than Trump?
They’re TIED with Gen Z voters? TIED?!
After the absolute thrashing that Republicans have received on abortion, only like 50% of women would break for Biden?
This is a poll of just the 5 key states, but this part of their methodology gives me significant pause as well: "To further ensure that the results reflect the entire voting population, not just those willing to take a poll, we give more weight to respondents from demographic groups underrepresented among survey respondents, like people without a college degree. "
Emphasis mine. There could be a huge skew. And these results don’t make sense. The other NYT poll from several months ago was also incredibly unusual and had very weird findings – to the point that the Guardian wrote something was very fucky with the results.
This isn’t to say this can’t be what’s going on, but we need corroboration from other polling groups. And it isn’t summer yet, which makes polls rather inaccurate too.
TLDR: Something’s fucky, we need more information and to monitor this.
EDIT: I just want to use my bully pulpit here to say that my criticisms by no means disprove the poll results. There’s oddities, but that doesn’t make the results an impossibility. Don’t only give credence to criticism of polls. If someone has reasons they believe the poll is accurate, you should give equal attention to it. At the end of the day, we don’t know what the actual truth is, and we won’t until the election is over. Just remember that we don’t want to just win, we want to dominate. We want massive margins. And that means we need to see wins even in less than accurate polls.
The largest cohort of people in this country want neither Biden nor Trump. Some of that cohort are willing to step out on a limb and support a third party.
It’s really hard to support somebody like Kennedy when you know his actual positions, and that they’re driven by the fact that a worm ate part of his brain
I’d vote for the worm before I voted for Kennedy, but whomever you are trying to convince isn’t listening. If you want to convince people of something, you need to understand them and why they do what they do.
Clearly at least 10% of voters see having a complete brain as less of a deal breaker than being either Biden or Trump. We should be curious as to why that is.
If you’ve been following the polling there is nothing different or unique about this one. It’s consistent with pretty much all polling over the past 400 days. Biden is losing. Polling is definitely still broken, but it’s consistent. There is no fuckery.
Biden needs to be up by 4-12 in those states if he wants to win.
See my posts in !data_vizualisations . I make a map of the offset in polling Biden needs to win a given state based on the fact that polls consistently overestimate how well Biden will do, and underestimate how well Trump will do.
When you see these poll numbers, you should subtract 4 for Biden, and add 8 for Trump. That was the offsets we observed from the 2020 election.
So keeping in mind data you already have about Trump, Biden, polling and it’s departure from real election results, it’s not even a question. Mortgage you house and out all your money on Trump to win. You have a differential polling error of 12 points in a Biden Trump head to head. Biden needs to be in the mid to high fifties across the board to have a chance.
He’s in the low forties.
If you don’t end up clicking the link: Relative polling error for Biden V Trump, 2020.
If you've been following the polling there is nothing different or unique about this one.
They posted their methodology and to me, as an unqualified lay person, it's clearly shit, and there's no reason to think it'll yield anything even resembling an accurate picture of how people are going to vote in the election. It's not surprising to me that recent polls in general tend to be as inaccurate as you're saying they are.
I would be interested to go back and look at some of the polling that led up to recent special elections where Democrats won, and see how the poll results compared with the election results -- if you follow polling in detail (which again, I don't), do you happen to know where I could look to find that?
They posted their methodology and to me, as an unqualified lay person (…)
So like, if you know the above statement to be true, that’s exactly where you should stop in your reasoning. This is something that I find Americans to be guilty if constantly, which is to have the humility to understand that they shouldn’t have an opinion, and the proceed to arrogantly have the opinion they just acknowledged they shouldn’t have. I think it’s a deeply human thing, that we evolved to have to deal with missing information and so our brain fills in gaps and gives us convincing narratives. However, you have to resist the tendency when you know you really don’t know: and even more so when your beliefs go against what the data is.
If you can find me some sources of data on special elections, I’ll happily analyze it for you. I think it would be interesting if nothing else to see the offset. I’m not on my desktop machine, but I’ll give you some sources for data since you asked.
Surely as a qualified non lay person you'll be able to do a detailed takedown of all the criticism I arrived at for the poll's methodology from like 2 minutes of looking, instead of just making a broad assertion that if the polling was wrong by a certain amount in a previous year we should add that amount to this year's polling to arrive at reality, and that's all that's needed and then this year's corrected poll will always be accurate.
