I found the article to be mostly self-aggrandizing. With full respect for you, I think it is naive to believe that the author wrote this out of altruism.
I do believe the motivation could be as simple as wanting the public to know that it's really as bad as they hear. However, you're probably right. The Republican presidential field is going to be crazy in 2012. I'm tempted to see this is the first step in a "re-elect Pence" campaign to position Mike Pence as a sober, safe leader who protected the United States from Donald Trump's worst tendencies and deserves to take official control of the White House.
The Republicans are going to be split between those supporting their incumbent and those wanting to declare a mulligan on 2016 and say the country needs a safe "real Republican" president to restore our equilibrium. Mike Pence could go with either camp, but I bet he abandons Trump and tries to get the presidency himself. Fortune favors the bold.
Imagine Donald Trump trying to campaign for the nomination while his vice president campaigns against him and calls him mentally unfit to govern. There's no reason that can't happen except that it seems too crazy to be allowed to happen.
Here [1] is a overview of presidential approval ratings from Gallup. You'll find that nearly all republicans approve of the job that Trump is doing as well as a fair chunk of independents. What you'll also find is a single digit approval rating among democrats. During this term in Obama's presidency, his approval rating was 45%. Trump's most recent approval rating according to Gallup is 41%. More recent polls from the Economist/Rasmussen/Reuters put it at 43/44/42 respectively.
Isn't it interesting how social media (and in this case the traditional media as well) has so completely distorted reality? Effectively the same approval rating as Obama yet here you are quite genuinely suggesting that perhaps his VP will start declaring the president crazy and openly run against him. This is a consequence of people surrounding themselves only with voices that they are ideologically aligned with. You tend to lose sight of what people, as a whole, actually think. This, in turn, fuels radicalism. It's not a great system.
and I think the most meaningful metric is the "net approval", i.e. the difference between the approval and disapproval rating. You will see that at this time in the Obama presidency, Obama had a net approval of -2.6 while Trump has a a net approval of -13.6 at this time of writing.
Maybe the difference is less than what some people think, but there is still quite a difference.
An aggregator is just a site that just shows others' data. That site is showing what is the result of "adjusting" others' data to create new predictions. Those "adjustments" led to phenomenal accuracy in the 2008 and 2012 general elections, and abysmal accuracy in the most recent general election.
You end up with the same problem of centralization that aggregation aims to avoid.
538 was one of the least wrong predictions in the 2016 elections, to the point that Nate Silver was getting shit from all over the place for not giving Clinton better odds.
The inherent variance in elections is extremely minimal. The odds in elections are more representative of confidence in your sampling than a product of randomness. What I mean here is that if you polled each and every person who would vote, the result of that would tell you who is going to win with a practically negligible level of variance. By contrast, even the best model for something like a sports game is going to be probabilistic.
Imagine a thought experiment. We're able to do something 100 times, each on a consecutive day, but without any knowledge of what happened on previous days affecting the future, and without any future information or events affecting original 'intent'. If you played a sports game 100 times you'd generally get a wide distribution of results. But if you ran the election 100 times, you're generally going to get the same result.
The point here is that Trump winning did not indicate a 'low probability' event. It indicated a dramatic failing in sampling. Why was this? The 'art' in sampling is not only obtaining a representative sample, but actually determining what a representative sample even is. And the radicalization of our society is making this more and more difficult. The media was running bits literally comparing Trump to Hitler, individuals have been assaulted, robbed, and denied service simply because somebody became aware they supported Trump, and even business leaders have been harassed to no end for doing things that could be seen as supportive of Trump. Like you mention even pollsters that didn't cheerlead a completely crushing Clinton victory "got shit" -- that's all just completely absurd! This creates a chilling effect where individuals are going to be less inclined to respond, and/or respond honestly, when queried about their views. Then pollsters are left to rely on incorrect information which hampers not only sampling but even in the determination of a representative sample.
And the point of all of this now is that presumably most pollsters have tried to change their ways. But this will be the first election where that will be put to the test. So unbiased aggregation is more informative than ever. 538's "adjustments" were based on past polls before we had such social extremism, and by relying on them alone for their first real test - well, that's a huge leap of faith.
Polls would still have non-negligible variance in the scenario you suggest because people can change their minds and polls can't be conducted instantaneously. The director of the FBI publicly stating that one candidate is under investigation will probably change the outcome, but if it happens 12 hours before the election no poll on earth will be able to catch it.
You also seem to be under the impression that the polls were drastically off in 2016. They weren't: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-are-all-right
National polls in 2016 were better than average, and while state polls were worse-than-average it still wasn't the worst error in the last 30 years.
The problem was never really with the polls (though there are problems there, most notably herding). The problem was with the narrative around the election which cited polls as evidence that Clinton was a sure bet even though the polls didn't really say that.
Of course, if you have evidence that the polls were more wrong than this I'd like to hear it.
That's pretty disappointing. Nate is clearly a smart guy who I ha.. a decent degree of respect for, but he's being quite disingenuous there. I predict a crushing win in a football game. I get a crushing loss. I respond, 'Well I think I was about as right as usual since I predicted just about the right number of shots on goal.' Presidential elections are decided exclusively by the electoral college, which is what everybody bases their predictions on. As everybody got this unbelievably wrong, he's instead looking at the popular vote and arguing that 'Well we were pretty much right there, so there was no problem.'
Everybody was predicting a crushing electoral victory for Clinton. Instead she suffered a crushing electoral defeat. Look at 538's own forecasts [1]. You'll note he put the odds of Clinton Winning the popular vote but losing the electoral college at just 10.5% when not only is that what happened, but it happened by a wide margin with Trump's electoral victory margin being even greater than was predicted for Clinton's.
