> I reached out to the smartest polling guy I know: David Shor, an independent data analyst who’s a veteran of the Obama presidential campaigns who formerly operated a massive web-based survey at Civis Analytics before leaving earlier this year
Schor’s firing is a tremendous example of how free speech values make people better at their job, and attacks on free speech values can jeopardize organizations and political parties. It’s conventional wisdom now that failure to condemn violent protests earlier cost Democrats votes, including among minority groups. This was quite apparent from polling this summer. (By June, YouGov polls showed that Latinos were more worried about the “breakdown of law and order” than about “systemic racism.”) Creating a culture that makes people afraid to have dispassionate, context-appropriate discussions about what the data was saying made it harder for people to do their jobs effectively.
Obviously what kinds of facts are relevant to an organization’s mission differs greatly depending on the organization! In many contexts Schor’s comments wouldn’t have been relevant and may have been better left unsaid to foster workplace harmony. But in a political organization, obviously some heated issues will come up and people need to be able to have honest discussions about them.
My heart broke when reading your article. There are some very different kinds of accusations put on Shor. The most hilarious is definitely the "you are not black so shut up" argument. I understand lived experience and how it impacts a person's ability to speak on a matter. that I have never seen a person even attempt at explaining how the author's lived experience corrupted their chain of thought. Also the original paper was written by a non white person. In my view this is worse than an ad hominem attack because in this tactics you feel like a whole community just insulated you. I don't understand what exactly the people restricting speech in this way are trying to achieve.
> I don't understand what exactly the people restricting speech in this way are trying to achieve.
When your ideas can’t be sustained on their merits, your only option is to eliminate people who don’t share your world view. It’s a complete disaster and only breeds fragility.
I will attempt to speak their position, though I disagree with the left on identity politics.
They might respond that, as a nation, US slaves and native americans and their descendants were exploited brutally by white English colonists. Over generations, this disparity was solidified by white male laws like jim crow, voter disenfranchisement, and overtly racist and harmful attitudes.
Where they go wrong, IMO, is what you've stated. I'm a white male posting this, does that matter? Should it? Or is it merely the historical fact that matters? And how fair is our current society?
I my view the problem is these objections (though valid at face value) are used to shut down the conversation, not to advance it. I'm not white, does that matter in this instance? Yes, because my lived experience will be very different from yours. But this whole thing is only valuable if I can explain what's missing from your mental model. Lived experience was supposed to give you cover over not knowing racial conditions upfront and give an avenue and tools for us to incorporate more information.
This argument originated to facilitate nuance but is being used to shut it out. That fucking sucks.
> They might respond that, as a nation, US slaves and native americans and their descendants were exploited brutally by white English colonists. Over generations, this disparity was solidified by white male laws like jim crow, voter disenfranchisement, and overtly racist and harmful attitudes.
Very few people would deny this, and I highly doubt Shor disagrees with any of this.
Lived experience is different from experience. But I think its illdefined and widely misused term. The way I see it lived experience differentiates internal and external experiences. For example a white person, black person and an indian person all can have the same police encounter (external experience) but live it in very different ways. Its because the white person and to an extent Indian person do not carry the fear of negative stereotypes because they have not lived the life of a black person who has had these counter multiple times and knows people for whom the exact same encounter turned out really badly.
There is a difference because one party has lived a completely different life so the same exact physical conditions lead to very, very different mental impact. Thus terms lived lived experience are important and the concept is worth looking at. It enables use to think in a more nuanced way and incorporate more information than what is exactly in front of us.
There is no such thing as "external experience", this is just called reality.
Experience = reality + human filter (mood, prejudice, ...)
Experience is a human concept, therefore it is necessarily subjective. Humans are not machines. Thus "lived experience" is just an empty phrase, invented to give a virtuous appearance to prejudice.
I see what you are saying but the connotative meaning of experience is not that. At least not in the media I consume. Usually experience means "I have been in that situation" but it does not take into account how the person arrived there. It's like trying to do a simulation without knowing any starting condition
It's a totally normal thing in english to add redundancy to emphasize. Global pandemic isn't wrong and nobody has to pay more to use two words instead of one. Lived experience is the same thing. Nothing wrong with emphasis.
Sadly typical of HN today that a topic that is interesting technically and politically neutral (the challenge of accurate polling) is derailed up top with an inaccurate culture war comment (there is no correlation between when a Dem condemned violent protest and whether they won their election).
FWIW, Shor’s theory about poll respondents is shared by Robert Cahaly at Trafalgar, but Trafalgar polls missed badly too in 2020 but in the opposite direction. So either that’s not actually the critical factor, or it’s not possible to control for this factor in any sort of reliable way. I find that far more interesting than Shor’s personal HR problems.
>there is no correlation between when a Dem condemned violent protest and whether they won their election
Even assuming this unsupported claim is true, it's not necessarily relevant because correlation isn't the same as causation. For example, it could be that Dems are pretty good at reading their local electorate, and left-leaning areas are more tolerant of violent protest in the name of left causes. So Dems in lefty areas did not condemn violence, whereas Dems in swing areas did condemn violence. If this was true, ceteris paribus you would expect Dems who condemn violence to be more likely to lose, just because they're running more competitive races.
BTW, I think people are unfortunately quite tribal nowadays, and tend to assume that extremists have control of the other side even if that's not the case. And disavowing extremists is only partially effective at changing that perception. Think about it--how much have Trump's many disavowals of the far right shifted your perception that he's in bed with them? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0cMmBvqWc Probably not much.
>So either that’s not actually the critical factor, or it’s not possible to control for this factor in any sort of reliable way.
One failed attempt doesn't mean that something can't be done.
> there is no correlation between when a Dem condemned violent protest and whether they won their election
You got a source on that? It's clear that democrats lost ground, despite the Republican party's abject failure to control the coronavirus. This should have been the easiest win in world history, and somehow, the Democrats barely escaped with the presidency. There is pretty clearly something to explain here.
Exit polls only interview people who vote in person, which may be generally be useful, but in this election are an enormously systematically biased slice of the electorate.
You really can't base any generalizations beyond the in-person voting segment based on them.
At least with the NYT exit polls, they included phone interviews to account for mail in voters. Here is a more systematic post-election analysis, based on a huge survey (100,000+ respondents), from Fox/Associated Press/U Chicago: https://www.foxnews.com/elections/2020/general-results/voter...
This one shows significantly lower Black vote for Trump than the Essence article (12% of men, 6% of women) but an even higher Latino vote (39% of men, 32% of women). Both sets of data show Trump losing support from white men slightly. (Which is consistent with pre-election polling.)
Are there some other measurements based on something else, or is it something we now can never know as a result of mail in ballots having no polling and an expected different statistical distribution?
I suggest looking at states like Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah, etc. that only do mail in voting and see how they measure what used to be measured by exit polls.
> Are there some other measurements based on something else
For 2016 and 2018, Pew had validated voter datasets, based on people in their American Trends Panel who were matched against voter databases and thus known to have voted. Assuming they do the same thing (or some other reputable firm does something similar, or ideally both) for 2020, that would probably be the best data source.
The votes haven't even been fully counted (NY has barely started with their mail-ins), so the exits aren't weighted yet. There are, so far as I know, no valid takes to be made from current exit data.
It's what the exit polls say, although the main lesson we've learned this year is not to trust polls.
What's clearer is that Trump made big gains in areas of the country with a high Latino and Hispanic population - e.g. Santa Ana county, CA, which is 77% Hispanic, saw a 13-point swing to Trump, and there are many similar datapoints from across the country. It's pretty clear Trump carried Florida on the strength of the Latino vote in that state. There's also similar evidence that Trump made big gains this year among Asians.
So to summarise: Trump definitely made gains among Hispanics and probably made gains among Asians according to voting data; he made gains with every demographic except white men according to exit polls; the former data is more reliable than the latter.
306 electoral votes is not "barley getting by", that's the exact same margin as Trump in 2016 minus two faithless electors. That's pretty much the definition of a rebuke.
Biden won by razor-thin margins in the swing states, underperformed his polls by 5 to 10 points across the country, and got crushed in several states which pollsters had said were competitive (e.g. Texas). Meanwhile the Democrats lost seats in the House and (probably) failed to take the Senate despite favourable polls and optimistic predictions of a "blue wave".
Happiness = Reality - Expectations. Expectations were very high and the Democrats have a lot of reasons to be unhappy.
> Biden [...] underperformed his polls by 5 to 10 points across the country
While the votes are still being counted and this may change a little bit, he underperformed the last 538 forecast by 2.7 points at current vote count (not 5 to 10 points), just on the edge of the 80% confidence interval (noted because that's what 538 publishes as its uncertainty measure). Note that in social science, the standard cited uncertainty window is the 95% confidence interval, which would be significantly wider.
Now, you might point out that the results were outside of the 95% CI of the polls, which is true, but polls don't predict voting behavior, they measure sentiment. The cited confidence interval of polls addresses only sampling error, but even if as a sentiment measure a poll has no nonsampling error, it has additional known source of error as a measure of voting behavior beyond its sampling error. Notably, polls are typically of either registered voters (which are very different population than "people who will vote") or likely voters (which are still a different population than people who actually will vote, based on some model of the pollster of who will probably vote.) The reason poll based forecasts like 538 exist is because polls, while they are useful inputs for predictions, are not themselves predictions.
On the Senate and House the results are similarly non-extreme outliers compared to the forecasts. The 80% CI for the Senate forecast ranged from 55 D to 52 R. The potential outcomes now have reduced to the range of 50/50 to 52R. The 80% CI for the House forecast was 225D to 254D. Current results are 218D with 16 seats uncalled. Its expected that deviations from the center of the predicted range on these will be correlated, and it looks like they are all hitting at or near the edge of the 80% CI.
Yes, Democrats underperformed the midpoint of the predicted range. But not by enough (and it didn't happen at all in the 2018 midterm) to think that the models are radically wrong.
D'oh. My "5 to 10 points" was off the top of my head based on some numbers I saw being thrown around last week but I didn't bother to double-check. Thanks for keeping me factual.
I wouldn't say "the models are radically wrong" but I think it's still fair to say that last week was disappointing in several ways for the Democratic Party, even with Trump losing.
Neither that tweet, nor the paper it referred to, attempted to correlate the exact date at which each Democratic candidate condemned violence with their respective election results.
that is such an impossible ask. We can only look at these things in aggregate. Contrary to popular belief a whole country doesn't turn on a time. Also even if that is your standard, this finding is still relevant.
I think you missed the point: if people feel like their opinions will be held against them, they will not share their true opinions, and polling will fail.
The comment seems on-topic to me regardless of whether the culture war represents reality or not
These HR problems have a negative influence on the quality of the work.
To me it looks like "killing the messenger". Listeners want the most accurate data irrespective of the fact that some unknowns can be controlled for or not.
Furthermore to respond to the culture war that you brought up, I think Shor's theory fits my personal experience that some people stopped stating their political opinion in the open. So it is on topic.
That may very well be due to "HR" being a problem or those that play HR on public platforms. The explanation might be correct or wrong, it might resonate with people or not.
Vox euphemized Schor’s departure in a way that was highly relevant to the subject of the article. The issue isn’t that pollsters couldn’t quantify the problem, it’s that they didn’t even realize the problem existed: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/11/02/shy-trump-...
> Trump voters are not liars. As a Democratic pollster and campaign strategist, I feel strange typing these words. But it is required to debunk the “shy Trump voter” myth.
This was written days before the election.
My post isn’t about “Shor’s personal HR problem.” It’s about a culture that caused very smart people to misperceive the facts on the ground, and misallocate funding as a result, in the middle of a high stakes situation.
People in Silicon Valley should understand better than anyone that culture matters and bears on organizational and institutional effectiveness. Often these are pretty theoretical and abstract debates. But here is a case study that elucidates culture that works versus culture that doesn’t work.
I’m not weighing in on the larger cultural issue. As I caveated, this is context sensitive. Political polling, news, academia, and the like are areas where free discourse with respect to sensitive issues is particularly important for the effectiveness of the institution. This is less true if you’re running a food delivery business.
I have a hard time believing your musings on culture are relevant to the topic of accurate polling when GOP-aligned pollsters, who firmly believed that Trump voters are less likely to answer polls and built that into their models, also missed badly.
What? Trafalgar was one of the only polls calling a close race. In Trumps favour but close nonetheless.
IIRC they were the only ones calling Florida going red. You’re being intentionally disingenuous saying they were equally as bad as the rest of the field predicting a blue wave.
Trafalgar almost certainly got more states wrong (counts aren't all finished, but we do know likely winners in all states). Other sites like 538 predicted all states correctly, except NC and FL (50.5%/48.8% and 50.9%/48.4% respectively, both predictions wrongly favoring Biden [1]). Meanwhile, Trafalgar's polls put Trump up in NV, GA, PA, AZ, and MI (from their website, all late Oct / early Nov polls [2]). Once counts are final, we can more accurately compare margins and errors more specifically, but Trafalgar does not have a good record for 2020. Comparing models to a single pollster isn't completely even, but it's important to note that the Trafalgar polls were mostly outliers, disagreeing with the consensus in many states [3].
Number of states that you get wrong isn’t a great measure though right? If I call if for trump at 51-49 and you call it for Biden at 75-25 and Biden wins by 51-49 I was more correct than you were, to count “states called” is the wrong way to evaluate analysis in the same way that fptp is unrepresentatove of the popular vote, ironically.
I agree with you, and that's why i made effort to differentiate between margins vs winning. In my opinion, 2020's polls were a lot worse than 2016's, but because of Biden's much bigger lead (in the polls and in key states), the polling errors did not cross the threshold to be "wrong" in the winner take all system. Finally, there is an argument that even a Biden 75-25 call gives the correct outcome because each state is a winner take all system (with the exception of NE and ME, iirc). From a stats standpoint, the delta in that example make it very inaccurate, but from a model/communication standpoint, getting each state "right" (in binary terms) is very valuable.
Trafalgar had completely different results than the rest of the consensus, and once counts are more finalized in non swing states (places like CA and NY take forever, but we don't pay attention because they are always blue), we can accurately compare the polling and real results between different pollsters and polling methodologies. Some experts have cautioned against using exit polls for this purpose (what is usually done for a quick read of polling accuracy), because exit polls are only measuring election day in person votes, and thus trend really red this year. Trafalgar had unconventional methodologies like a "shy trump voter" bias where they arbitrarily shifted their numbers to the right, with weirdly consistent results of Trump +3 in a bunch of close/blue states. Perhaps there is more complicated justification of these numbers in the background, but I'm concerned that even if their deltas end up better than the "normal" pollsters, they are generating an inferior product with overbaked data.
They tried to come up with approaches to get around the very effect the article talks about: Trump voters don't answer survey questions. The main differences in methodology were making fewer assumptions about Republican turnout, larger sample sizes, and different survey techniques.
Trafalgar clearly missed some things: traditionally republican collar counties breaking hard for Biden. (My county didn't vote for Obama either time, but voted for Biden by 12, after voting for the republican governor a couple of years ago by 38.) But 538 had some insane misses this year in critical states like Wisconsin (off by 7.7), Ohio (off by 7.3), Florida (off by 5.9), etc. Finalizing counts in NY and CA isn't going to change those numbers--and Trafalgar wasn't analyzing them anyway.
Like I said in an earlier comment, comparisons between polls and a model aren't completely fair. Part of the model's calculation is that 8.8 points or whatever requires an enormous polling error to swing for trump. I do agree that other polls should get criticism/improve their methodologies to avoid the ~5 point margin in FL, or the 7.7 margin you listed. And, I even think that they may not get as much criticism as their errors warrant because many of these states were off by 6+ points but still went for Biden. Still, Trafalgar has a unique methodology that should be understood better before they are extolled as the "best pollster". And, Trafalgar is not immune to similar polling errors, just in the other direction, and with a wrong result. The delta may be more important from a statistical methodology standpoint, but these polls are measuring winner take all states, and "The Trafalgar Group’s Robert Cahaly is an outlier among pollsters in that he thinks President Trump will carry Michigan, Pennsylvania, or both, and hence be reelected with roughly 280 electoral votes" is a pretty poor prediction based on their data. Does this mean that their data is necessarily poor? No, but it isn't a good sign.
We can't measure the deltas with as much confidence, because counting is far from finalized in many states (especially non swing states). But if trafalgar is the only group putting out polls where trump is ahead in several states, and then those states are lost, isn't that meaningful? Trafalgar was putting a "shy trump voter" bias into their polls, basically shoving the polls arbitrarily right. Some of that may have helped with polling errors that hurt other pollsters, but its clear they went too far, especially with many midwest states that ended up going blue.
Trafalgar got the margin much better than 538 in key states. Your list excludes several that 538 thought would be close but weren't: Ohio and Texas, and which ended up being close but 538 thought would be a blowout: Wisconsin. Putting those states in, you get Trafalgar erring in favor of Trump by 1.76 points, while 538 erred in favor of Biden by 4.37 points: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSulsnjJ96c2...
The final count will change these numbers a little bit, but I think Trafalgar will have gotten closer to the final result in these key states by 2.5 points on average.
I'll be interested to see the final count and compare on all states, but Trafalgar's issues are deeper than just deltas in my opinion. They had an arbitrary "shy trump voter" factor, which may be justifiable, but any "shy voter" effect is tautologically immeasurable (and thus just a guess on Trafalgar's part). They had weirdly consistent results where Trump was up by 3 points in lots of purple/blue states, which doesn't line up with the differences we saw in other polls and in the results (so far). I agree that the polling errors are significant in many of the mainstream models, even in the states that were called correctly. These deltas so far are worse than 2016, and should be looked into. But _if_ Trafalgar ends up with a lower delta over all 50 states when this is all finished, they still gave the wrong result in most of the key states that matter for the election. That's significant, because the polls are measuring 50 winner take all systems, and 538 told us 90% chance Biden win, while Trafalgar told us that Trump was favored in almost any state that was worth watching this year. That was wrong, and Trafalgar deserves criticism for it.
They didn't have an "arbitrary shy Trump voter" factor. That's not how they did it. They observed that Trump voters were less likely to answer polls and tried to get at the data other ways.