Because to me, that sounds initially plausible but then when you look at it for a little bit longer you say, oh wait hang on, if that was all that was needed the professional pollsters could just do that, and their answers would always be right. And you wouldn't need to look closely at the methodology at all, just trust that "it's a poll" means it's automatically equal to every other poll (once you apply the magic correction factor.)
To me that sounds, on close scientific examination, like a bunch of crap once you think about it for a little bit. But what do I know. I'm unqualified. I'll wait for you to educate me.
I think the right answer is to do what you described, in the aggregate. Don’t do it on a pollster to pollster basis, do it at the state level, across all polls. You don’t do this as a pollster because that isn’t really what you are trying to to model with a poll, and polls being wrong or uncertain is just a part of the game.
So it’s important to not conflate polling with the meta-analysis of polling.
I’m not so much interested in polls or polling but in being able to use them as a source of data to model outcomes that individually they may not be able to to predict. Ultimately a poll needs to be based on the data it samples from to be valid. If there is something fundamentally flawed in the assumptions that form the basis of this, there isn’t that much you can do to fix it with updates to methods.
the -4, 8 spread is the prior I’m walking into this election year with. That inspire of their pollsters best efforts to come up with a unbiased sample, they can’t predict the election outcome is fine. We can deal with that in the aggregate. This is very similar to Nate Silvers approach.
If there is something fundamentally flawed in the assumptions that form the basis of this, there isn't that much you can do to fix it with updates to methods.
My only critique is that I don’t think 2020 skew is valid anymore. After Dobbs, the landscape seems to have significantly changed. 2022 was predicted to favor Republicans by a strong margin, but it ended up being a tie pretty much. And a lot of special elections have had surprising results too.
My personal opinion is that polling methodology may have overcorrected for 2020, and we’re getting a picture now that’s skewed right, versus left from beforehand.
It’s really hard to say though. There weren’t a lot of great polls to start with in 2022, and special elections don’t have significant polling either. It’s a weird position where the only good data set we have is from 2020, but there have been so many changes in the national environment that we have reason to doubt the skews from 2020 are still valid. But at the same time, what else do we have? Vibes and feelings and anecdotes. And the engineer in me dislikes dismissing data in favor of vibes. It’s important to consider still I think, because none of this is infallible. But I honestly couldn’t tell you what the “right” outlook to have is. Maybe I’m onto something, but maybe I’m just letting optimism bleed into my better judgement.
My personal opinion is that polling methodology may have overcorrected for 2020, and we're getting a picture now that's skewed right, versus left from beforehand.
I won't say that you're wrong about what the pollsters are doing -- but to me this strikes me as very obviously the wrong way to do it.
If you find out your polls were wrong, and then instead of digging into detail as to what exactly went wrong, and then fixing the methodology going forward, using non-phone polls, doing a more accurate calculation to make sure you're weighting the people who are going to vote and not the people who aren't going to vote, things like that … you just make up a fudge factor for how wrong the polls were last time, and assume that if you just add that fudge factor in then you don't have to fix all the things that went wrong on a more fundamental level, that seems guaranteed to keep being wrong for as long as you’re doing it.
Again I won't say you're wrong about how they're going about it. (And, I'm not saying it's necessarily easy to do or anything.) But I think you've accurately captured the flaw in just adding a fudge factor and then assuming you'll be able to learn anything from the now-corrected-for-sure-until-next-time-when-we-add-in-how-wrong-we-were-this-time answers.
That’s the thing, we don’t know how they’re correcting for it, and if it is just a fudge factor. The issue is there’s more confounding factors that anyone could list which could be the culprit here.
A fudge factor is easy, but the wrong solution here. But the right solution is incredibly complex and difficult to even identify. In my field we can get away with using a timer instead of a precise calculation sometimes. That really isn’t an option for polls. I don’t favor the people trying to fix the models.
I mean if we’re stepping off the data into editorialism, Trump out performed all other Republicans in 2020, like he also did in 2016. As well, Trump endorsed candidates struggled in 2018, and 2022, and special elections. My read of this evidence and I’ve seen it suggested elsewhere, is that whatever property it is that causes Trump to consistently over perform isn’t transitive. So evaluating how well Trump will perform against how well Republicans are performing is misguided. You should evaluate candidates individually, and that would agree with their performance.