As an aside, even the popular vote aggregates are somewhat disingenuous since they're heavily based on major polling screw ups. For instance Clinton's margin of victory in the popular vote nation wide is smaller than her margin of victory of victory in California alone. 538 was off by more than a million votes there, which they're now using to try to spin into defending the aggregate numbers (which are not even what the election was predicted on to begin with.) This is just really disingenuous stuff.
Your explanation doesn't really explain much. These polls have generally been accurate in the past, but they were very wrong here. Was that because the "art" of finding a representative sample got worse, it was never good to begin with, or something in society changed making this much more difficult?
Like I said, I think it was the change in society. We've become aggressively intolerant which is manifesting in various ways. Do you recall during the primaries when Trump supporters were literally being assaulted and hounded, just for being Trump supporters? Or how the media was running, non ironically, pieces literally comparing Trump to Hitler. The sort of stuff you might expect from internet trolls, not actual reporters.
Compare this to, for instance, how the media and society society responded to e.g. Romney, McCain, or Bush. Society has shifted sharply towards intolerance which is making obtaining accurate information very difficult when that information might leave one within the crosshairs of said intolerance. This creates a major chilling effect which leads people to misrepresent their views. Take the state of society today and then imagine somebody calls you and asks if you're voting and if so, for who. You're going to get some decent chunk of Trump supporters that will lie here. Voting is anonymous, but phone calls are not.
The burden of somehow trying to overcome this problem is on pollsters, and the only thing that's certain is that it's not going to be easy. Gallup was way ahead of the game here -- deciding for the first time ever to not make predictions about the 2016 election.
I'm not arguing that popularity with the voters is driving this. It's the disdain that Republicans in Washington feel for him. In the Bush and Obama years it wasn't hard to find voters who thought Dubya was a frivolous dumbass party boy whose dad's friends made him president so they could run the country, or that Obama was secretly a brainless bimbo benefiting from a liberal conspiracy to manufacture the illusion of a smart capable black man, but you couldn't find high-ranking members of their own party who voiced that opinion about them or even hinted at it outside of a primary, much less multiple White House sources to confirm it.
Comparing numbers comes with an implicit "all other things being equal..." which is a huge disclaimer in Trump's case. Anyway, his persistent popularity with a certain percentage of the population, far from not penetrating the liberal bubble, is the most famous thing about him. From early in the Republican primary, his opponents have been burned over and over again by assuming that this time his popularity will suffer, this time it's safe to bet against him. I predict that in 2020 there will be more big Republican names ready to bet against Trump.
> It's the disdain that Republicans in Washington feel for him.
You say this as if it's a bad thing. Trump met disdain from Republicans during his entire run and tenure as president. It only adds to his popularity. People are tired of typical politicians.
Adjusting across polls, Trump's approval rating is probably under 40% [1] which is very unusual for a first-term President [2]. Not sure where you got the idea that his numbers are "basically the same" to Obama. Trump is an unusually unpopular President by virtually any measurement [3].
It is interesting though how people blame the media for their own distorted views of reality. The American media is objectively awful by most first-world standards, but that doesn't explain the extraordinary ignorance of Americans themselves.
'RealClearPolitics' keeps a decent aggregation of poll numbers. You can see them here [1]. His average approval for their rolling period is 41.7%. You'll scarcely find any poll that drops below 40%. Their table copy pastes nicely and you can easily drop it into a calc table to run whatever analysis you want. For instance of the past 50 polls (going back to july) there have been only 5 pollsters report anything below 40% - they were 39/38/38/38/36. The average is 42.98% approval. Obama's rating for this quarter, at least according to Gallup was 45. That 2% is going to fall within their margin of error which is why I think it's safe to call them basically the same, at this time. Obama was unusually popular early on in his presidency as he was hugely charismatic, Bush received a huge popularity boost following 9/11, so aggregate values can are not necessarily indicative of how presidents were viewed throughout their terms or at any given moment.
But in any case getting below 40% would indeed require substantial "adjusting."
I included links to past popularity ratings. That article makes it clear that Trump has been unusually unpopular from his inaguration.
> The average is 42.98% approval.
I don't think your polling model actually means anything. As the RCP data makes clear there's an enormous spread to those polls. What do you think that average represents?
> Obama's rating for this quarter, at least according to Gallup was 45.
Why do you only consider Gallup's poll for Obama at this time. Why not consider averages? Isn't that your model?
You seem to be trying very hard to suggest that Trump and Obama have "basically the same" popularity at this time but it doesn't make any sense. Trump's approval rating never rises above 45% for his second term but Obama's approval rating almost never falls below 45%. It's quite a stretch to suggest their popularity is comparable.
That's definitely a fair point. The reason I was using Gallup is because they tend to be a high quality pollster and I'd assumed the aggregate data for Obama would be a bit more difficult to find. It's not. Here [1] are the aggregate data for Obama's presidency. At this point in time during his presidency he was rolling at an aggregate 44.3% approval, so we have a total aggregate popularity difference of 2.6%.
And once again, as I've constantly stressed, I'm speaking about this moment in time as that is generally what people are referring to when comparing presidents at any given moment in time. E.g. you would not say Bush was a popular president, yet he had an average approval rating of 49.4%, which was even higher than Obama. The thing that confounds it is averages -- his popularity shot to near 100% after 9/11 from which it started a long slow downward slide as the 'rally around the flag' effect waned. And similar for Obama. He is an absolutely phenomenal and charismatic speaker and he seemed to be living up to his promises at first, which made him tremendously popular. But as it became clear that his early actions belied his actual character, his popularity waned -- leaving him, moment for moment, pretty comparable to Trump at this point in time.
Yet if you polled people on these issues I think there's no doubt that perception vs reality would be incredibly skewed. And for this I think both the social media and the media have played major roles. And this distortion of reality is not productive for a healthy democracy.