Also, who cares about 50-state results? One of the key points Trafalgar's founder has made is that polling is a state-by-state exercise. All pollsters use data to estimate e.g. turnout among different demographics. National pollsters use things like exit polls, but Trafalgar digs into state-level voter registration data.
There has never been such a thing as a politically neutral HN. It's just that there wasn't until recently a userbase to counteract the liberal tech groupthink.
That's more recent, to be honest. When I started reading HN, it was very very libertarian (but mostly non-political).
As it's grown bigger, it's started to reflect the demographics of software/data/professional people, with a bias towards the West Coast of the US.
That's presumably what you mean by the liberal tech groupthink (note that disliking Trump does not make one a liberal, which is a mistake a lot of conservatives have made over the past four years).
How long ago was the dominant libertarian scene? I've been reading for about 7 years and it's definitely been heavy liberal with the occasional libertarian belief even back then. Since 2016 it's been full throated liberalism though.
2011 is when I started lurking here. i originally had disgruntledphd, but lost my password and there was no way to recover it (apparently you could contact paul graham, but I didn't know that) so I became disgruntledphd2.
Yeah, exactly. People who want to scream about how Shor got cancelled have zero interest in actually discussing anything Shor writes.
That said, and to be perfectly clear: Civis should not have fired Shor. It was very bad. (To be fair in the other direction: the guy is a known genius in leftie political circles and my understanding is that he's done very well for himself since termination as an independent consultant.) But really it's the only good example of the "Cancel Culture" paranoia, so right wingers feel the need to trot out the argument every time his name comes up.
Oh wow, I'm so happy I'm not the only one thinking this. I noticed this transition over the past few years on these forums and I even commented about it in the past.
It is the path of things on the internet that are interesting and then become popular. Same for Usenet :) Kuro5hin escaped by becoming uninteresting. Our descendants may find a solution.
Things change over time. Also note that HN used to be over-run by libertarians that would make Ayn blush. Kuro5hin escaped by dying. There is lobsters, but it has almost zero discussion and overly focuses on "the rules".
I think norms are better and more powerful. Be the norm you would like to see in the world.
I should qualify my statement as I get voted down into oblivion. Hn still has higher quality comments and I'd ever seen it slashdot. However those high value comments usually come on particular subjects that lie within the hn community's zone of expertise. However for political topics or for science articles, hn comments usually lack expertise or neutrality. They're all falls into whether hn thinks of itself more as a repository of expertise or a forum for individuals to discuss topics where those individuals have expertise in some topic ie a professional which by and large the community is composed. Please excuse any strange typos I am voice typing this as I walk.
The same people that attacked Schor have undoubtedly also asked themselves this question, without an ounce of self-awareness.
Except instead of recognizing their own culpability, the conclusion most such people are coming to seems to be "well, I guess nearly half of all Americans are bad people".
Not bad people, but gullible people. Anyone that believes QAnon conspiracy theories such as Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey are raping and drinking the blood of kidnapped children in pursuit of the “fountain of youth” is gullible.
Looking from afar, paranoia seems to have been a mainstay of the American right since the 1950's. What's changed in the past 15-20 years is it appears to have become a mainstay of American politics in general.
they are victims of a con, and they are members of a cult, but they are not gullible: they are scared. scared people are easy to manipulate, which is why terrorism (broadly defined, including 24/7 news cycle of calamity) is so effective at public control.
By dismissing the individuals as flawed due to gullibility, you obscure the true phenomena, and make you and your peers more susceptible to it.
> By dismissing the individuals as flawed due to gullibility, you obscure the true phenomena, and make you and your peers more susceptible to it.
Yes, the continual polarization and forcing of picking a side. What's sad is even after the victory speech I'm seeing posts on FB from the 'winning side' that are further polarizing.
It’s about 40%, look it up there’s polling on it, and that’s apparently probably over representing the more trusting/sane ones. Partly joking on the last part dunno how the populated those polls.
Very often you do encounter polls these days where an absurdly huge number of people give hilariously trollish answers to pollsters, and then people take the resulting polls completely seriously. Pollsters try to include 'attention check' questions to catch basic issues like people just pressing yes to every question, but I do see very often polls that quite obviously can't match reality without anyone noticing it. There's something about maths that switches people's brains off.
I think a large proportion of Trump voters believe parts of QAnon-pushed conspiracy theories - especially that he is "taking on a Deep State conspiracy", and data indicates some support for that[1][2].
Surely they don't believe the "blood drinking paedophile" part though? It seems outrageous, and yet I know a bunch of people on HN believed PizzaGate back in 2016, so maybe I'm underestimating it.
You shouldn't be downvoted. Trump "taking on the deep state" isn't even a conspiracy theory, he literally made that a major part of his 2016 campaign. If deep state/swamp/etc is interpreted as a vague reference to the Washington/New York professional classes who populate government in huge numbers and tend to share very similar worldviews and beliefs, then calling this a QAnon pushed conspiracy theory would be a pretty grotesque distortion of the truth: conservative politicians have campaigned on rolling back big government for as long as there have been competitive elections.
> Trump "taking on the deep state" isn't even a conspiracy theory, he literally made that a major part of his 2016 campaign
You're misframing this. The conspiracy theory is not that Trump is taking on the deep state; it's the existence of the deep state to begin with.
>If deep state/swamp/etc is interpreted as a vague reference to the Washington/New York professional classes who populate government in huge numbers and tend to share very similar worldviews and beliefs
Speaking of grotesque distortions of the truth, that is not what the "deep state" has ever referred to. It's always been, by definition, a conspiracy theory. It generally posits that the country is actually run by a group o unelected individuals in secret that orchestrate events in this country up to and including the selection of presidents.
Eh, wasn't one of the main reasons Clinton ran aground the belief that her nomination was due to a stitch-up inside the DNC (selection of Presidents ... nearly, at least)? Isn't it true that many US laws are created by regulatory agencies of various kinds, and then implemented/enforced by unelected judges?
The notion that most rules are invented and implemented by the unelected isn't extreme, is it, it's more like an observation of how the system really works, especially in the US where - unusually - regulatory agencies can create new laws without involving Congress.
> Eh, wasn't one of the main reasons Clinton ran aground the belief that her nomination was due to a stitch-up inside the DNC (selection of Presidents ... nearly, at least)?
No,.that belief was a side effect of (1) the fact that it was, to a certain extent true that her nomination was largely a product of elite arrangements and structural advantage, and (2) the deep and broad unpopularity that was the actual reason she ran aground in what should have been the easiest election for Democrats in a long time.
Well, no. Laws are only created by Congress. Regulatory agencies can create non-trivial policies, and you might want to argue that the distinction between a regulatory policy and law is minimal or non-existent. But regulatory agencies are never what proponents of the deep state are discussing in my experience. Likewise with judges - and if we wanted to somehow include judges in the deep state, we have the problem that Trump has at this point appointed more federal judges in a single term than any other president and more SCOTUS judges than any other president. If judges are part of the deep state, Trump can not in any way be said to be fighting against it.
The downvotes on this are very aggressive and I'd love to know why. Do people think my summary of the data is wrong or that I'm underestimating the depth of it?
I think Democratic voters are vulnerable to a different kind of conspiracy theory.
For example, huge numbers of left-leaning voters seem to believe that money is the determining factor in elections, whereas the evidence points towards you needing a certain amount, but beyond that it appears to be of marginal value.
The far-right has been experimenting with new forms of high-value persuasion over the last five years or so, which are more subtle, cheaper, and more effective than the usual brick-in-the-face TV ad spend.
QAnon is one of those projects. So is the social micro-targeting used by Cambridge Analytica/AIQ which swung the Brexit vote in the UK and also did a lot to get Trump elected in 2016.
It would be irrational to assume the same thing wasn't attempted this year. All the media outlets I read - not just social media - have been heavily astroturfed with posts making the same pro-Trump scripted talking points over and over and over.
(HN has been relatively free of this, but I suspect that's primarily because conventional political debate is strongly discouraged outside of the occasional thread not because it wouldn't have been tried if it were possible.)
The problem with micro-targeting is that if you're not in one of the target groups, you don't see the ads - so unlike a TV campaign you're not aware of what the other guy is saying unless you can contrive some real and/or fake accounts that will get you an in.
And the propaganda techniques are both subtle and outrageous. (You might not think QAnon is subtle, but it's very carefully designed.)
Trump significantly outspent Biden on social. But the Trump campaign never really ended, while Biden had to start relatively cold.
So for all these and other reasons you're right. It's not about money, it's about narrative engineering implemented with money - and the right has always been much better at that than the left.
I didn't downvote you but I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories. I voted for Trump because I like his style. I like that he pushes back when attacked. I like that he hasn't started any wars. I like my tax return. I like that he renegotiated NAFTA and trade with China. I like that he's getting Arab states to make peace with Israel.
What specifically do you like about the USMCA vs NAFTA? Do you feel it was worth the alienation of Canada as an ally? What advantages do you feel have been gained in trade with China? Wouldn't it have been more productive to work with allies on that front, rather than launching a unilateral trade war? Are these really the reasons you like him, or are they justifications?
I agree that not starting wars is good (except potentially when it's the only way to stop a terrible human rights abuse, like a genocide), and Trump certainly has a better record than Bush there. He does also seem to have made progress with middle east treaties. So I am with you there.
What on earth do you like about his style though? His style is to lie about everything, making up whatever supposed fact suits him at the moment, launch ridiculous ad hominem attacks at anyone he views as an enemy, and just basically stir up anger and discord. The way he "pushes back" is that of a childhood bully. He has ramped up partisan division and anger to an unprecedented level in modern history, and is in the process of undermining confidence in the democratic process itself. He's also alienated the rest of the world with his narcissism, incivility and pettiness. These do not seem like good qualities in a person, and especially not in a president.
I can understand people who vote for him because they're staunchly pro life. I'm not, but I can understand their ethical position. And I can understand those who have fallen for conspiracy theories. But if you're existing in the same reality I am, reading the things the man writes, and listening to the things he says, I honestly can't imagine how you can support him. I'm not one of these that thinks all Trump supporters are racists, or conspiracy theorists, or Russian bots, but I do find that any I've met who seem reasonable, once I dig deeper, believe things about the world that I don't just disagree with but know to be factually untrue. I've also met some who see the world the way I do, but aren't reasonable - basically those who just enjoy the fact that he makes the other side angry. I would truly like to understand what, besides a genuine belief that abortion is murder, could bring a reasonable, knowledgeable person to vote for Trump.
USMCA plugs a hole in NAFTA. It had been easy for non-NAFTA countries, particularly China, to import things into the USA via Mexico. USMCA mostly stops that. Canada isn't so alienated. The prime minister may be unhappy that his own failure was exposed, but the people got cheaper dairy. Even if Canada were alienated, it just wouldn't matter much.
It is usually best for the USA to act in a unilateral way. This is due to power. Working with multiple other parties is typically a harmful distraction. I get that some people are horrified by this, but it's clearly true, and the president's job is to put the USA first. Coalitions are for the weak.
His style is fun. There is nothing wrong with fun. It's a nice bonus, though hardly a reason to vote for the man. The same goes for getting globalist communists angry. It's a nice bonus. There are far more important reasons to support Trump.
The definition of "lie" has become absurdly biased. It's a "lie" if Trump makes a joke, exaggerates a bit, uses sarcasm, or has a few percent error on a number. Meanwhile, his opponents endlessly repeat proven falsehoods. Partisan division and anger were ramped up by his opponents, particularly in the media. There would be no division at all if people would simply accept the Trump plan for America.
We haven't had a non-narcissist president or candidate since Eisenhower, so clearly that isn't anything that matters.
You say he "is in the process of undermining confidence in the democratic process itself", as if it is his responsibility to sweep flaws under the carpet. His opponents have fought hard against anything and everything that could be used to prove fraud. (suspicious...) How can you support this situation, purposely being unaware of the extent of fraud? Unjustified confidence should be undermined. Unjustified confidence is harmful. We should not blindly trust a supposedly democratic process that would be easy to corrupt.
I'm looking back at you in disbelief. To use your wording: I would truly like to understand what could bring a reasonable, knowledgeable person to vote against Trump. (in either election) Are you in fact knowledgeable? DKIM proves corruption for both Hillary and Biden. The first time I chose Trump, I didn't trust him, but I knew that Hillary despised normal Americans and that she had committed crimes that would put any normal person in prison. I was shocked that Trump actually followed through on most campaign promises, and that earned him my enthusiastic support.
Also there's often a trend I've noticed in some of my own down voted comments that an initial negative turns positive as curious readers want to see what was so bad, realize it was nothing, and upvote.
In this case I'm still not sure if people are downvoting because they don't like the data, don't like me not being convinced about the blood libel parts, think Pizzagate was real or what.
The blood libel stuff is absurd. Unfortunately, we have blackmailed politicians. So many of them have been caught doing absurd and evil acts that the absurd possibilities become oddly believable. I'm not saying it happened... but I wouldn't be at all surprised.
Pizzagate being "real" is ill-defined. Things happening in the basement of a specific DC pizza place seems unlikely, though not impossible. For example, the claim that it lacks a basement is reasonable but unproven. We'd have to excavate to be sure that there wasn't an unauthorized basement that is now filled-in to hide evidence.
We do know that pizza-related codewords are used by pedos, and that pizza-related codewords are used in the leaked Podesta emails. Are they unrelated? Not many people will rent a specific number of slices of pizza for a specific number of hours, but that is exactly what the emails reveal. The number of slices is commonly thought to mean the age of the children, but it could be the number of children.
Would you consider pizzagate "real" if everything was as stated, except that the actual building was next door to the pizza place? Supposedly a near-by building was owned by Epstein.
Would you consider pizzagate "real" if the pizza place was just a location to meet up, but not where any child was actually harmed?
>Why else would most Trump voters come from rural areas?
Because the political and cultural interests of rural areas are different than the interests of urban areas? The economies of rural areas have crumbled. But 50% of the population live in cities and so economic policies that benefit the "majority" of the population will completely miss the issues rural areas face. Trump's support is because he at least pretends to care about them.
Also rural areas see much less of the impact that government has. They see less infrastructure, they see less of the masses of students that have to be educated, etc. They tend to be pro-small government because they don't have a daily view of the impact government has on daily life.
I don't view that as gullible, I view that as a perspective that is incomplete due to geographical circumstances. And I am sure that's probably a road that goes both ways, with people in urban & suburban areas not seeing the full picture with respect to rural society.
Yes, the role of government support in their lives does not take on as much of a visible role.
However I'd also like to comment on a common argument that Blue States/Cities pay for Rural areas. Yes, red states receive a disproportionate amount of federal aid, but that is something everyone benefits from. For example, farm subsidies keep food costs low for everyone in the country. Low income states with a high proportion of people on SNAP & other means-tested government programs mean the social safety net is improving our society as a whole by ensuring fewer people are left behind, which would be an even larger drag on society & the economy. In short, I don't think you can separate funding by state in that way and come to any value judgments based on it because the interwoven nature of our society means we do not stand alone as individual states.
I agree with your second paragraph, with the caveat that it would be nice for the direct beneficiaries of these funds to acknowledge the help they are receiving. That's my beef - not the subsidy, but the illusions held by the people receiving it.
Nonsense. Consider where government jobs are--and the massive economic effects of those jobs: there are substantially more federal government jobs (on a per capita basis) in the cities than the rural areas.
You're missing the point. It's not that they're gullible, it's that one side ignores them completely and the other side is speaking to them. It doesn't matter that the guy telling you what you want to hear is probably lying, its still a better spot than the guy that ignores you because they don't want or need your vote.
It’s amazing how many people in the left still don’t get this. Trump supporters absolutely did not vote for him out of gullibility. They got exactly what they expected.
> The bulk of Trump voters are from rural areas, and tend to be less (or un-)educated.
You're of course ignoring even worse problems on the Democrat side.
The lowest education rates and highest drop-out rates in the US are not in rural areas, they're almost exclusively in the inner cities where Democrats tend to completely dominate the vote.
Rural students at 87% are more likely to graduate from high school in four years than the national average at 83%.
The graduation rate by comparison in Washington DC public schools is typically around 65%-70%. Shall I list all the major blue cities by graduation rates, or is that not necessary because everyone already knows what the outcomes actually look like?
The persistent low education and high drop-out rate problems in so many major Democrat dominated cities (eg: Philly, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Detroit, Atlanta, Cleveland, Milwaukee, DC, etc.) is terrifying as an American. They're rates that low-development nations might be ashamed of.
The left pretends none of that exists when it's inconvenient, like when making blanket statements about Republican voter education levels.
I feel like your answer is sort of in bad faith. I live in an urban area, and people are quite concerned about the dropout rate (and more to the point that I think you're trying to imply but are dancing around for your own reasons, the racial achievement gaps). But I guess we put a different spin on it: we are ashamed of it, we should be ashamed of it, and we bring it up a lot in political races and on billboards and in conversations about who to elect to the School Board. Have we been effective in fixing it? Not really. But it's not because of propaganda purposes -- it's because it's a hard problem that's intertwined with questions of financial capital and stability and health care and justice and environment.
Anyhow, in the United States, all citizens have the vote, and an uneducated urban vote and an uneducated rural vote are both votes, though due to our unequal representation the rural vote is 'worth' more.
In sports terms, if a penalty is committed, we give the other team some compensation. Like a pass interference penalty. Because it's not fair to make a team go for the same goal when they've gotten cheated...
In the US, we scream bloody murder at most attempts to even out those starting point disparities that our ancestors caused... when I was in school, one favorite trick to do instead was to stick Magnet programs in poor schools to import kids from the rest of the city to try to bring up some of the numbers, rather than focusing on the kids who weren't doing well in the first place.
It makes for a wonderful self-fulfilling "these people are worth less because they accomplish less so it's out of our hands so we have no need to try to make right our past wrongs" story.
I think the point GC was making is also that rural people see how poorly democrats are running cities in many cases and don't want that to happen to them.
The logic being: better little-to-no government at all than one that does a terrible job.