Also, this is one poll. The aggregate of polling agrees with this one poll. The minor methodological changes they make from year to year are infact extremely minor and they are doing the appropriate statistical accounting afaict. There is nothing weird or wonky about these polls: Biden is just performing very very poorly. I’ve been saying this for months to an onslaught of downvotes from people who simply don’t want to believe this to be the case.
Finally, I’ll argue that the ‘right’ outlook is always the one that aligns most closely with the data. We should believe stories we tell about data less than data itself. There is nothing to suggest that this election will really be anything that different than the 3 previous, and in terms of landscapes, the best proxy appears to be 2016 in terms of contested states. You should believe the data that is telling you that Joe Biden is losing this election. Biden has been setting up to lose the upper Midwest since December. These are the same states Hillary lost.
maybe I’m just letting optimism bleed into my better judgement
I agree. It’s also what the political pundit class did when they completely wiffed on 2016, and it’s what they’re doing right now. 90% of Lemmy also agrees with your sentiment, and in both Lemmy’s and the punditry’s refusal to be critical of Biden, to drag him towards more popular policies, they’re setting Trump up for victory.
I don’t really disagree with anything you’ve said, it’s a very valid take – and you’re spot on about underestimating Trump but overestimating Republican cohorts in polls. My only qualifier there is that we don’t know if 2022 models were overtuned for only Republicans, or also Trump support.
I don’t know if we can take 2016 as representative of our current dynamic. I think it’s certainly more representative than 2020 however, but shifting populations and world/domestic events have had massive impacts.
In short? I don’t know which outlook is more accurate. What I can reasonably assert though is that the reality will be somewhere between the less optimistic and the more optimistic outlooks. Taking these poll results at face value is probably the better strategic option anyway to create pressure to go vote and campaign.
I agree though, we shouldn’t be totally dismissive of these polls. It’s fine to scrutinize and question them like I’ve said, but it shouldn’t take away from the very real possibility that these are correct. Oddities don’t create impossibilities.
we give more weight to respondents from demographic groups underrepresented among survey respondents, like people without a college degree
Oooooohhh
All of sudden it makes sense
Here's their methodology page, with in addition to that fuckin fascinating tidbit you quoted, some other things of note:
The New York Times/Siena College Poll is conducted by phone using live interviewers at call centers based in Florida, New York, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia. Respondents are randomly selected from a national list of registered voters, and we call voters both on landlines and cellphones.
In the end, fewer than 2 percent of the people our callers try to reach will respond. We try to keep our calls short — less than 15 minutes — because the longer the interview, the fewer people stay on the phone.
We call more people who seem unlikely to respond, like those who don’t vote in every election.
But the truth is that there’s no way to be absolutely sure that the people who respond to surveys are like demographically similar voters who don’t respond. It’s always possible that there’s some hidden variable, some extra dimension of nonresponse that we haven’t considered.
If the 2024 presidential election were held today, who would you vote for if the candidates were
Then it lists the usual suspects including third parties. The only age group for that question voting for Biden is 65 and older. Maybe so, but that doesn’t seem right.
I suspect that out of the 2% of people who answered the phone (and the smaller percentage that stayed on for the whole poll), there were some number of young people whose parents answered the phone and then answered all the poll questions for them, or something weird like that.
Maybe not. But in general, the whole methodology starts to look like a big pile of garbage the closer you look at it. It's not surprising for some answers to come out of it that are very obviously wrong.
To be clear, polling theory is totally valid and an established science within statistics.
But the challenge is always with methodology, because you can never get a perfect simple random sample. And the methodology here certainly seems terrible.
Your issue is you fail to understand how stupid and shortsighted and uninformed the average person is.
I live in one of the most educated states in american, and plenty of people here are complete idiots when it comes to politics and pretty much everyone under 30 is anti-biden and anti-trump and pro-being a whiny bitch about life who refuses to take any accountability but delights in trash talking how everything sucks and the world will end. Along with some grandstanding about how ‘alt’ they are for being anarchist or communist or whatever. But if you ask them specific policy questions they lose their shit because they don’t know and don’t care. Politics is all about image/branding for them so they can feel smug and superior to ‘boring old status quo people’ like myself who will vote for Biden.
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