Worth noting here something important: when people talk about the "educated" city people, what they actually mean is people holding a university degree.
Holding a degree is to a large extent a proxy for age. It used to be that not many people went to university. The concept that ~everyone (or at least 50%) should go to university is a relatively new one. So the numbers of people graduating over time has shot up. Hence if you select the population by whether they have a degree, you'll end up with a lot of young people. And youth is quite correlated with voting left.
The notion that holding a degree makes you inherently smarter than someone who doesn't is an increasingly suspicious one to many folks, like me. There are too many people with multiple PhDs writing academic papers that have major errors in them, signing off on papers that have major flaws, changing their supposedly expert opinions overnight for political reasons, saying things on Twitter that are totally bizarre and so on. Do universities really make you "educated" or do they just make you unwilling to question another "educated" person's opinions even when obviously wrong? My experience is that older people, people in more rural areas and those without a degree are more willing to engage in common-sense reasoning and reject nonsensical claims even when they come from an educated member of the elite, whereas degree holders find it far harder (perhaps because it would devalue their own degree).
The story about uneducated rural areas vs educated cities is slowly turning false. Previously you just hadn't access to culture and were cut off from most events, but that changed with a global network to a significant degree. If remote work becomes more established, there is actually little reason to stay in the city, especially if you found a family.
You find derisive comments on rural areas throughout writings of the 19th and 20th century and it will probably still be reiterated for decades.
I know Trump voters who are extremely well educated, this is not an argument. Secondly, if by "educated" you mean holding a piece of paper, we already know that many colleges these days are infested by the far left, so again it is not an argument. What you care about are critical thinkers, and there's a much bigger disparity there. I'd argue that many college degree holders are not good critical thinkers.
Having lived in San Francisco has definitely changed my perspective. An area with supposedly lots of intelligent people continuously votes for the worst politicians, leading to one of the worst managed cities in this country when it comes to property crime, drug use, cost of living, and homelessness.
If we actually care about outcomes, then maybe we should use some of that vaunted intelligence to think about winning more.
"You're dumb and racist, so vote for us" is apparently not a winning message. And spending hundreds of millions on the same dumb media consulting firms that lose again and again, zero positive message besides "it's us or trump".. I could go on for days about how "smart" the democratic politicians are.
Pursuit of winning at the cost of values isn't a great path. We certainly see it in a bipartisan selection of politicians, but there's no reason intelligence should win out any more of less to propaganda or misinformation, regardless of which party it comes from, especially because it tends to be a lot easier to convince even inteligent people of an appealing lie than an ugly truth, again regardless of party affiliation.
As I said, these things are not constrained to one side or the other. Though Biden was a moderate, and overall there was more support for moderates in the aggregate than for the more extreme progressive views of Bernie. That could just have come down to a more cynical calculation about "electability" though.
Whomever's downvoting both of us should chill, first off.
Second off.. I mean Biden's basically center-right, and he does nothing for any of the values most loudly espoused by the democratic base. He'd have been fired from a FAANG company for the "You're not black" comment, but everyone just agreed to pretend it didn't happen instead because we were stuck with him at that point.
So you can't say it's about values instead of winning. The thing is, our values would win. 60-70% of the country supports medicare for all, most people would support a more redistributive tax code, most people don't like the idea of cops shooting their kid, it goes on and on. But the democratic professional class refuses to run on those values, again and again.
Do you ever see the Republicans telling the pro-life people to eat shit the way the Democrats consistently tell progressives? No, they make a deal that they'll fight for it, probably lose, but at least they'll fight, and they get votes for it.
And the coup de grace is that anyone who questions the democrats' commitment must not really be on our side. Probably a closet racist. It's really kind of genius if your goal is to maintain control of the party.
Yeah, I don't get the downvotes either. It's an honest discussion, but too many people upvote/downvote only based on agreement with the point of view. I'm perfectly happy to upvote a comment I disagree with if it is well thought out and improves the discussion in a thoughtful way. Conversely, I'll downvote someone I agree with if their comment is inflammatory.
Anyway, I'm done here, no energy left after going through these threads. I generally agree with your sentiment though, albeit not on everything.
Even though Clinton and Obama weren't saints - and I have limited respect for both of them - you are going to have a really hard time finding behaviour on that scale on the liberal side.
You're also going to find much less evidence of either threatened or actual violence.
Even BLM at its worst has never come close to the appalling record of right-wing violence in the US over the last couple of decades.
So that's why liberals "lose" - we're far less likely to feel comfortable with lying, cheating, bullying, violence, and intimidation. And for a substantial percentage of right-wing supporters those seem to be considered admirable moral features, not bugs.
Disagree? Provide evidence of general trends, not specifics.
I would say that candidates pushing a three year old conspiracy theory doing better in elections than, say, the Libertarian or Green candidates demonstrates some mass.
I would say the US president supporting it gives it some mass.
Pretending it is not a significant force in Republican politics is either spin or an ostrich impersonation, not sure which.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen the same thing. It’s weird because outside of these political conspiracies, they don’t really have any other odd beliefs as far as I know.
I know a lot of Trump voters, and I’m not aware of any who believe these things. It might be my own bubble, though. They voted almost exclusively due to the abortion issue.
Yeah, I think that's a separate category. I've tried to engage with a number of Trump supporters, as I'd really like to understand how reasonable, ethical people could vote for someone I see as so despicable and dangerous. Obviously I'm missing something, and I honestly don't want to think that half the US population is unreasonable on unethical.
I've found that the most reasonable people tend to be staunchly pro life. And I can see that—if you truly believed abortion was murder, it would be reasonable to support almost anyone who might stop it. I don't believe that, but I can respect it. Others tend to believe things about the world that I don't think are true, like climate change isn't a big deal, other countries have been taking advantage of the US for decades, democrats are controlled by the military-industrial complex, etc. Their conclusions might be reasonable if you take their beliefs as fact, but I think their starting position is flawed.
And then there are of course those who aren't reasonable. Those who just enjoy watching Trump troll libs. Those who want to see the whole system burn. Those who just believe whatever Fox or Breitbart or whatever says. Etc.
I mean, I'm sure I have my own biases. I despise the very thought of the man, because of the way he acts and how he doesn't care about the damage he does. But I'm sure that feeling makes it difficult for me to see any of his positive qualities, or that someone could (perhaps rationally?) value those qualities over the negative ones I see. So far though, I haven't been able to find evidence to change my mind.
If you're missing something, it's probably because you dismiss what was said. I've seen that happen all too often.
For example, suppose a person doesn't want to become a linguistic or religious minority in their own country. When they logically oppose immigration, do you decide that you're hearing a dogwhistle for white supremacy? If so, you're discarding what was actually said and you're substituting false data that supports a pre-determined conclusion that Trump supporters are racist.
Another factor is that there has been some truly shocking projection and gaslighting with regard to corruption. Like no other president, Trump has fought corruption, yet he is relentlessly accused of it. The claim that Obama had a "scandal-free presidency" is a cruel joke; his abuse of the intelligence apparatus to target a political opponent made Nixon look saintly. Biden's family has gotten rich off of foreign influence; we have the evidence and there is no alternative explanation. The whole impeachment process started because both Biden and Pelosi had children collecting bribes from Ukranian gas companies, and Trump dared to tell the Ukraine that prosecuting the corrupt was proper. Looking back to Hillary, her actions with classified information would have put any normal person in prison for decades. The contrast with Trump is stunning. For years everybody has investigated Trump in hope of finding something, and everybody has failed.
The desire to put America first is real, legitimate, and proper. It's a job requirement for the president.
Cutting regulations shot the economy to record highs before that virus hit. Inequality actually dropped. Black and hispanic unemployment was the lowest recorded ever, with records going back over half a century. Trump knew what business needed, and he delivered.
Why do you imagine that "he doesn't care about the damage he does"? He is only damaging things that need to be damaged, like the choking bureaucracy. He cares, and he did the damage on purpose, because the damage was needed. If by "damage" you're referring to something like the opinions of the leftist leaders of parasitic countries, yeah he doesn't care and he shouldn't care. The job is to put America first, not to please foreigners.
I don't know what to say besides that I disagree with almost every single aspect of what you wrote, on either a factual or a moral basis. Often both. Honestly though, we're so far off that I think itemizing everything I disagree with here would be a waste of time. So instead, I'll list what I do agree with. First to answer your question, I don't believe most Trump supporters are racist, although I would suggest you really analyze why decreasing linguistic or religious dominance is threatening to you. I agree that the first (but not only) duty of any world leader is to the people of their country. I agree that cutting regulations, cutting taxes, and encouraging low interest rates likely helped the economy (although other effects of some of those regulatory cuts, especially on climate, are very concerning to me).
And to answer your final question, the most recent example of Trump not caring about the damage he does is him currently undermining faith in the democratic process itself in order to avoid admitting defeat. More generally, he will always take opportunities to fire up his base despite any deleterious effects on national unity. And yes, also his actions and rhetoric toward strong allies such as Canada. Framing such as "parasitic countries" is both inaccurate and diplomatically unproductive - from you, but especially from a world leader. I would go further into why I disagree with that approach, but that would lead me into all the things I disagree with here. So instead I'll just ask you to do some research on your other points outside of right-wing sources. The most clear-cut one is this thing about Pelosi's son, so maybe start there.
The fear of other language and religion is reasonable. In fact, I'd have to say that a person is extremely foolish if they don't fear it. Language is how we communicate. Communication failure creates isolation, hostility, and loss of productivity. You can see that the map of linguistic diversity at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_diversity_index looks an awful lot like a map of poverty, strife, and general failure to be part of the modern world. There is a connection. Religion just made the news a week or two ago in France, with a teacher's head getting cut off. Pretending these issues don't exist doesn't solve them.
Other aspects of culture matter too. It's just more comfortable to know that your neighbors laugh at the same jokes, celebrate the same holidays, and so on. People who want different can leave, but people who want the same have no option other than to fight to keep their culture from being overrun.
This idea that there is a problem with "undermining faith in the democratic process itself" suggests that the most important thing in a fraudulent election is to hide the flaws. I hope you were at least fair about that, not complaining at all when Trump or Bush won. I hope you opposed taking those elections to the supreme court. Lots of people claimed that those three elections were stolen, and lots of people even rioted. If you had any complaints whatsoever about those far-cleaner elections, you're just being partisan. I happen to believe that there is a duty to expose problems, including any way by which fraud could go undetected. We shouldn't just trust that an election could be clean; it is dirty until proven clean. The fact that the left has vigorously opposed election integrity efforts is shameful and highly suspicious. If you'd rather Trump didn't have a legitimate argument that the election was stolen, maybe you should have cooperated in securing it against all possible fraud.
Have you found the perhaps-mythical unbiased news source? Are there any non-right-wing sources that don't censor the news and maliciously spread misinformation? Anything that spread the Russia hoax or "fine people" hoax is disqualified immediately. If the news source didn't fully cover the Biden laptop, it is censored. Full coverage includes at least a description of where to find the video of Hunter naked and worse with his niece, and it includes mention of the email being DKIM verified. The news is censored if it didn't included coverage of Biden's sundowning and other signs of dementia. The news is censored if it never tied the Ukraine controversy back to Joe Biden being caught on video bragging about how he got the Ukrainian prosecutor fired by threatening to block a billion dollars of foreign aid.
In response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25132392 which doesn't have a reply link: being open to other viewpoints doesn't mean automatic acceptance. I do listen and think. I'm not very likely to change my whole value system though, and I'm not about to trust news sources that have long histories of dishonesty. Remember that much of your news media couldn't even be honest about Trump feeding koi in Japan, editing the video to suggest that he rudely disrespected the ceremony. That news bubble is a bad one to be in.
The purpose of an open mind is to close on the truth, but that should be more like science than dogma. New information can change conclusions.
My value system is largely focused on the success of my descendants, including distant ones not yet born. They will prosper best if they have complete dominance for their country, culture, language, and religion. They are more likely to die off otherwise. To prosper they also must avoid the mistake of leftist government (socialism, communism, etc.) because that killed over 100 million people in the 20th century and it's still killing people today.
Answering a couple more points from your original comment here: I don't just enjoy watching Trump troll libs, but I do enjoy it. There is nothing wrong with a bit of fun. People on the right don't believe Fox anymore, and haven't for several years. There was an ownership and control change, with Roger Ailes dead and Rupert Murdoch mostly gone. Aside from two major commentary/interview shows, Fox is now leftist. Fox even hired Donna Brazile, the disgraced former head of the Democratic National Committee.
You mention that you despise the very thought of Trump because of the way he acts and how he doesn't care about the damage he does. OK, so what about that crime bill? I mean the one that put lots of black people in prison for crack. Joe Biden fought hard to pass it, Kamala Harris eagerly used it to put black people in prison with huge sentences, Hunter Biden was immune from it while smoking crack, and Donald Trump signed a prison reform law to stop the harm. How can you not despise the very thought of Biden because of the way he acts and how he doesn't care about the damage he does?
As you say, "I'd really like to understand how reasonable, ethical people could vote for someone I see as so despicable and dangerous." Yes, me too, but the other way. The 100 million are dead, and more are dying. The war in Iraq, supported by Biden, killed plenty. A few decades of life in prison is roughly equivalent to a death, and there were an awful lot of those. Perhaps you can explain why all these things are reasonable and ethical?
To put some numbers to it here are results from a Morning Consult poll[1]:
>Republicans, in particular, have been drawn to QAnon, with 38 percent of GOP adults who had heard of QAnon saying they believed the claims were at least somewhat accurate, compared to 18 percent of Democrats and 16 percent of independents.
Strangely enough Democrats and Independents were more likely to have an opinion of QAnon than Republicans. However they were much less likely to believe any of it with 63% of Democrats labeled it somewhat or completely inaccurate while only 24% of Republicans did.
This also seems to be another strike against the idea of "shy Trump voters" because I think there is a bigger social stigma against QAnon than Trump. Although I guess maybe the Republicans who are saying they aren't aware of or have no opinion of QAnon could be "shy QAnon believers".
I don’t find it too surprising that more Democrats have an opinion of QAnon. There’s a small segment of people who actually have consumed the material and believe in it, and a much larger set who have heard of it and have a vague (and possibly wrong) notion of what “side” it’s on. I think due to the repugnant nature of the movement, most of that commentary is going to come from the left, so mostly left-wing people will form an opinion. Most of the people who are favorable toward QAnon in those polls on both the left and right probably have little idea of what it actually is.
So you're defending the person who is trying to explain why polls got it wrong by using polling data to show that their argument belittling the BLM protests was correct.
This is ridiculous on it's own, but also ignores things like how wrong it is to blame the protests for violence often instigated by the police, how dumb it is to trust polling data from the Nixon campaign when we know he was involved in all sorts of disgusting tactics to get elected, and how there is evidence that the protests strongly helped the Democrats.
> So you're defending the person who is trying to explain why polls got it wrong by using polling data to show that their argument belittling the BLM protests was correct.
He's not belittling them. He's supporting them and their cause, and offering course corrective advice so that they are better able to achieve their stated goals.
> This is ridiculous on it's own, but also ignores things like how wrong it is to blame the protests for violence often instigated by the police
Violence was instigated on both sides, but regardless of what the underlying reality was, the perception was that leftists were responsible for much of the violence, and that is problematic electorally.
The Twitter thread you linked is exactly why the Democrats lost power this cycle. This thinking, right here:
> And for those pointing out that Dems may have lost some House seats in conservative districts, at least in part due to BLM: If you define your party based on what you think might work in one district in Oklahoma, you're doing it wrong.
You may not like the fact that you have to think about the median Oklahoman voter, but the reality is that that voter is much more important than the median say, NYC voter. Because you already have NYC in the bag. Oklahoma, on the other hand, is up for grabs. Whether or not this system is how things ought to be, this is how it actually is.
> He's not belittling them. He's supporting them and their cause, and offering course corrective advice so that they are better able to achieve their stated goals.
Kind of like telling women that they shouldn’t venture out at night? For their own safety.
Or to give another example, the recent arguments made that people shouldn’t publish cartoons that Muslims find offensive, for their own safety.
In all three cases telling people that they shouldn’t exercise their rights “for their own benefit” is seen as highly offensive.
He's not telling them not to exercise their rights. He's telling them not to protest violently. He is encouraging them to protest. He's encouraging those protests to be non-violent.
But this is part of the problem for Dems: it's perception of truth, not truth, that matters for the undecided voter. So even though a few miles from me it's the Aryan Cowboys and Boogaloo Bois who are being prosecuted for property damage, it's the antifa that people in rural Oregon and Oklahoma are afraid of. They're also very afraid of "white slavery" (yes, I'm using the wording of the 1880s and 1910s [1] because it's the same tropes gussied up for today) -- they're afraid that some foreigner will come snatch their beautiful innocent daughter from Walmart; the reality is of course that their daughter's more likely to start doing meth. And of course there is abortion, too; it's wildly more likely that a Republican woman will need a procedure that will be forbidden under various proposed antiabortion laws than that a woman will have an abortion of a healthy baby in the 9th month, but the second scenario drives Republicans while the first is a fact to be swept under the rug ("it's different").
Dems don't speak to the feelings in the way that modern Republicans do. Dems think that because something is unlikely or illogical, they don't have to spend a lot of time talking about it; Republicans realize those are the best things to spend all your press time on, because then there can be no metrics to look bad on. Republicans know much better how to tap into the fear of the white electorate in particular, and then add the carrot that once the temporarily embarrassed millionaire is restored to riches, there'll be no taxes ;)
>Violence was instigated on both sides, but regardless of what the underlying reality was, the perception was that leftists were responsible for much of the violence, and that is problematic electorally.
Literally "it doesn't matter who was responsible for the violence, the left get blamed for it so it's their fault." Fuck that. The police are very often responsible for the violence, and you should not stop protesting because they can attack you and make you look bad. Suggesting they should stop is belittling their protest.
>You may not like the fact that you have to think about the median Oklahoman voter, but the reality is that that voter is much more important than the median say, NYC voter
You completely missed the point of what was said. Maybe in Oklahoma this was a net negative, but countrywide including many swing states it was essential.
I don't think they were saying the protests should stop. They made on observation about how the protests were perceived by others, and that perception, correct or not, influenced voting decisions.
This is changing it from "they said to stop" to "they said it was wise to stop," and the distinction basically only matters if you want the Democrats to win. You're saying the same thing either way.
No, it really doesn't. You're making an extra leap in logic that isn't true for all people. Just because the protests could lose some votes doesn't mean everyone who acknowledge that possibility wanted them to stop.
Pick any issue. A person can support the issue and recognize it may have negative consequences. From there I'm making the distinct that beliefs on the issue can go (at least) two ways: 1) The issue is too important for those consequences to take precedence over fighting for the issue. OR 2) The consequences are too high to continue fighting for the issue and it would be wise to stop.
You seem to be saying that someone who supports the protests & believes it will lose votes must automatically jump to #2. That doesn't follow. A person can believe the lost votes are not important enough to override the importance of the protests.
>A person can believe the lost votes are not important enough to override the importance of the protests.
That person will spend their time discussing the issues important to the protests, not spend their time discussing how the protests are actually hurting their greater cause.
A responsible person considers the consequences of their actions and what trade offs are being made. Supporting the protests but also considering the consequences are not mutually exclusive and is in fact an obvious step to take for a mature and rational person.
OK? If you've thought through your actions, your still not going to belabor the point that the protests aren't helping in the elections. You'll talk about what is important enough to be worth those consequences.
Well, it seems like we parsed this conversation to the point where we found that we actually fundamentally agree on that issue. Thank you for a thoughtful conversation. Heck, even if we had ultimately disagreed, we went about the discussion productively, clarifying our points at each step etc. without insults or flame wars. This is why I find HN to be a unique community.
Do you mean I'm a democratic strategist? I'm the one that proposed the the distinction, and I'm no political strategist. If that part of your comment was meant for me, then I really have no idea where you got that impression.
The comment I was responding to seemed to be saying that a person cannot acknowledge that the protests would lose votes without automatically believing the protests should stop, even though they might support the issues being protested.
That's not true. A person can believe-- about any issue-- that fighting for that issue may have negative consequences but also that fighting for it is still the right thing to do, that the cost of the fight is worth the consequences.
Saying "don't want the Democrats to win" would have made it clearer, my mistake. Ignoring the outlying position the other poster mentions as they will make themselves clear on their own, if you want the Democrats to win those two positions are identical. If you don't, it's two separate negative views of the protests.
I was responding to a post that said "It’s conventional wisdom now that failure to condemn violent protests earlier cost Democrats votes, including among minority groups." So if Shor's point was not about such topics, it has been subverted to be used about such topics.
I'll admit, he does not seem to have belittled the protests directly though. I may have went to far with that one.
It is possible that protests motivated both Democrats and Republicans. The extent of this is unknown, the dust has barely settled. I suspect it will be an area of much research.
Who replies honestly to political question to random strangers? I know I don't.
What's the benefit of letting anyone know where you stand politically at this point? None.
It's much more likely - no matter which side you're for - that the person asking could have an adverse reaction. Things are just way too polarized now, not sure how that can change, but that's how it is.
I mean outside friends/family I simply take a neutral, non-committal stance on almost every hot-button issue these days. And honestly even that's not 100% true, I avoid getting into deep political conversations with most of my family, I simply don't want to cause further rifts in our already frail relations over all this stuff. There is no middle ground.
Funny, I realized that I've never thought about how I react to polls until reading your comment. I flat out refuse to answer polls regardless of who is asking. I refuse to leave any public artifacts of my political feelings (signs, bumper stickers, facebook comments, etc). The reason is exactly as you describe - I have nothing to gain and potentially something to lose.
I am a problem for pollsters and there's no reason to think I'm unique in this regard.
But, given the apparent popularity of social media you shouldn’t assume you’re representative either. I’m sure there are people like you - but we would be helped with a way to measure how many there are in polls. Guessing here, I’d imagine it’s related to income/age/sex/education/etc and possibly distinct subsets of those categories. Who knows though.
I’m increasingly of the opinion that opinion polling needs to be closely reconsidered for informing policy. People conflate polls with votes and something above 50% is seen as having something like a mandate. But it seems like a very immature field or being used for way more than it’s worth.
Not being a fan of push polls, for phone polls/opinion polls, I have a simple response. I let them know my charge for focus group participation is $200/hour, 2 hour minimum, plus expenses.
The person on the other end is getting paid, but I’m the one with the desired information. Are these terms acceptable?
I did one of the phone polls about 15 years ago, and after about 30 minutes of questions I was really tired of the whole thing. But the last stroke is when instead of asking my opinions about issues/etc they started asking the personal questions (presumably to categorize me race, income/etc) I told them I was done answering questions and refused to answer anything that wasn't something you could conclude by looking at me on the street. Now I just say "no" and hang up.
And thats probably a big problem for them too, I had a few friends in HS who worked as pollsters at the local mall, they actually paid people in gift certificates and the like for the hour they took up. It was all really upfront, "Hi, would you like a $10 gift card for an hour of your time answering questions?". IIRC it was 100% issue questions too, the age/race/etc questions were all later filled out by the pollster from what they saw rather than being questions on the form.
So, yah, I'm guessing its a lot cheaper to run phone polls than pay people in the mall to give out gift cards.
The sole time I answer a political poll, I remember being unable to answer a single question. Each one was so obviously a loaded question and completely missing context that I couldn't respond. All I could say is I need more context which they could not give.
I've come to the conclusion that it makes sense (morally, though perhaps not persoanlly) to broadcast your viewpoint when it is generally suppressed, but not when it is already a mainstream viewpoint.
A blue message in redville makes it more acceptable to discuss and is an opportunity for communication and progress; likewise for a red message in blueville.
But if you are broadcasting a blue message in blueville, you are just jumping on the identity bandwagon, further alienating the red tribe; and likewise for broadcasting a red message in redville, which just alienates the blue tribe.
I wish I could do this better. It still scares the heck out of me to say something that could be construed as even remotely redville when I’m in navy blueville. I’m sure others feel the same way in the opposite circumstance.
I think almost everyone would feel the same way. I know I would. We should reflect on why we feel more like this than in 2010.
Persoanlly, I think it has to do with the moral realm vs the practical realm. We think of morality as a good thing, but it is more about absolutes than goodness. As we bring more things into the moral realm -- who you vote for, for example -- it shuts down reason, discourse, nuance, and understanding.
Traditionally, the moral realm is about what you do. There's not much value in society discussing murder and whether its a good thing to do or not; and there's a lot of potential harm. If murder becomes an issue of nuance, people can rationalize it too easily and you get chaos.
Now, I feel like our thoughts are becoming part of the moral realm, and that's a bad thing. There's no chance to discuss and learn together if one person thinks that the other is evil. It also means that it's easy for an otherwise good person to do horrible things because they feel that they are attacking evil.
I don't meam to say that moralization is new. It has certainly happened in the past, say with McCarthyism, or the Spanish Inquisition. But it does feel like the pendulum is swinging in the direction of everything-is-a-matter-of-good-and-evil.
And frankly, it seems like most of this moralization of thought is coming from the left. There's still some socialism-is-evil sentiment on the right, but that was pretty minor this cycle compared with the Trump-is-evil sentiment.
"middle ground" is anti both sides.
As rightly mentioned, things are very polarised now. Thanks to hyper-targeted social media content, one side has no clue what is the other side reading & making opinions from.
I for one want to engage at a level where the cost/benefit at most allows an 'opponent' to reevaluate their stance. At least, I can understand a thread of reasoning that is alien to me.
I understand engaging in a radius of reason. I implore you to build relationships that necessitate constructive debate.
Polls showed similar results for the presidential race whether they were online or over the phone, so the whole “too shy to admit your politics to a human” argument isn’t a very good one:
People who hold controversial ideas may also not trust a computerized system. It isn't just about the person on the other end of the phone judging you. It's that someone is recording what you believe, and you may not be as anonymous as you think.
Research has confirmed that people don't lie to pollsters in any meaningful way when asked their head to head preference.
It's mentioned in the last graph of the article. The crux of this article is rather than 'shy trump voters' there is simply a large amount of these Trump voters who will refuse to take a survey flat out.
"Pollsters say people don't lie to pollsters" is a bad argument. I ended up on some list and lied to every caller out of spite. These people are effectively telemarketers for corrupt propaganda companies interrupting my family at dinner. They don't deserve my honest opinion.
The important thing isn't people lying to pollsters, its people lying to pollsters in a way that's coordinated with a particular demographic or voting block.
If 10% of people surveyed, at random, lie to the pollsters and choose the "opposite" candidate out of spite, you'll actually see a sort of reversion to the mean compared to the actual opinions.
I would bet there is a significant correlation with voting habits -- particularly in this election cycle. Why wouldn't someone who holds the view that polls are corrupt and biased have their attitude towards answering them affected by that?
> Why wouldn't someone who holds the view that polls are corrupt and biased have their attitude towards answering them affected by that?
If your opinion was that polls were biased against your candidate, how would that make you answer? Is it more likely to make you answer in favor of your candidate, answer in favor of the other candidate, or go out of your way to participate in polls to "fight back" against the bias?
You can invent a narrative that supports pretty much any activity. Only some of these narratives have any data behind them.
As far as I'm aware the best-supported theory by data isn't that people intentionally lie, but that they simply don't participate in polls because they narrative pushed by republican campaigns is that the polls are always wrong. This is, we'll say, half true.
What I'm interested in, now that the republican talking point is that the actual polls don't matter, since Democrats are stealing the election anyway, is if Republican turnout will similarly decrease.
Are you saying it’s a bad argument, and contradicts previous research because your personal experience differs? That sounds like anecdata, not argument.
As far as I understand, the traditional sense of "shy voter" is to describe your poll numbers (i.e. the people who did take the survey) which answered "undecided" when they were shy about their choice. This also goes hand in hand with things like observed differences in answers of in-person surveys when the person doing the survey is/isn't from the same demographic as the person being surveyed.
A disproportional amount of people (after controlling for race/gender/income/education/etc) simply refusing to answer the survey has similar but conceptually different effect; one that (as the OP claims - perhaps they're mistaken) is new and had not been a significant factor before.
Not quite, it's a subtle nuance. The concept of a shy Trump supporter is that they're afraid of a stigma associated with admitting support for Trump.
That is different than someone who just doesn't want to take a poll but may be perfectly happy to tell you their views if you struck up a conversation. My own observation is that over the last 4 years, Trump supporters have become ever more loud and proud of that support, not more shy.
But the reason they're not taking the poll is because they don't want to admit support for Trump, right? Of course some are happy to tell everyone, but some aren't. Otherwise why is this concept of republicans responding to polls less just starting now with Trump?
No, not if the hypothesis of the article is correct: They have lower social trust & cooperation metrics, and are disinclined to answer any polls. As for why it started with Trump, there could be a few reasons, all speculation on my part: He may be attracting people who didn't vote much before, and these new voters are the sorts of people who have lower trust etc., and so don't answer polls. Personally though, I think it might be more that President Trump's messaging fosters & encourages a certain amount of distrust: Fake News, anything negative about him are lies, deep state conspiracies, other views aren't just disagreements but bad/treason/sedition, etc. If distrustful people don't answer polls, and President Trump has made his followers more distrustful, then his followers are now less likely to answer polls. Just a hypothesis though.
Yea I agree, they need to find a new term I guess because it seems pretty clear that this is what's been happening to me at least. I guess my question was more along the lines of who doesn't think this was the issue? Seems so obvious that his conspiracy theory squad won't want to talk to pollsters. Plus energized dems are more willing than usual to talk. The 1% response rate is a crazy number. How could they possibly think they're getting a representative sample if only 1% of people respond and responding is a choice? If there's any correlation between predisposition to respond and preferred candidate they're fucked. And it's hard to believe there wouldn't be.
There's a few ways to infer whether or not a 1% response rate is truly representative, or if there's some selection bias with responders responding because they're different that non responders beyond that one simple binary behavior.
My job is basically data analyst/programmer, but I have a decent background in research of this sort (not politics, surveys and qualitative research) and occasionally have to conduct surveys. It often falls to me, or I insist on it, because practically no one knows how to write quality survey questions that aren't leading questions that bias the response.
For example, if you wanted an opinion on a new food product, someone that doesn't know how to ask a neutral question (or is purposely rigging the survey) could ask "How much do you like these french fries? 1) Fantastic 2) Very Good 3) Good 4) Okay 5) Awful. Those answers are front stacked with positive answers, only one negative answer, and no neutral answer. If someone doesn't believe they're awful, they have no choice but to answer "okay".
In any case, one common method I use to measure the presence of responder selection bias is a followup communication to non-responders 1-2 weeks later to nudge them to take the survey. The hypothesis is that people who did not response initially, but do respond when prodded again, will represent a middle point between initial responders & complete non-responders. If that middle point is not statistically significant in their responses that the original responders, I can infer that non-responders are less likely to be a group that would answer differently if had bothered to answer.
No, this is absolutely not a perfect method. More robust methods are needed to further reduce uncertainty: Ethnographic & other qualitative studies can help. Talk to responders to find out what they responded and consider the inverse. e.g., if they say "this is a really important election we have to get Trump out and I want to spread the word so it was important to share my opinion" that should make you question whether Trump supporters would feel the same way about responding.
To really get to non-responders, you need more time & more resources. Find them and pay them to talk to you. It's not uncommon to reward research participants who certainly wouldn't participate otherwise.
Again, none of these are perfect, they just inch you close to greater understanding a little bit at a time.
The badly worded question issue is clearly major, but it's received so much publicity, and with meta pollers like 538 existing it seems like it shouldn't be a huge problem when there's such a wide selection of big money polls available. All those ideas seem decent, but as you said they're not really solving the problem, just inching you toward a less biased sample. I'm sure people that already declined to take the poll are real happy to be bothered again about it. As far as I can tell the only way to actually make polling work is to force people to respond, and obviously that won't happen. And even if it did people would give troll answers(at school we had captive polls and the last question was always "how seriously did you take this poll?" of course the least serious people always marked themselves as most serious). Even paying people to respond biases the sample because now you're more likely to get people who want money(not necessarily totally correlated with income). Of course you can infer that your sample is biased by one side being more enthusiastic, but without a way to enumerate how biased you're nowhere.
No, "shy Trump voter" specifically means someone who says they are not voting for Trump (or undecided) then does so, because they're afraid to "admit" voting for him.
This reads to me as being in alignment with the parent comment to which it was posted as a response.
"... voters who will refuse to take a survey flat out" is equivalent to "... simply tak[ing] a neutral, non-committal stance on almost every hot-button issue these days."
I'd lie to pollsters because I dislike the practice. It causes irrelevant news, and feeds into strategic voting. One distracts / causes pageviews, other one lowers the integrity of our democracy. My data can skew the accuracy of pollsters, however little that is, thereby hurting their interests.
I am also open to lying to telemarketers as I despise their job. Perfect example of a Bullshit Job.
An effective poll should be highly anonymized, like voting, for the same reasons.
You pick a random piece of paper from a stack, check some boxes, put the paper into an opaque box with all other papers. This makes tracking the paper back to you impractical, if not impossible.
This is, of course, not achievable by phone calls, and also hardly achievable over the internet (only maybe using Tor). This also may make it harder to control for age, gender, race, etc.
Otherwise, expressing any opinion (even the most orthodox at the time of the poll) may potentially be turned against you, and there is no obvious personal benefit for most people in expressing their opinion to strangers.
The problem with polls is that there is substantial bias introduced by the fact that only a particular type of person volunteers to participate in polls, not because people are lying to pollsters because they are afraid of their identity being tied to their answers. Anonymizing the polls will not fix partisan non-response bias.
When I was younger and just becoming politically aware, I recall stories of people confessing that they told their family they voted one way when in fact they voted another.
There are very few consequences for dissembling, lots of consequences for being transparent, and in fact the ability to lie about your vote is essentially built into our current voting mechanism as a right. I dabbled in electronic voting for a bit, and the open source folks were struggling with this quality. Being able to disavow an act is called 'repudiation', and many crypto systems have nonrepudiation as a feature. But you also need to prevent ballot box stuffing, so you need a way to assert that John Smith voted, but not who he voted for.
But keeping this feature means that anyone with an IQ above 80 can't be coerced or bribed into voting for a particular person. You give me $200, blackmail, extort, or otherwise encourage me very strongly to vote for Hitler, but I can just vote Ficus and tell you I voted Hitler.
Some rando walking up to you after voting, or worse, before, how do I know they're asking in earnest instead of with some agenda? I'll say anything I can think of to get away from them as fast as possible.
>It's much more likely - no matter which side you're for - that the person asking could have an adverse reaction. Things are just way too polarized now, not sure how that can change, but that's how it is.
What? When was the last time a pollster got upset because of your response? Or are you somehow worried that the results will leak out and you'll get canceled?
...because they identify themselves as such? I guess it's possible that someone impersonates a pollster, but that'd fall under the second part of my comment, which I haven't see evidence of happening.
Years ago back when I had a landline, I was excited when "Gallup" had finally called me to participate in a poll.
It turned out to be a "push poll" for a particular issue (which I agree with) where they were trying to identify personal info about myself and sign me up for something.
I suspect this was not an uncommon campaign technique, and it only needed to happen once before ppl stop answering calls from "Gallup".
If you can't admit you voted for someone, maybe you shouldn't be voting for them. If you are afraid of your neigbors finding out your political leanings, maybe the problem isn't your neighbors but the candidate you are supporting.
If you want to support a specific candidate and everything they believe in, that's just fine, but you should feel comfortable saying as much and, if you feel up for it, laying out the reasoning.
I am completely fine admitting voting for Biden, why he isn't my favorite and who I would prefer. I feel zero shame, you shouldn't either.
Being able to vote anonymously and without regard for being shamed by your neighbours is a feature, not a bug, and one of the last protections against democracy being hijacked by intimidation and mass groupthink.
I have plenty of beliefs I'm not ashamed of on a personal level, that I think are noble, wholesome, and just, that I sure as fuck don't want my employer knowing.
People are bigots. It's not just bad beliefs that are judged harshly.
The Soviet Union had a long tradition of non-secret ballots--and naturally virtually everyone voted for the Communist Party candidate [there weren't other candidates, but theoretically you could vote yes or no on the ones on the ballot].
> I am completely fine admitting voting for Biden, why he isn't my favorite and who I would prefer. I feel zero shame, you shouldn't either.
There are a lot of communities where you wouldn't be completely fine admitting you vote for Biden. Being allowed to vote for Biden anyway is a good thing, being forced to vote on what your peers voted in is bad.
One of the biggest issues I think is that the polling is still done by just randomly calling people. I think I agree that there is a large skew introduced by the simple fact of only reaching people willing to answer a call from an unknown number.
The thing that not enough people bring up is the rampant robocalling. Before I left the US around a year and a half ago, I was getting 2-3 calls a day. Basically, if I ever got a call from a number not in my contact list, I would never answer. I know I'm not the only one like this, but I don't have any numbers to back it up. Even in Germany where robocalling seemingly doesn't exist, I still have this reflex, so it makes me seriously consider the validity of any phone-based polling.
> Basically, if I ever got a call from a number not in my contact list, I would never answer. I know I'm not the only one like this, but I don't have any numbers to back it up.
huh... I have literally never met a single person that answers cold calls on personal lines, this was already SOP when I was a kid.
Anyone with a job that requires them to talk to people with unknown numbers calling. There is one bias right there. Probably people who don't get that many cold calls outside elections, which must fit some sort of demographic as well.
But the better pollsters don't just call. They use various online methods as well. 538 lists the following methods, and rates a pollster higher if they use more of them:
Live — Live telephone interviews, including cellphones.
Landline — Live telephone interviews, not including cellphones.
Live* — Live telephone interviews, but FiveThirtyEight cannot confirm whether cellphones are included.
IVR — Interactive voice response, otherwise known as automated polls or “robopolls.”
Online — Poll conducted by internet; generally, this means by web browser, but it’s inclusive of text message or application-based polling of mobile phones.
Mail — By U.S. mail or other “snail mail” service.
>Anyone with a job that requires them to talk to people with unknown numbers calling.
Exactly this. I'm forced to answer a lot of calls even when I think it's 80% likely that it's a spam call. I own a business and need to keep my employees fed with work. My likelihood of landing a contract with a person drops by about half if I don't pick up the phone right away.
People who don't live in countries where the problem is this bad?
I'm in the UK and I get about 1 unsolicited call a month. If I didn't pick up numbers I didn't recognize I would have missed my Doctor (this week), several new client leads and multiple friends and acquaintences that changed their number.
Also people older than ~60 who still have a landline at home, and grew up without caller-id. Answering unknown phone calls was normal, because you never knew who the caller was.
You don’t have to be 60+ to have grown up without caller ID. I’m much younger than that, and we certainly didn’t have it for at least most of my childhood.
However, I do not have a landline at home now, and have not in many years.
I don't pick up unknown numbers, I call them back a bit later. If the number turns out to belong to a call center, great, I just hang up. If it's a real person, sure, let's chat.
If somebody really wants something, they'll call again.
Also, sending an SMS to the unknown number and asking for a name works wonders.
If someone really wants something they will take the time to type.
This is getting really off topic but I also don't answer calls unless I know them. My mobile voicemail is redirected to my Google Voice # and the automatic transcription is good enough that I usually don't need to listen to the actual voicemail. You might want to give that a try.
Hell, this was SOP before we even had Caller ID! If you weren't expecting a call, you let it go to the answering machine and maybe pick it up after they started talking. "If it's important, they'll leave a message"
Couriers often call me when they're unable to get into my building to deliver packages. One time I was expecting a delivery, I answered a call from an unknown number figuring it was the courier. To my annoyance, it was a cold-calling recruiter.
This is a bit of a tautology, but I guess it skews towards people who actually advertise/distribute their primary phone numbers (i.e., for business, or as a contact point for some club/group/community/org) or are otherwise in a field/business that basically boils down to networking.
I'm not sure exactly when I stopped answering calls outside of my contacts, but I know it's in the past ~9 years (and I feel like I've only been very consistent about not answering for 2-3 years). I'm fairly phone-avoidant, and almost never receive a "real" call from a non-contact.
But it wouldn't shock me if my last real-estate agent answered her personal cell if I called from a number she didn't recognize.
Last presidential election cycle, I seriously snapped when I was getting multiple calls a day, every day. I’d never answer them, but blocking the numbers never did any good.
I somehow managed to get the name of one of the companies responsible for it. Then, I called them up — not the call center employees who were making the calls, the actual corporate office — and I told them to please stop calling me, or, real soon, I was gonna start looking for someone to sue.
The calls stopped. I don’t think I even got any this cycle.
I get calls from HP and Dell (we have on-premisis servers), which somehow come from numbers in Britain, Singapore, India and Denmark. I'd prefer them to email, but I can't really blame the support staff from trying to solve problems as fast as possible.
For spam calls, I lost all pretence of politeness years ago. In the best case I just hang up.
However, I only get a spam call every 3 months or so.
Yeah I got 4-5 spam calls every day and just as many spam texts on my personal cell phone and so I don't answer any unknown calls on it. It is all just scam robocalls. If a pollster called me, I doubt I would answer. And even if I did, would I trust they were a real poll? Probably not.
When I lived in the U.S., the do-not-call register worked pretty well. It wasn't perfect, but it dropped the unsolicited calls from several per day to a couple of times per month.
Unfortunately, it's basically stopped working completely. Legit companies respect it, but there are a lot of overseas scammers continuing to call because there's very little that can be done to them. So now it's all robocalls and "windows technical support" and crap like that. I get 3-5 per day on both my cell phone and land line each.
This isn't strictly true though, there are any number of polling methods that pollsters use these days including online polling and essentially pre-approved call databases. One of the examples in this article was an in-person poll with 70% response rate.
It's probably more accurate to say it's harder to effectively weigh or average responses in a setting where there are 4 or 5 different channels you are collecting responses from.
That’s interesting, considering I would be far more likely to dodge an in-person poll than any other type. If I see anyone with a clipboard asking people if they’re registered voters, I give a wide berth.
Public radio once had a guest describing their online polling methodology - it was running "Win a Prize" type banner ads. So probably not very representative either.
Most/many polls weight for this. If the people they reach are 60% seniors and 40% non-seniors, they know that seniors don't make up 60% of the population, so they weight based on likely voter demographic numbers. After 2016 they also started weighting on education level, because they thought that was a factor in the polling miss of 2016.
Weighing of course can add much more uncertainty. What if there is a portion of the country you simply can't reach for some reason, or you hear back from just 2 people? That data would be as good as useless even if you extrapolate with weights.
I recently learned that the German polls also rely on random calls - but worse than that, they only use the publicly registered phone numbers, i.e. the ones in the phone book.
That list mostly includes landlines, and biases towards older landlines as well (since IIRC phone book registration switched from opt-out to opt-in at some point).
So the polls strongly overemphasize older voters (because no one else has a landline phone anymore).
Even the method of contact would skew toward people who have a means for the method of contact or location. Cell phones might include less seniors. Questioning people walking into Whole Foods is going to give you a different set than people walking into Cracker Barrel.
If the source set of names and numbers is truly representative, I think random calling could work if you make sure to include "did not response" as a line item. Then you might get something like:
I suspect "did not respond" is already more than 15% and increasing constantly. I could easily see it already being 50%+. Even a layman would know to be suspicious of "12% Biden, 11% Trump, 77% No Response".
I can't even tell you if a pollster called me... I'm getting about half-a-dozen calls a day from rando numbers that want to refinance my nonexistent student loans or talk to me about my home's nonexistent warrantee. I went to permanent do-not-disturb months before the election was even in the news. If you don't leave me a voice message I don't even know you exist; if you do leave me a voice message you've got about 3 seconds to convince me you're not a spammer before it's trashed.
But then the polls should undercount a population that is more likely to vote for the Dems and so the polls should have shown more support for the republicans than what happened in the elections.
Maybe we should just have taken the lesson of Dewey defeating Truman and not trusted polls is the first place.
The polls were not great this cycle, but the 538 forecast, which is mostly polls-based, still correctly predicted 48/50 of the states in this election. If you went an entire cycle without looking at a single poll, or reading a single piece of media informed by a poll, do you think you could do better than 48/50?
Correctly predicting is not a badge of honor if the numbers are way off. As an extreme hypothetical, if he'd predicted California to be Biden+40 and it was actually Biden+10 that would be correctly predicting who won but it would also be a massive polling failure. If the numbers land outside the predicted margins, it's bad polling regardless of whether the binary decision was right.
Aaaaand you've actually answered your own question. Why would people not give an actual opinion to a stranger when there's this default opinion of them as (a) having wrongthink they should be ashamed of, or (b) too stupid to realize their wrongthing is in fact wrong?
Guess we'll never know why those dummies would possibly hide their true preferences.
It's less about 'ashamed of their opinions' or the 'shy trump voter.' The article talks about this. The crux of the problem - at least argued by this authored and from what I see working politics backed up generally - is that those Republican / Trump voters do not trust others and are less likely to take the poll in the first place. Those that do take survey generally do not lie about their support.
The article gives evidence. Here is the section:
"I use the General Social Survey’s question, which is, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” ....
It turns out, in the GSS, that 70 percent of people say that people can’t be trusted. And if you do phone surveys, and you weight, you will get that 50 percent of people say that people can be trusted. It’s a pretty massive gap.
[Sociologist] Robert Putnam actually did some research on this, but people who don’t trust people and don’t trust institutions are way less likely to answer phone surveys. Unsurprising! This has always been true. It just used to not matter."
Exactly this. How many Cuban americans in Florida had phones that they answered? The polls clearly missed this demographic group and it's pure "malarkey" to say they were shy Trump voters. The amount of times I've tried to debunk this shy voter nonsense...its much more likely that random calls miss people than they are shy to admit their support anonymously.
Everyone knows Republicans are racist homophobic xenophobic bigoted nazis. Why would they want to admit that to some random over the phone?
The rhetoric that we are using to describe the other party is not necessarily helping our cause in the long run. First it is pushing folks with legitimate disagreement away from public discourse. Second it is creating a good-guy/bad-guy scenario that is the equivalent of tribalism. At this point I can pick between a political talk show or professional wrestling and get about the same quality of content.
Do you not think that the mainstream Republican party has moved radically rightward over the past 12 years?
It's not spending its energy discussing Laffer curves and energy policy, and whether or not someone can be fired from their job for being gay, or if we should invade another Middle Eastern country anymore. It's spending its energy seriously talking about QAnon, and how the COVID pandemic is over, and and how there's a vast liberal conspiracy that destroyed the integrity of this country's elections, and how their president will think about whether or not he will step down if he were to lose the election.
These aren't weird views held by a bunch of powerless cranks on the party's fringe. This is the sort of stuff that the party bet the farm on this year, and has largely paid off with the voters.
In any sane world, an impartial observer would look at that, and conclude that it is all absolutely crazy. But we no longer live in a sane world, so there's now no shortage of people apologizing for, cheerleading, or just ignoring that kind of behaviour in their elected officials.
One way to deal with this type of dysphoria would be to spend some quality time with people who hold views different from the ones you have, and it would be much better if you didn't do that online, but in person - for reasons that I'm sure you understand well, since you are an HN reader.
Or, you decide that everyone on the other side of the fence is completely bollocks. But will this make your life better?
I have two friends whose parents have gone down first the anti-vaxx, then the flat earth, and more recently the QAnon rabbit hole.
They describe it like losing a family member to a drug addiction, or a cult. Quality time with their own family is no longer a thing that can happen, because how dare the children suggest that basic pandemic precautions be taken, or even think of supporting the vast pedophilic democratic conspiracy.
Pray tell, how should they bridge that chasm? This is a serious question.
It's well and good and morally smug to suggest that the problem is that 'you don't spend enough time talking to people holding insane beliefs'. The problem is that you can't use reason or empathy to get someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
Instead of grousing about the tone of the question, could you answer it?
I'd be happy to forward your suggestions to them - they'd appreciate being able to visit their parents every once in a while without being subjected to a firehose of crazy.
Yesterday's flavor of that unsolicited firehose was "They called those four states for Trump, and Biden is at 215 now."
I was talking about opposite side of the political spectrum but obviously not insane people.
It seems you are grossly mischaracterising people of a certain political orientation which brings me to think that maybe you never really attempted real contact and/or you didn’t try hard.
Some of those conspiracies you mentioned don’t even have any link with any specific position on the political spectrum e.g. here in Sydney some politically progressive suburbs are amongst those with the lowest vaccination rates and as you probably know this is also true in many other large cities across the world https://www.smh.com.au/healthcare/rich-suburbs-have-low-immu...
I've done that. It doesn't really help because there's no effective, scalable antidote to enragement engagement, herd behavior and people who are susceptible to emotional manipulation.
It's not like red state people have a monopoly on this behavior, but it seems to be a bit more common among them.
Politically we seem to be in some sort of positive feedback loop of anger/fear/suffering -> lashing out -> more anger/fear/suffering. It's scary.
Deliberately appearing as a troll until the crucial context arrives to reverse the entire meaning is a shit narrative device when discussing serious issues. Save this stuff for stupid memes.
> Deliberately appearing as a troll until the crucial context arrives to reverse the entire meaning is a shit narrative device when discussing serious issues. Save this stuff for stupid memes.
Even with the context it's obviously a troll, because the poster spends the entire first graph building a straw man. The underlying implication is that Republicans are somehow persecuted against by a nameless group who believes all of these negative attributes apply, but no evidence is presented for this.
Because of geographic polarization, the majority of Republicans live in communities that are majority Republican, and the majority of Democrats live in the communities that are majority Democrat. The majority of Republicans face zero social penalty for admitting their support for Trump because most of their friends, family, neighbors and coworkers are also voting for Trump. The 0.1% of Trump voters who live in Silicon Valley are wildly overrepresented on HN, which is why you see so many people whining about being too oppressed by their lefty coworkers to admit that they are Trump supporters, but that is not representative of the actual lived experience of most Trump voters.
This is my personal experience: over the course of my life, I have held both conservative positions and more progressive ones (depending on the topic, and in different periods of my life). I have always been much more willing to discuss openly those positions that I would describe as progressive.
This is despite the fact that over the years I have been living in more than a handful of different countries, each one with different cultural norms. So I think there must be some sort of general tendency, where conservative opinions tend to be disclosed less frequently. I don't know why that is the case, and I would like to hear if anyone has an answer.
I’m similar. It’s a good question. I think it’s because there’s a pervasive underlying presupposition that conservatives are less intelligent or at least less educated than liberals, so maybe you subconsciously want to be associated with the smart, scientific group and disassociated from the uneducated, anti science group? I suspect that’s part of it in my case. Also, in my personal experience, if you want to avoid negative consequences, you’re better off keeping conservative opinions to yourself. The same is not true of progressive opinions.
Thomas Sowell's "Conflict of Visions" theory might provide better explanations. In effect, people with more left/liberal views tend to emphasise the importance of speech, ideas, things that seem expert or scientific. People with more conservative views in contrast emphasise practical experience over ideas, common sense / simple explanations over complex / expert explanations, and tend to consider speech not particularly powerful at changing minds or spreading ideas.
The above explanation is not judgemental. There are times when complex, expert arguments are correct. There are also times when people obfuscate hidden agendas behind clever sounding language. How powerful speech is at spreading ideas is a purely intuitive judgement, it's not easy to measure.
If you believe that expressing your opinion isn't particularly impactful on the world, that people who use complicated statistical methods aren't automatically trustworthy and might be obfuscating things with maths, that academic/intellectual types who talk a lot aren't really valuable to society, then automatically you'd find participating in a poll unappealing.
In contrast, if you believe speech/expressing opinions is an extremely powerful way to change the world, that experts who use maths are inherently worth supporting, that academics/intellectuals are amongst the best of us, then talking to a pollster might seem like a pretty important and virtuous way to spend your time.
The above explanation is invariant to cancel culture, sneering attitudes towards conservatives etc.
I think it also depends on the audience and group you're with. If you're moving around a lot, you might end up in expat/international/diverse groups. Most people who move to several countries aren't moving to villages 4 hours from a city and speaking and blending in with the locals and really hearing what rural people think.
Growing up in a small town and moving between small towns across the US every year or so, I never had exposure to "liberals" until I started using the internet as a teen. Until then, everyone I was ever around talked about them like they were bogeymen.
In the country I live in now, I was initially exposed to much more "progressive" opinions from people. Now I'm seen as less "that foreign guy" and more of a local, and I hear what people would normally discuss with their friends and family. It's quite different.
It's true that context counts, I can see your point since, similar to your experience, I also come from a rural area and I lived in a tiny town for some years.
But I also feel like I have a "default setting" for situations where I don't really know who I'm talking to, and in those situations, what I said above still applies.
Cancel culture is often in the back of my mind because I work in tech, however what I said above was not only referring to the workplace, so the question still stands.
Also, you are not really giving an answer, because if the cause was "cancel culture" then the next question would be why cancel culture works that way and not the other way around.
“The kind of people who answer polls are really weird, and it’s ruining polling.”
This is true everywhere. I’ve been involved polling in for a popular AAA game, a small retail business, school events, online forums, and more; they all fail to account for the “who chooses to answer” bias (is there a name for this?).
I speculate that the “average 4.7 million viewers“ rating Firefly received when it aired was totally off. The Fox executives (who clearly didn’t care for the show, if you read the full story) used this as ammunition to have it cancelled. (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_ratings for criticisms of the rating system used at the time).
The people who would take the time to answer a poll (or connect a device to their TV for some cash) are a small subset of people who will skew your data in unintuitive ways. If more business people understood this, our world would be a better place.
I think actually op is referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_bias: "Participation bias or non-response bias is a phenomenon in which the results of elections, studies, polls, etc. become non-representative because the participants disproportionately possess certain traits which affect the outcome."
Confusing terminology, but I guess "response bias" is about a false response by the participant to a question, and "non-response bias" is about whether the selected participant responded (participated) at all.
I think no one really knows what the different parties represent any more. Most people I know voted Republican were low-wage working people, where my highly paid educated friends voted Democrat. Isn't it supposed to be other way around? No wonder everyone is confused.
The current arrangement is high and low vs the middle, or HLvM for short.
The left is composed of two factions, not one. The left is the high within society aligned with the low in society to destroy the middle in society. [1]
When the power of the upper class is not secure, or somehow threatened by a middle class, the upper class forms an alliance with the lower classes. Today, you see the highly capitalized media powers (like Big Tech and primary media corporations) and other "woke" corporations forming an "alliance of the fringes" with historically marginalized groups, against the more traditionalist middle class. In the past, Kings would form an alliance with peasants to fend off nobles.
Bertrand de Jouvenel described this dynamic early in the 20th century, but it's a common refrain throughout history.
Neoabsolutism is a modern framework for understanding this dynamic.
It's quite interesting that I see the same things but opposite conclusions - to me, the "high and low vs the middle" aspect makes sense, but it obviously refers to the Republican party, lead by the interests of the wealthy elite on the backs of votes from lower class rural people and blue collar workers (predominantly the white workers, but as these elections showed, also black working men) against the middle class such as the college-educated skilled workers who range from people with income like teachers and to those who are well off but have no chance to get into the wealthy (0.1% not 1%) class ever.
Yes, that's true, and because of that the lower class systematically vote for parties and policies that harm lower class to benefit the wealthy.
Actually, this - class consciousness / false consciousness; the understanding (or lack of it) of the role and interests of the class you're in - was one of key concepts of Marx writings, too bad that this association currently makes many people automatically discard these ideas even if they actually are quite relevant to their interests.
Marx's problem was that he thought of everything in terms of class. If I'm poor, and I know I'm poor, but I also think about something other than class when making political decisions (no matter what that "something" is), then I have "false consciousness". That is, if I don't think about this totally the way Marx says, I'm stupid. Nice.
If you think about your life that one-dimensionally, you're poor in a way that Marxism can't fix.
999 times out of 1000 if I ask a working class American to explain Marx's concept of surplus labor time, they would have no idea of what I was talking about. That is false consciousness.
You're talking as if they rejected the idea. They don't even know what the idea is.
A sizable amount of working class Americans have no idea that people die. They have no idea that their grandparents died. They have been to wakes and have seen the corpse of their grandparents or whomever, but when I talk to them they say their grandparents are elsewhere and enjoying themselves. They do not mean this metaphorically, or that they live on via children or their works or memories. They have no concept that these people are not around any more, permanently. They go to churches where a man stands in front and says this, I guess they believe him. This would be part of false consciousness, although not a needed component of them. They are as ignorant of death as they are of their economic exploitation. They are ignorant and uneducated. If you want to call them stupid as you do, that's your right.
Piggybacking onto this, since it looks like something the hivemind may disagree with and isn't sourced in your link, breaking down by family income, between $30,000-$150,000 is majority lean rep, outside those bounds is majority lean dem.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/09/13/2016-party-i...
I've been over these stats 4 times and reread the parent comment and its post but still have no clue how one is supposed to tie to the other.
I think the point I'm having difficulty with is the thin majorities in the study. Does the study say much? Or did pew do a study and publish its research just because...well...that's what it does?
I'm always finding commonality between Roman history and current events (perhaps because Roman history is the only history I read). For example, last night I was reading one of Cicero's speeches against Catiline, and in the preface for the speech the modern author giving context writes:
"To these men and his other supporters, Catiline offered the policy they longed for - cancellation of debts. It was precisely the policy to win him the support of the desperate from all ranks of society - and one that no respectable politician was prepared to offer"
Catiline has supporters both from the upper classes, where they had borrowed too much money and fallen into debt, and from the lower classes where they didn't have enough money in the first place, as well as dispossessed former soldiers.
It makes me think of some left contingents today where they are supported alike by upper-middle class children who have become burdened by inescapable student loan debt and lower class people who were just always burdened by poverty.
>Most people I know voted Republican were low-wage working people
Because Republicans put more money back in the pockets of low wage workers with kids. Most people don't have the luxury of voting along idealistic lines, they vote based on finances out of necessity.
Low-wage workers with children were those most hurt by the Obama's ACA Mandate penalty tax, piled on top of not being able to afford health insurance. Republicans removed that ACA penalty plus doubled the child tax credit. People who afford health insurance are out of touch with this segment of people.
At least we got something useful out of the ACA rather than just tax cuts for the wealthy and political points.
"All taxpayer income groups with incomes of $75,000 and under — that’s about 65 percent of taxpayers — will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019."
"People with incomes between $10,000 and $30,000 — nearly one-quarter of Americans — are among those scheduled to pay a higher average tax rate in 2021 than in years before the tax “cut” was passed. The C.B.O. and Joint Committee estimated that those with an income of $20,000 to $30,000 would owe an extra $365 next year "
Isn't it a core Republican talking point that the Democrats secure support from low-wage people with generous handouts? This seems like another example of the OPs point about the world being upside down.
"Handouts" are viewed very differently then taxes by the general public. One is the government giving out free stuff the other is them taking YOUR money.
Low wage workers are pretty much guaranteed to be net-negative tax contributors. Their tax refund each year is going to be larger than what they cumulatively paid due to refundable tax credits. “Lowering taxes” for people in that position is the same as handing out money.
Statistically it seems that he did well in higher paid groups. But also, he did better among people without college degree and badly among young with college degree.
So in some ways your acquitances are not that odd. Voters cluster, they are not randomly distributed.
It's a multi-faceted reason as to why this is, but the most recent phenomenon I think has most to do with it: voting one way simply to piss off the other side.
anecdotally, knowing some very rich people, they mostly voted for trump in 2016. Pretty much every single one voted for Biden or declined to vote this year.
I voted for myself and have been getting a lot of shit for it for some reason.
I respect voting for yourself over voting third party. If you're going to vote for someone who can't win, at least make it the person you agree with the most.
What does "coastal/urban elites" mean? Just anyone who lives in a coastal or urban area? 80% of the American population lives in urban areas, and that's only going to increase when you include whatever your definition of "coastal" is. Where does the "elite" factor in?
Except that’s really not what the statistics show. Republicans gain a majority of support from high school graduates, individuals with some college experience, and college graduates. People without a high school degree or with a post graduate degree favor Democrats.
An individual’s likelihood of being a Democrat decreases with every additional dollar he or she earns. Democrats have a huge advantage (63 percent) with voters earning less than $15,000 per year. This advantage carries forward for individuals earning up to $50,000 per year, and then turns in the Republicans’ favor — with just 36 percent of individuals earning more than $200,000 per year supporting Democrats.
Partisan identification is very different from voting. That has 29% of the population Republican and 34% independent which is wildly outside how people actually vote.
A large slice of voters self identify as independent, but their voting habits don’t match that self identification. It’s that classic independent streak myth so popular among Americans.
This is inaccurate based on latest elections. There isn't full data for 2020 but in 2016 college educated voted Dem +9.
"In the 2016 election, a wide gap in presidential preferences emerged between those with and without a college degree. College graduates backed Clinton by a 9-point margin (52%-43%), while those without a college degree backed Trump 52%-44%. This is by far the widest gap in support among college graduates and non-college graduates in exit polls dating back to 1980."
Trump had unusual support among the uneducated and a strong dislike among the educated. Presumably from his long run on TV. Here are some more typical results.
No college degree Obama: 51%
Some college Obama: 49%.
College Romney: 51%
Postgrad. Obama: 55%
Though this varies by election with the numbers moving a little based on who wins. Obama had a large popular vote lead which flipped the some collage group.
PS: Split tickets in 2020 are another indicator of more topical voting behavior.
A college degree sounds like a laughably low bar for being considered "elite." 27% of American adults have college degrees. In a state like Missouri which is presumably not considered a particularly liberal or Democratic or "elite" state, over 50% of adults have college degrees.
Oops, not sure where I found that Missouri figure, but it looks like you're right. Still, one quarter to one third of the population doesn't fit what I would remotely consider to be "elite." And why is "almost everyone in your social circle" relevant? I don't think people generally use the word "elite" to refer to the ability to make friends from among a specific third of the national population.
Still, one quarter to one third of the population doesn't fit what I would remotely consider to be "elite." And why is "almost everyone in your social circle" relevant?
It's one thing if you have a college degree and half of your acquaintances don't. It's another if you rarely have meaningful interactions with anyone who doesn't; in that case you're in a subculture that has very different experiences than the average American.
> It’s pretty obvious from election maps and donor data that the democrats are now the party of coastal/urban elites
Urban populations, sure. Not particularly coastal aside from the fact that there's more urban population on the coasts, as county-level maps show pretty clearly.
“Elites” are more dubious. Sure, Democrats and Republicans (counting leaners) are closer to parity for voters with less than a college degree, with college grads and even moreso postgraduate degree holders strongly favoring Democrats.
OTOH, Blacks, who are overwhelming not elites, overwhelming are (and even more overwhelming lean) Democratic, and the same is true predominantly (though less overwhelmingly) of Hispanics.
So, yes, to the urban part, not particularly independently true of the “elite” or “coastal” part.
> OTOH, Blacks, who are overwhelming not elites, overwhelming are (and even more overwhelming lean) Democratic, and the same is true predominantly (though less overwhelmingly) of Hispanics.
I think that's actually the rub. Blacks and Hispanics are voting less and less for Democrats, and that is true more for this last election than 2016 [1]
Despite the very visible rhetoric of racial equality and other movements, the Dems are becoming the party of rich white people.
Same data shows that Black and Latina women voted for Democrats at historically high rates, as did Asians. And Black and Latino men outside of conservative states.
> I think that's actually the rub. Blacks and Hispanics are voting less and less for Democrats, and that is true more for this last election than 2016
Clinton won greater than 90% of the black vote in 2016, as did House Democrats in 2018; there's indications that Biden did a little worse this year. specifically among black men.
> the Dems are becoming the party of rich white people.
Good verified voter data for 2020 will take a while, but in 2016 Trump won 55-39 among whites with over $150K income; the Republicans (while they have support elsewhere, as well) are very much the party of rich white people. Meanwhile, even if they've lost some ground with some of these groups compared to some point in the past, Democrats remain heavily favored, nationally, by blacks, asians, and hispanics.
> Good verified voter data for 2020 will take a while
Agreed and my above source is (probably) using exit poll data, which we should be a bit suspicious about. This is early and it's going to take a few weeks to get and unpack data.
> in 2016 Trump won 55-39 among whites with over $150K income;
And he seems to have taken losses there in 2020
> even if they've lost some ground with some of these groups compared to some point in the past, Democrats remain heavily favored, nationally, by blacks, asians, and hispanics.
I was reading an analysis today that suggested Dems may continue to lose these groups - and they will be losing them to the Republicans ( [2] but note the source and that's it opinion and give the appropriate grain of salt). Given how uncomfortably close 2020 has been for the Dems, I would not rest on my laurels and assume we'll just continue to come out ahead in these groups.
It's starting to seem like there is something the Republicans are selling that are picking up these groups, and the Dems are failing to hold onto them despite their messaging.
> my above source is (probably) using exit poll data, which we should be a bit suspicious about.
Normally, exit polling aren't too problematic, but exit polls in this election when "vote in person" vs. "vote by mail" has been a matter itself of intense partisan division, well... There's a fairly obvious built-in bias compared to the electorate at large.
> I was reading an analysis today that suggested Dems may continue to lose these groups - and they will be losing them to the Republicans ( [2] but note the source and that's it opinion and give the appropriate grain of salt). Given how uncomfortably close 2020 has been for the Dems, I would not rest on my laurels and assume we'll just continue to come out ahead in these groups.
I'm not sure there is a grain of salt large enough for "analysis" from the Editor-in-Chief of the Washington Examiner which rests on no apparent actual data. That said, I think complacency is never good, and I think the Democratic Party should be active asking how it can serve all kind of communities better, including black, hispanic, and other racial/ethnic minorities (and the working class generally, and...)
But there's a difference between that and believing that there is clear (or even strongly suggestive) evidence of a particular problem with certain particular communities (I think there is, but more with the working class than race/ethnic minorities, right now; but I think that means we need greater additional effort in the "working class" area, not an absence of it in the others.)
With the Hispanic vote there are two things happening:
Firstly "Hispanics" is way too diverse a demographic to ever vote as a block. Cuban Hispanics in Miami vote very differently to people of Mexican extraction in California. That in itself will cause some variation election-to-election.
Secondly, and specific to this election: Republicans were very effective in their door-to-door registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns in "new voter" Hispanic communities in Florida and Texas. The Democratic party avoided this because of COVID-19 and it cost them badly.
What are we calling "urban" here? More than 80% of Americans live in urban areas. Are we using a circular definition of "urban" that means "big cities with a large Democrat majority"?
> What are we calling "urban" here? More than 80% of Americans live in urban areas.
By the census definitions, which don't separate out suburban as a separate category, but encompass what would normally be thought of that way as part of urban. If you look at the urban core counties in the Pew list below and a by-county election map of the US, there's a pretty close correlation, visually at least.
> What are we calling "urban" here? More than 80% of Americans live in urban areas. Are we using a circular definition of "urban" that means "big cities with a large Democrat majority"?
Urban mostly means "denser than suburban tracts of single-family homes".
I disagree with both you and the poster who talks about the high & low against the middle, though less with the other poster.
I'm from flyover country, one of those three states that went Biden this year surrounded by a sea of red. You know, one of the three states that elected half the members of 'the squad'. Sure, California rich people can throw in a lot of money, but that's true for both Republican and Democratic parties. Don't dismiss our importance in the Democratic party. We turn up & do the work, including the work of talking with our 'red' neighbors and actually trying to work things out in this country.
As for high & low vs middle, it just doesn't make sense to me. Lots of rich people supporting the Republicans -- lots, lots, lots. Lots of rich people supporting the Dems. Poor people split by race and geography. Middle class people split by race and geography. The split by geography and race is more significant than the split by income, in almost every presentation of data that I see.
People 2020 said that in 2016, yet the average income of Trump voters was higher than Clinton voters. It'll be interesting to see if that changes in 2020.
Although there is something to what you say; the income gap between Republican and Democratic voters did narrow substantially in 2016.
If the 1% class leans strongly right wing, the average income doesn’t really tell you much about the highly paid middle class (or even “lower paid” upper class) as incomes are not normally distributed & you’ve got significant skew (1 billion will make more difference on the mean than $0).
There aren't many people with $100 million income. Most billionaires don't have income that high -- there is a much higher wealth disparity than there is income disparity.
So while I'd rather the media reported the median income than the median income, it's the number we have and hopefully it's a useful approximation.
> There aren't many people with $100 million income
Sure, but there's also a couple with over an order of magnitude more.
> So while I'd rather the media reported the median income than the median income, it's the number we have and hopefully it's a useful approximation.
It's not a useful approximation of anything, and we have a lot more detailed information that “average income of voters of one side vs. the other" on the relationship between income and voting / party preference. And it tells a more complicated story (e.g., in 2016, Clinton won significantly among those with income of $150K+ and under $30K, was nearly even among those with $100-150K and $50-75K, lost significantly among those with $74-100K and $30-50K.)
> Most people I know voted Republican were low-wage working people, where my highly paid educated friends voted Democrat
Biden actively courted high-earning, educated voters with his free college and student loan forgiveness policies, which amount to a wealth transfer to people who already have higher lifetime average earnings and are at a competitive advantage in the employment marketplace. Not very progressive:
He also pledged to fund it by raising corporate income taxes, which will reduce the profitability (and therefore, the value) of all publicly traded companies in the US, which means anyone with a 401(k) or IRA will indirectly be paying for this, even if they don't have student loan debt or a college degree at all.
I'm not sure why this was downvoted. The degree divide is growing as an electorate bifurcator, with the GOP fast becoming the party of the college-less:
And as I pointed out, it's not solely for the reasons college-educated progressives are eager to suggest ("ignorant, uneducated people vote republican"). Student loan forgiveness is a flatly a regressive policy, amounting to a handout to people who are already economically advantaged.
> Biden laid out a narrower plan, saying he would forgive $10,000 in student debt for all borrowers, and the rest of the debt for those who attended public colleges or historically Black colleges and universities and earn less than $125,000 a year.
Imagine being a non-college educated voter earning $60-70k a year, and reading that people earning upto $125k a year will get a handout.
While it's true that the average salary of people who complete a college degree is higher than those who don't there are large numbers who don't complete the degree (which ends up with little salary benefit), or who do degrees that don't provide great salary outcomes[1]
> He also pledged to fund it by raising corporate income taxes, which will reduce the profitability (and therefore, the value) of all publicly traded companies in the US, which means anyone with a 401(k) or IRA will indirectly be paying for this,
That's not how it works. The stockmarket is a comparative market where higher profitability compared to other companies is what affects stock price. This means tax increases to all companies don't drop stock prices.
Also the amount of tax increase is so small it is unlikely to be noticeable on the P&L anyway.
> The stockmarket is a comparative market where higher profitability compared to other companies is what affects stock price.
Can you provide evidence for this? I was under the impression that price is dictated by long-term underlying company value. That is to say, time-discounted, risk-adjusted dividends, including buy-outs. Dividends are just paid out via stock-buybacks these days because the dividends are taxed more, despite them being functionally equivalent.
I was under the impression that price is dictated by long-term underlying company value. That is to say, time-discounted, risk-adjusted dividends, including buy-outs.
It's true that price is determined by long-term value, but long-term value isn't sorely dictated by dividends. Expected price appreciation itself is a factor for growth stocks. Growth stocks include some very large companies, including Google and Facebook.
Earnings is seen as an indication of future value (and future dividends if it is an income stock rather than a growth stock)
> That's not how it works. The stockmarket is a comparative market where higher profitability compared to other companies is what affects stock price. This means tax increases to all companies don't drop stock prices.
The value of any stock (or bond or other financial asset) is its expected future cash flows discounted back to the present at a rate that reflects the risks associated with those cash flows. This is corporate finance 101. Higher taxes for US companies means lower cash flows, and lower values for those assets, unless the discount rate is lowered enough (e.g., lowering interest rates further, even going negative) to compensate. Companies with more US exposure will become less valuable, and money will flow to other assets, including bonds, foreign stocks, etc., to reflect the shift in value.
Companies with more US exposure will become less valuable, and money will flow to other assets, including bonds, foreign stocks, etc., to reflect the shift in value.
Indeed, this is a good point too. 401K managers are aware of this and can just shift allocations.
Maybe it doesn't really matter much. I mean, sure, we need some amount of polling because it informs decisions such as who gets to participate in televised debates, etc. But other than that, what does the general public get out of polling? It's a spectator sport. In the end, all that matters is the votes, and people should really be encouraged to remember this. I'd think 2016 and 2020 would be a healthy reminder of that.
> what does the general public get out of polling?
The laypeople, not much. But for politically active people, not to mention political parties, polls are the best tool to determine where to do what. If you are way ahead in one race but neck and neck in another, it makes sense for parties and activists to focus their efforts and donations to the competitive race. There is never enough resources to focus on every race equally and to the fullest extent. Decisions need to be made. Polls are the best tool to make informed decisions.
OK, but when some random pollster calls me, what do I get out of it if the parties can allocate their resources more effectively? That's not anywhere on my list of concerns. It lets you campaign more effectively? Great, go bother someone else.
If political parties see, through polls, that their platform is not resonating with the populous, they will change their platform and policies. Decisions about future direction of the parties are not made in a vacuum. Polls are one of the feedback methods determining them.
Yea as someone who lives in a non swing state it occurred to me that being polled would probably give my options the more influence than my actual vote.
> I mean, sure, we need some amount of polling because it informs decisions such as who gets to participate in televised debates
I would strongly disagree with this use of polling data. This is exactly how they justify locking out third party/independent candidates from the debates and preventing them from getting any traction, it's the two party duopoly at its finest (also how we end up with ironic tweets like [1]).
I think a much better system would be that anyone who will be on the ballot in enough states to take the presidency (ie 270 electoral votes) should be included. Requiring being on the ballot in enough states ensures that there is a reasonable base level of support for the candidate (since it's not particularly easy to get on that many ballots) and is also an objective measure vs taking into account polls that might not even have many candidates as options.
Even if that allows some candidates you might consider "unviable" to participate, I still say that's a good thing. At least it allows them to show their ideas for how to address various issues (which may influence the platforms of the larger parties if there appears to be broad support for it) and also allows them to potentially gain more support in the future.
Accurate polling is important because it lets politicians and journalists know what is politically possible. But, over-reliance on polls can prevent politicians from doing things that are right but unpopular. A great discussion on the role of polls can be found in this podcast episode https://pca.st/episode/c7683cc8-1031-45ac-ac0c-533aff34557b Especially near the 27-minute mark
Polling can be used to influence the public. Conduct a poll, ask some leading questions, and publish results that appear to show broad support for candidates or policies. This can be used to sway those undecided voters who are inclined to "go with the majority" or "vote for a winner"
Exit polls were historically used as a method of detecting election fraud, because they've always been very accurate. It's only the last few elections where we've seen such a large disparity in polling and actual results.
That is a good point. To the extent that vote-by-mail becomes the dominant choice, we won't be able to rely on exit polls as a check. So it becomes even more important that the other checks we have on the system remain in place.
The key problem with exit polls (in non-pandemic years) is that they are non-representative until the whole vote is collected and they can be re-weighed.
"exit polls are eventually weighted to match the final results, but that only happens after the election is over. On election night itself, the numbers are reweighted as more data becomes available, but what you’re seeing is still subject to a lot of uncertainty"
Yeah, since about 2000 it's been shown to be really unreliable in the US. Heavily weighted towards democrats for much of the same reasons that makes normal polling unreliable now.
Considering the trend for people to be socially canceled, scorned, and shamed for supporting the "wrong" candidate, yes I think exit polling (and all polling for that matter) are not working. People are much more likely to either decline to respond, or they will lie.
Campaigns and parties buy polling and use it to make decisions on what messages to use, what races to invest in, etc. Those private polls were just as wrong as the public ones. From the campaigns perspective that’s wasted money.
It gives people a better sense of the political preferences of the various parts of the country. In a weird sort of way, it helps validate the election results, even if the numbers are off. If you are a liberal living in SF and see Trump win in 2016, you might have seriously questioned the validity of the election results, if you didn't have numerous polls backing up that Trump did indeed have supporters.
This is one thing that I considered, but I wonder if exit polls would be a better choice. They're usually much more accurate than pre-election polls, so they serve as a hedge against large-scale fraud.
A lot of the common answers seem to amount to "it helps politicians and activists figure out what to say." Because apparently say whatever tests well is paramount.
i could picture polling having an effect of suppressing the vote such as in 2016. where one side doesnt feel the need to vote since their candidate is the clear favorite.
It's not just for politics. For example, it's used frequently in public health. There have been a ton of polls about mask wearing, whether someone would take a vaccine etc. that help guide public health policy makers and give them a semblance of an idea of where the public is at versus just guessing.
For no particular reason, I feel very strongly that you could achieve much more accurate results by asking people to estimate what _they_ think the final margin will be then average those results.
I'm inclined to think that community members know their community well enough that given a large enough sample, this average will trend towards the true result.
You may find this specific technique interesting, in which you try to find the "expert minority" in the crowd, under the assumption that people who can better predict the crowd's belief can also better predict the true outcome:
Were the mail in returns against the poll? Or only the in-persons? I know in my area of Texas, the mail-in returns were more Dem than the polls, but the in-persons were much more Rep. Could it be that one side focused on in-person voting and self selected into in person votes.... perhaps. Could it be hacking or other fraud, not very likely. Such accusations need a lot of support of proof, because faith in democracy depends on faith in elections. I don't think we're seeing enough proof anywhere. (I would look to any place that has a mandatory recount where ballots are hand counted). I don't think any Texas races were that close though.
> And the polling error was worse in 2020 that 2016.
reply
The votes haven't even been finished counting in 2020, and that there are shifts over time in the ratios is a well-noted phenomenon. While we're well past the point where that realistically effects the outcome, assessments of polling errors that don't effect the overall outcome may easily be premature (and those started getting made before the race was called, based on the then-current state of the count as if it was final.)
If I were going to try an influence an election via voting machine software, I would affect only some percentage of votes so it wouldn't be too obvious--if there was also mail in ballots, it wouldn't matter.
I might also target only key locations--those on the margins where it wouldn't be suspicious.
If I were to do this in favor of the Republican candidate, you'd probably find that mail-in votes even in non-pandemic years skewed more Democratic. You'd also find that polls seemed to indicate that Republican voters were "shy" and it keeps messing up the polls.
2018 polls were pretty accurate IIRC. Lots of theories going around about how Trump uniquely screws up polling. Not a ton of evidence, but it is really surprising both 2016 and 2020 were off in the same direction. It could happen due to random chance of course. Too bad we probably will never see Trump on the ballot again to get any more data on this phenomenon.
Not the parent, but I think there's a difference between looking at a few datapoints that make you curious and jumping to "Trump stole it." As for 2012, who's to say they back the same party each time, or even that it is the same attacker? Certainly most on Hacker News know software can have vulnerabilities.
In other words, there should be many scientific steps between "that's odd" to "hypothesis proven" otherwise it's just a conspiracy theory.
I think the Electoral College 'stole' it, from the popular vote.
I blame a combination of:
advertisements :: all political ads should probably just be banned period
misinformation on social media :: probably _some_ of which are foreign powers trying to divide the population of other nations
Lack of IRV :: I'd prefer any IRV system over what we have now, though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method seems like a winner focused variation of eliminate the 'biggest looser' first and yield the winner IRV.
The Electoral College :: for distorting the entire process and being non-necessary in the modern world. In the late 1700s when it was created the speed of communication was horseback letters and trans Atlantic sailing ships. It made sense to select a representative who would then travel in person to the core of politics, learn more, and possibly change their mind if the interests they represented were better served by another choice. The hyper-politicized, party focused, blindly following electors of today may as well not exist.
To solve voter representation and choice I believe the US needs:
2) Remove the electoral college. Step A.1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta... Step A.2) Require all votes are counted everywhere. B) Constitutional amendment removing the Electoral College; and while we're at it, mandating IRV of some sort (and hopefully enumerating academic criteria of the method rather than enumerating specific methods).
3) A ban on all political ads and limits on campaign finance and PACs.
4) More voter (general populace) education, an informed public is an implicit requirement for a functional democracy. Probably also better info-graphics presenting 'the books' (money in, money out) about who's paying for what results.
I'm merely quoting the article re pre/post 2016 polling accuracy.
I'm not implying and wouldn't guess Trump stole it. If it was rigged, my guess would be that Putin rigged it without even caring whether Trump wanted to be president or not.
I don't know, but I believe that the models used by major forecasting organizations like NYT and FiveThirtyEight do attempt to control for voting method.
Did Nate Cohn's predictions this election pan out?
“The final polls more or less comport with how we already viewed the race. Mr. Biden ends the race up by more than eight points nationwide — the largest lead a candidate has held in the final polls since Bill Clinton in 1996. He’s up by at least five points in states worth more than 270 electoral votes, the number needed to win. Beyond that, he’s got at least a nominal lead in states worth 350 electoral votes, and he’s just a 2012 polling error away from a sweeping landslide of more than 400 electoral votes.”
Biden underperformed compared to Clinton in most pivot counties and bellweather predictions (which were 90% wrong this year, wow), and most counties in swing states entirely with the except of greaty overperforming in the densest liberal areas, in some of those cases even doing better than Obama as crazy as that seems. Biden underperformed with hispanics and black from exceptions and likewise Trump did better with them than expected overall. And no matter what if you think someone the day of the election saying "Biden Landside" was possible, well...
You do you, but me personally, I'm going to go to someone else for opinions because that was such an exaggeration of reality that it seems like it had to be "for effect".
I disagree. It's FAR too early for him to be writing about "why we got it wrong" because if they knew that now, they would have known that last week.
Look, if it was 2 points in a couple states here or there, I get it! But... if the guy was claiming the possibility of a 400 vote Biden landslide? Nah man, that is either massive incompetence or it's intentionally misleading. Neither scenario do I trust this person.
Which one of Cohn's swing state predictions are within "polling error"? If you can't even consider the possibility that the polls were pushed to demoralize, that's not on me.
Here... Let me give you a source of pollster who explains just how crazy Cohn, Silver, Wasserman's polls were and how drastically they overshot.
This guy is right leaning, but no fan of Republicans, but the view here is that he's pissed about how poorly everyone did this and how it's incompetence or malice.
First, I think you misunderstand poll margins of error. For example, the NYT poll is +-4 for each candidate. Meaning it could swing a total of 8 points.
That isn't anything new.
"In a new paper with Andrew Gelman and Houshmand Shirani-Mehr, we examined 4,221 late-campaign polls — every public poll we could find — for 608 state-level presidential, Senate and governor’s races between 1998 and 2014. Comparing those polls’ results with actual electoral results, we find the historical margin of error is plus or minus six to seven percentage points. (Yes, that’s an error range of 12 to 14 points, not the typically reported 6 or 7.)"
> Which one of Cohn's swing state predictions are within "polling error"? If you can't even consider the possibility that the polls were pushed to demoralize, that's not on me.
A normal polling error is about 5%, so all of them are within that except for Florida and Wisconsin.
Frankly, this has an obvious answer: The people who answer polls are not representative of the population at large. Yet this was known decently enough since 2016. But more at the heart of the issue here is pollsters are providing a service not to inform but to persuade (both the public and donors); internal-polling is actually what matters. And instead of reformulating the service with more accurate questions for total populace (who will your neighbor vote for?), the pollsters doubled down on the standard methods and made (roughly doubly!) a larger polling error than 2016. I mean the Maine senate race was on average ~15 points off the final result[0]. Frankly this was the race for the pollsters to prove themselves that they can self-correct, as they have demonstrated to be unable to do this, it is clear they just should be abolished.
What I mean to say is polling as a major industry for political campaigns is done after this election. The current people running these public polls have no place of confidence anymore: donors should not take them of value, and public opinion should ignore polling. They had their chance this time around for survival as an industry but roundly threw that away.
"The voter approaches their table, and gives their name and party affiliation. The party affiliation is used as a signal that something fishy might be going on if the ratio of R to D is very different from the votes recorded."
This sounds so weird to an Aussie. For most people when you enter the polling place, you get bombarded by party supporters with their "how to vote" leaflets. Most people take all or none to be polite and not indicate your preference. Inside you give your name and it is ruled through on the roll printout and you are handed your ballot papers. Once you vote in your little cardboard both you slot the paper in the box. You go outside, hand back the how to vote leaflets, and chat with people after you have bought your "democracy sausage" ( a hot dog bought from the local school or fire service fundraiser). No one really cares how you voted (and 95% of people eligible vote)
You can also look at previous votes on initiatives as semi-accurate polling.
Michael Bloomberg / Everytown for Gun Safety / Moms Demand Action / The Trace / Mayors Against Illegal Guns which are all the same entity repeatedly pushed out the statistic that "90% of guns owners want to end private gun sales" of course this is totally misleading, but...
When it came a vote in Washington state, after outspending the NRA over 10:1 on Initiative-594 they received a 60/40 win.
I would put that 90% a lot farther down, because everyone in WA voted on this, not just gun owners. So, its it 10%, 30%, 60%? IDK, but I know it's not 90%.
For example ask people to vote on ‘universal background checks’ alone, you’ll probably get a majority voting in favor.
If you ask if a gun owner should give their guns to a trusted friend of family member for safekeeping if they feel depressed or suicidal, most people would also say that was a good idea.
Of course they wouldn’t realize they had just criminalized it.
Yea, I can agree to that. Let's say then that we can't make determinations, but can tell when something is just definitely not true, like 90% of gun owners definitely do not support ending private sales.
>If you ask if a gun owner should give their guns to a trusted friend of family member for safekeeping if they feel depressed or suicidal, most people would also say that was a good idea. Of course they wouldn’t realize they had just criminalized it.
Man, whole separate topic right there! People not realizing what gun laws say vs mean is so common it seems like it's by design.
> When and where was the last poll that predicted an election accurately?
Polls don't purport to predict elections; though people do poll-based forecasts.
538, for instance, does a lot of them every cycle. And seems to be fairly close on the odds, though generally the most-likely predicted outcome occurs at a slightly higher rate than their predictions.
I mean, if you're looking for sub-1% accuracy, you're not going to get it, but polls are usually accurate to within a few percent. In the US, the last couple of elections were quite close, so fairly small misses had a big impact (at least in 2016; in 2020 the only state that was clearly a wrong call based on polls was Florida, and arguably Georgia).
Notably, polls were generally fairly accurate for the US 2018 midterms.
In general, polls work better in electoral systems where national polls are useful; the US presidential election in particular is challenging.
Trafalgar group did a pretty good job this election. They were also lambasted by Democratic media and called wackos and nutjobs. Meanwhile WaPo put its name on a poll that had Biden +17 in WI.
No, they didn't. They were off by 4 in AZ (and called it for Trump), by 5 in Georgia (again for Trump), 6 in Michigan (again), 8 in Wisconsin (and again), and 3 in PA (which they, again, called for Trump). They were also off by 7 in Minneapolis (which they correctly called for Biden) and 6 in Ohio (which they correctly called for Trump).
There was a narrative on e-day that Trafalgar had done a good job, because Democratic votes were disproportionately counted later in the week. But if you'd relied on Trafalgar predictions to allocate resources in an election, you'd have gotten depantsed.
Moreover the Trafalgar head of polling went on Fox a day before the election claiming that there would be 4% points of systematic election fraud happening in Pennsylvania. So "nutjob" and "wacko" would be underselling them.
Some of the local ones have done well. The Des Moines, Iowa poll has been pretty close.
The national polling firms are only getting airplay if they give the "right" result, the few groups that have been pretty accurate in 2016, 2018, and 2020 got very little media coverage due to not being close to the high profile ones and not having the results that CNN, ABC, NBC, etc. wanted to broadcast.
That coupled with comments from some prominent Democratic politicians that they want to make lists of Trump supporters presumably to punish them for their actions, has a significant chilling effect on people being willing to vocalize their support for Trump to non-friendly or unknown people.
Decades ago, phone polling got over a 50% response rate. Now it's under 10%. So there's at least a bias towards people who are willing to accept unsolicited calls.
The book Thinking in Bets points out that predictions are given with a % of certainty. If I say X party will win at Y% and Z party wins, it doesn't mean the model is broken.
On the other hand, this makes the whole operation unfalsifiable in any reasonable time frame. "I always said the candidate had a .1% chance of winning!"
Given two major elections in a row where the results were essentially out of the error bars, it is perfectly reasonable to be dropping your confidence on pollsters very hard. Once was perhaps understandable, but twice is getting into "right .01% of the time" territory.
I hadn't considered the "unfalsifiable" aspect of my comment. I think you make a good point.
At a poker table you get a high number of events to check against but a presidential election is only once every 4 years.
I wonder how accurate the local elections are vs the national? If neither is accurate, then that's a strong case for your point of view and a change in methodology.
> On the other hand, this makes the whole operation unfalsifiable in any reasonable time frame. "I always said the candidate had a .1% chance of winning!"
I wonder how many people still think Nate Silver has a credible perspective: he's spun the above strategy into a job in unscientific punditry.
But elections aren’t single events, they are 50 different events. 5% of the time the results in Michigan will be outside the error bars. But if the results are outside the error bars in Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, etc., and the polls all got it wrong in the same direction for each (overestimated Biden’s support) that’s actually statistically quite unlikely.
Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota aren’t statistically independent though, so if a poll is wrong in one of them, it’s also likely to be wrong in the others too.
Maybe it’s semantics, but to me that means something is wrong with the model. It’s not just a matter of an unlikely result being happening some percentage of the time. There is some hidden factor that could have been adjusted for ahead of time.
The model certainly ought to handle correlations, but the evaluation should take them into account too.
You can't treat the election as fifty independent replicates: a miss in both Minnesota and Wisconsin is clearly worse than one error, but it's also not as bad as (say) getting Wisconsin and Rhode Island wrong, where it's more likely that two separate errors occurred.
I understand the point mathematically, I think I'm talking about more of how the presentation of the error term is unintuitive to me. It makes sense to me to say "the predications were right, Trump just got lucky" when he outperforms the 95th percentile error bars in a state. He just got lucky. But if he outperforms it in a bunch of states because the polls didn't account for the fact that Trump supporters don't answer pollsters, then it doesn't make sense to me to say "the predictions were right because they factored in the chance that the polls hard correlated errors." I get that you've quantified the possibility that the polls are wrong in a systematic way, but I don't think that's the kind of possibility people are thinking of when they hear "there is a 5% chance Trump could still win."
"The pre-election numbers suggest that in a typical poll with 500 positive responses, 255 went for Mr Biden and 243 for Mr Trump. But typical response rates are 5 in 100 — often lower, says Andrew Gelman, a statistician and prominent election modeller. He says that only around 1 in 100 people respond to opinion polls. So now picture 10,000 people, 255 who called their vote for Mr Biden, 243 for Mr Trump and 9,500 who never responded. How confident are we feeling now? "
Harford is the host of the excellent More or Less podcast that looks at the validity of statistics in the news.
As bad as election polls are, at least you get to find out the truth eventually. A lot of polling has to do with domains where there's no easy way of establishing ground truth. But ironically it would appear to me people tend to trust these polls more. While most seem to be skeptical about election polling, they might share exit polls on, say, demographics, without questioning their accuracy.
If your definition of "work" is that a poll accurately predicts the outcome of the election, take a step back. Polls don't do that.
I'm not just referring to inaccuracies that are introduced by non-representedness of the sample, although that's clearly a factor as well.
Polls invite respondents to indicate how they would vote "if an election were held today". But the election isn't being held today, and the respondents know it. Polls are an invitation for respondents to send a message to politicians before the poll, to influence the politicians' offerings. Respondents know that, and use the opportunity that way.
So what are polls? Polls are their own little universe, with their own characteristics, dynamics, and effects. What they aren't is a crystal ball.
One potential solution is to pay people to participate in polls. Pollsters don’t do this because it is prohibitively expensive and cuts into their consulting margins, but it can reduce sampling bias (it can also introduce a bias if not used effectively).
Could you select a random group of individuals up front and then bid on their collective participation in a poll (say, beyond 95%, you all get $10)? You might have to pick a few groups and bid between them.
Yes. A lot of the digital surveys you see do this. E.g. they enroll people in mechanical turk. They claim it's similar to a Nielsen group but I don't buy it. We do truly random surveys delivered in mobile ads. Can't ask nearly as many questions but I think it's one of the best ways to currently get a large truly representative sample
If pollsters from a long and academic history are getting this wrong, and it basically is a two-sided yes/no question, what validity is there in twitter/facebook mining sentiment analysis?
I've kept a spreadsheet to compare the last polling estimates from fivethirtyeight.com with the actual election results. Although there may be 8 or 9 million votes left to count, the percentages are probably good enough to make some comparisons.
What I saw was an average polling error of 4.9 percentage points. The actual results for Trump were 4.9 points higher than the polls. And the errors were greater in states that had higher percentages of votes for Trump.
For example, North Dakota: The last polls showed 37.9% for Biden and 59.6% for Trump, a 21.7% difference. The latest popular vote tally from CNN shows 31.8% to 65.1%, which are 33.3% apart. That's an 11.6% error, much larger than expected sampling errors of 3-4%.
Shor's explanation was interesting. Whether the explanation is right or not, I can see the effect Shor is describing.
Because they are systematic errors e.g. Latinos are hard to poll. Latino vote went more in the direction of Trump then previously. So, every pollster is running into that issue.
To me, this article highlights how much of a moving target weighting polls, and political prediction is. Shor here speaks about how Democrats get oversampled as both in 2016, and 2020 due to different levels of engagement and trust over the election:
>> It used to be that once you control for age and race and gender and education, that people who trusted their neighbors basically voted the same as people who didn’t trust their neighbors. But then, starting in 2016, suddenly that shifted. If you look at white people without college education, high-trust non-college whites tended toward [Democrats], and low-trust non-college whites heavily turned against us. In 2016, we were polling this high-trust electorate, so we overestimated Clinton. These low-trust people still vote, even if they’re not answering these phone surveys.
Is this shift partially because Trump and then QAnon have shifted Trump-voters trust in institutions - thus the voters that don't respond to pollsters are shifting as the Republican party becomes more radicalized?
Does anyone else reject the premise of the article? I understand that polling definitely missed big in some areas, but isn't that normal? Polling is really hard. You have to make a lot of assumptions, adjust for demographics, predict whether a voter will turn out, while using a sample of usually ~1000 people. Of course some polls are going to be wrong. I don't think the polling was generally wrong though. Polling averages had Biden +8 or so, when all votes are counted he'll likely be +5, which is within margin of error. Polls were extremely accurate in Georgia, where conventional wisdom would say Biden shouldn't win.
I get that most of the polling error benefited Trump, and the industry needs to reflect on why that happened and how to prevent underestimating republicans again in the future, but I don't yet buy the narratives that "the polls got it wrong."
Here I am telling people that Republicans are distrustful of mainstream media, science, colleges etc. and that pollsters must know what they're doing, getting representative samples is the best we can do etc.
And then I found out what I suspected is true. The most trivial thing of some people being overrepresented in a poll by the mere fact that they agree to take one, apparently, was somehow TOO MUCH FOR THE POLLSTERS TO HANDLE. Are you kidding me?
The methodology should involve getting truly REPRESENTATIVE and RANDOM samples. While each one is going to be biased in some way, the bias should be independent of political affiliation.
For example, stopping people on a street. Yes it excludes people who don't go out on the street, or people who won't stop.
Then you are supposed to note how many people refused to take the poll. And then you are supposed to measure the correlation between that and their beliefs.
If you really can't do this, then have a sign outside the voting areas, as people exit, with Donald Trump or Biden or JoJo etc. and have them sign up for polling in the next four years. This way at least you can make sure going in that your population is balanced as of four years ago.
> Qualitative research doesn’t solve the problem of one group of people being really, really excited to share their opinions, while another group isn’t. As long as that bias exists, it’ll percolate down to whatever you do.
The trust in this case is trust of strangers who are calling you to ask you polling questions.
When it comes to media, all information you consume must be read with a critical eye. You need to understand what assumptions are driving what is said, what the tone is and where they are drawing their conclusions from.
Well, so that means roughly half of the country is racist. No matter what you think of them, if you want your polls to work, this means that your polls have to also work properly on measuring the voting preferences of racists as well; a poll needs to make racists comfortable enough to reveal their intent, or it is a useless poll that won't properly reflect reality of what the people want and what the people will do.
Denouncing white supremacists after the entire country says you have to isn't really the same. Anyone with critical thinking skills can see that the number of times he has refused to denounce white supremacists or called them good people makes him a white supremacist.
It's been three years, can we please stop repeating this lie? Trump has disavowed white supremacists clearly and repeatedly, and the claim that he called them "fine people" is not true. Let me say that again: it's wrong. This is not ambiguous:
it would have taken you a single Google search to find out that when Trump talked about "fine people" at Charlottesville he explicitly said that he wasn't talking about the white supremacists and neo-Nazis and that those people should be "condemned totally." And that's just one of countless times that he's condemned white supremacists and distanced himself from them.
The media repeats this easily-debunkable falsehood again and again and again and again, people like you fall for it, and then they have the nerve to tell us that it's only the Right who engage in "misinformation".
Yea... it's so weird how Trump keeps making these, at best, ambiguous statements where he has to explain later - sometimes days later, sometimes never - what he really meant. And really weird that, during that time, neo-nazis, white supremacists, white nationals, and other groups earnestly quote those statements and publicly support him. But I guess the weirdest part is actually anyone who holds Trump accountable for those statements. /s
To continue: Promoting the birther conspiracy theory, pointedly stiffing Puerto Rico for disaster aid, racist comments about Latinos ("crime and rapists"), all the way back to the Central Park Five ad campaign, actually.
I wonder what Facebook or Google's "poll" numbers would have been if they decided to run one? Given their access to search, texts, social media posts, emails, tracking, etc along with their profile of a large segment of the population, I'm guessing their polling data would be the most accurate.
Facebook already determines your political leaning, somehow. At least a few years ago you could see it for yourself, not sure if that still exists. I'm sure without a shadow of a doubt Google makes the same determination. So they probably don't need to 'run' anything special here.
It seems obvious to me that there was massive bias in media towards Biden, and they all happily accepted the narrative that Biden would win in a landslide and dismissed anyone saying otherwise as know-nothings.
IMO that's tantamount to election interference, if there's near unanimous media coverage for the entire election season of inaccurate polling that assumes a landslide Biden victory.
I didn't vote for Biden or Trump, so I'm not really interested in defending either camp here. I just think the media and big tech are so demonstrably contemptible and partial.
> If the media should be giving equal status and weight to all the parties
I'm not saying they need to give them equal status, necessarily - I'm saying that the employees of these institutions exist in a bubble mostly cause of class&geographic reasons.
The point is that all of these positions "Biden will naturally win in a landslide per polling" are tacitly accepted and challenges are dismissed as hearsay.
There needs to be some challenge/discourse against the elite orthodoxy.
I didn't see any of the elite media saying "Biden will naturally win in a landslide per polling". They were saying that in 2016. In 2020 much more common was "the polls are showing a landslide, but I don't trust the polls completely any more".
If you are saying that the polls were deliberately biased, I disagree strongly. It's a really freaking hard job if only 1-3% of the people you try to poll don't hang up the phone on you. That the polling error was under 10% was incredible in that scenario.
The media is biased. The polls had an error. Two very different things.
That certainly was not the case. There was a bit of shell-shocked fear about 4 more years of Trump, but they most certainly did not expect a nail-biter election where Republicans outperformed in most areas, whether it's the presidential election in states(and pretty darn close to 10% off in some places), the Senate, the House or state legislatures.
Everyone I know who claims Trump is racist can quickly and easily point to specific policies, quotes, and actions - both before and during his presidency.
This meme that people don't have evidence for their issues with Trump is not only false, it's comedically ironic.
I use the classic and correct definition of racism that associates attributes to racial groups, or more precisely ethnicities and adds a value judgement to that. You are a racist if you think one ethnicity is intrinsically superior to others.
I don't think Trump has that belief, it is also improbable for his character in my opinion.
First, your argument is different from the comment to which I replied. Whether Trump _is_ a racist and whether people have reasons for believing he is a racist that they can articulate are two completely different things.
>I use the classic and correct definition of racism
I really don't have any interest in debating what definition of racism is better - certainly not which one is "correct". But dictionaries and definitions are descriptive and subject to change; they're not normative. If your argument hinges on a different definition of a word, you're no longer have a good faith discussion with someone.
From election strategy point of view, you are in a much stronger position if you poll much higher, for various reasons:
- uncaring and undecided voters, if they had to vote, are likely to vote for the winners, because being on the winning side makes them feel better (which may have decided this election)
- if you lose the election, people are more likely to believe that the other side cheated if you were projected a clear winner by the polls, so you can bring people on the streets or run fraudulent lawsuits to deter the opponents and still get a lot of support
So, strategically, it pays to poll higher regardless of how things really are. Given how a lot of media organizations are against Trump, it's not unlikely that these polling organizations were too... and they helped the opponents.
> People tell the truth, when you ask them who they’re voting for. They really do, on average. The reason why the polls are wrong is because the people who were answering these surveys were the wrong people.
The takeaway from the article is not that people lie, but just that people who are more trusting (according to the GSS survey) are more likely to take surveys and are also more likely to vote Democratic.
> people who are more trusting...are also more likely to vote Democratic
I think this is built into the fabric of political views. If you're cautious about other people's motives, you'll want smaller government (less authority over you). The more you think folks are generally trustworthy, the less you'll fear having a larger government.
My own perception of how others act is clearly clouded by the inaccuracy of survey sources.
I wonder how many in any set think similarly about these surveys. I assume distrust is the most logical base state, hate unknown callers / blind interactions as sources of fraud, misinformation, and marketing (which I view as often leaning against the borderline of the former).
I would also hope and assume, given the religious bias correlated with Republicans in the US, that many of them are more trusting of others.
How could that tweet possibly have anything to do with polls? Any remotely scientific poll would surely be anonymous. That has nothing to do with people willingly tweeting their political views and then attempt to cover them up or expect them to be forgotten in the future.
If you get a call from an unknown caller asking "hey who're you voting for", how do you know if it's a proper scientific pollster or your employer's brother-in-law?
They're based on calling phone numbers, which are tied to identities, and the President has access to the NSA databases that correlate everyone's identities with their phones, IP addresses, etc.
If people in Congress or the President wanted to, they could absolutely find out who answered in polls that they'd vote for a candidate.
> People tell the truth, when you ask them who they’re voting for. They really do, on average.
That might have been true in the past.
From 2016-2020, Trump supporters have been loudly and repeatedly called racistNaziMisogynistHomophobe, or the polite version, "deplorable". That is not an environment that encourages honesty.
As a center right moderate I definitely feel this. Especially at work/with acquaintances where I feel compelled to just silently nod and agree with everything being said or else risk my career and social standing.
As a center right moderate, did you vote for Trump? I might use similar terms to describe my political beliefs if I was into labels, and I feel none of this. I've always been frank about my political leanings when it comes up, and no one I know has had any trouble talking about the issues while leaving the Candidates out of it. That said, given where the Republican party is right now, I can't imagine voting for any R on the ballot (and contra-wise Biden and Jerry Brown are the only two D votes I've ever cast, both entirely in opposition to the frankly scary Republican opponent, not in support of the candidate).
I did not vote...I've found similarly that issues-wise discussion is not bad, but more often than not conversation is always about the candidates themselves as a package and support for one particular policy means you support all of them.
Trump supporters do seem to differ from my view of a 'traditional republican'; if not the actions of the namesake (which I do view as the negative things you describe) what do they see in the candidate or platform being supported?
Since you did not specify what you consider a "traditional republican" to be, I'll tell you why I voted for Donald Trump: 1) No new wars started, despite media outcry in 2016 that he'd take us into WWIII; 2) Historic peace deals between Israel and its neighbors - again, in spite of accusations that Jerrod Kushner did not have any diplomatic skills and would botch anything he touched; 3) Strong federalist approach to COVID - while the media and Democrats decry Trump's approach to COVID, I appreciated his willingness to make Federal resources available to the states that requested them rather than force them onto unwilling governors; 4) His respect and support for the military - not always a favorable viewpoint for non-Americans, or even more liberal Americans, but I think has been a mainstay of Republicans for a while; 5) His support for law and order - we have to be a nation of laws and the riots and looting (not protests) that were a feature across the nation this summer that were supported by mayors, governors, and Democratic Representatives and Senators was saddening to watch; 6) His understanding that the response to COVID should not be worse than the disease itself and that the economy should be allowed to continue to operate, we cannot go into a permanent lockdown status and thrive as a country; 7) The economic growth we had pre-COVID was great as well as the economic opportunities for minorities and women.
What policies did Trump enact which you think animated the support that Trump received?
Thank you for your reply and sharing your point of view.
Answering your question: I didn't have any theory relating Trump's actual policy implementation accomplishments to support. Rather _my opinion_ is still a _belief_ that most who support the 45th president as a candidate do so based on blind charisma and an extra sweet helping of wishful thinking.
That was not convincing at all and had some really glaring errors. Dr Shiva somehow confuses percent of overall voters with percent of Republicans to make it seem like there is a conspiracy going on. He says that margin for Trump should be a flat line so that if there 5% republican all-ballot voters it should be off by the same margin in Trump vote as a precinct with 80%. However if 20% of republicans flip that would mean 1% flipped vs 16% in those examples which is a line with a slope. Literally flipping those graphs would make them look the same for Biden as for Trump. All it shows is basically a kind of regression to the mean. Precincts with high republican or democratic all-ballot voting weren’t as republican or democratic as they seem. There could be many good reasons for that such as that voters that go against the way their communities vote tend to not be all-ballot voters.
Also, Dr. Shiva is not an independent voice. He ran in Massachusetts as a Republican.
He found that the more a republican a county is, the more republicans voted for Gop candidates, and against Trump.
But only after the first 20% or so of the vote was in. In the first 20% of the vote Trump was doing better than the Gop candidates on the ticket.
Comes to the conclusion that an algorithm is syphoning votes from Trump to Biden. In a predictable linear fashion after the first 20% of the vote is counted. And flips more votes in more republican counties in an almost perfect linear way.
It doesn't make sense because Trump was polling better than the Gop candidates before the election, and was popular with republican voters.
The tallying software has a weighted vote feature. Where votes can be weighted for example 2:1 for one candidate over the other. Thinks that this was kicked in after 20% of the vote was in. Which would produce a linear drop that the graphs show.
Democrats have highly effective social messaging, led by Hollywood and professional athletes. They constantly put out messaging, making dissenters appear 'uncool'. Sad to say, adults are actually swayed by such childish forces.
How else to explain the constant error to the left in polls?
Before being fired for pointing out that violent protests alienate people: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/case-for-liberalism-...
Schor’s firing is a tremendous example of how free speech values make people better at their job, and attacks on free speech values can jeopardize organizations and political parties. It’s conventional wisdom now that failure to condemn violent protests earlier cost Democrats votes, including among minority groups. This was quite apparent from polling this summer. (By June, YouGov polls showed that Latinos were more worried about the “breakdown of law and order” than about “systemic racism.”) Creating a culture that makes people afraid to have dispassionate, context-appropriate discussions about what the data was saying made it harder for people to do their jobs effectively.
Obviously what kinds of facts are relevant to an organization’s mission differs greatly depending on the organization! In many contexts Schor’s comments wouldn’t have been relevant and may have been better left unsaid to foster workplace harmony. But in a political organization, obviously some heated issues will come up and people need to be able to have honest discussions about them.