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this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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This is quite interesting, thanks for sharing!
My only critique is that I don't think 2020 skew is valid anymore. After Dobbs, the landscape seems to have significantly changed. 2022 was predicted to favor Republicans by a strong margin, but it ended up being a tie pretty much. And a lot of special elections have had surprising results too.
My personal opinion is that polling methodology may have overcorrected for 2020, and we're getting a picture now that's skewed right, versus left from beforehand.
It's really hard to say though. There weren't a lot of great polls to start with in 2022, and special elections don't have significant polling either. It's a weird position where the only good data set we have is from 2020, but there have been so many changes in the national environment that we have reason to doubt the skews from 2020 are still valid. But at the same time, what else do we have? Vibes and feelings and anecdotes. And the engineer in me dislikes dismissing data in favor of vibes. It's important to consider still I think, because none of this is infallible. But I honestly couldn't tell you what the "right" outlook to have is. Maybe I'm onto something, but maybe I'm just letting optimism bleed into my better judgement.
All I know is that I don't know.
I won't say that you're wrong about what the pollsters are doing -- but to me this strikes me as very obviously the wrong way to do it.
If you find out your polls were wrong, and then instead of digging into detail as to what exactly went wrong, and then fixing the methodology going forward, using non-phone polls, doing a more accurate calculation to make sure you're weighting the people who are going to vote and not the people who aren't going to vote, things like that … you just make up a fudge factor for how wrong the polls were last time, and assume that if you just add that fudge factor in then you don't have to fix all the things that went wrong on a more fundamental level, that seems guaranteed to keep being wrong for as long as you’re doing it.
Again I won't say you're wrong about how they're going about it. (And, I'm not saying it's necessarily easy to do or anything.) But I think you've accurately captured the flaw in just adding a fudge factor and then assuming you'll be able to learn anything from the now-corrected-for-sure-until-next-time-when-we-add-in-how-wrong-we-were-this-time answers.
That's the thing, we don't know how they're correcting for it, and if it is just a fudge factor. The issue is there's more confounding factors that anyone could list which could be the culprit here.
A fudge factor is easy, but the wrong solution here. But the right solution is incredibly complex and difficult to even identify. In my field we can get away with using a timer instead of a precise calculation sometimes. That really isn't an option for polls. I don't favor the people trying to fix the models.
I mean if we're stepping off the data into editorialism, Trump out performed all other Republicans in 2020, like he also did in 2016. As well, Trump endorsed candidates struggled in 2018, and 2022, and special elections. My read of this evidence and I've seen it suggested elsewhere, is that whatever property it is that causes Trump to consistently over perform isn't transitive. So evaluating how well Trump will perform against how well Republicans are performing is misguided. You should evaluate candidates individually, and that would agree with their performance.
Also, this is one poll. The aggregate of polling agrees with this one poll. The minor methodological changes they make from year to year are infact extremely minor and they are doing the appropriate statistical accounting afaict. There is nothing weird or wonky about these polls: Biden is just performing very very poorly. I've been saying this for months to an onslaught of downvotes from people who simply don't want to believe this to be the case.
Finally, I'll argue that the 'right' outlook is always the one that aligns most closely with the data. We should believe stories we tell about data less than data itself. There is nothing to suggest that this election will really be anything that different than the 3 previous, and in terms of landscapes, the best proxy appears to be 2016 in terms of contested states. You should believe the data that is telling you that Joe Biden is losing this election. Biden has been setting up to lose the upper Midwest since December. These are the same states Hillary lost.
I agree. It's also what the political pundit class did when they completely wiffed on 2016, and it's what they're doing right now. 90% of Lemmy also agrees with your sentiment, and in both Lemmy's and the punditry's refusal to be critical of Biden, to drag him towards more popular policies, they're setting Trump up for victory.
I don't really disagree with anything you've said, it's a very valid take -- and you're spot on about underestimating Trump but overestimating Republican cohorts in polls. My only qualifier there is that we don't know if 2022 models were overtuned for only Republicans, or also Trump support.
I don't know if we can take 2016 as representative of our current dynamic. I think it's certainly more representative than 2020 however, but shifting populations and world/domestic events have had massive impacts.
In short? I don't know which outlook is more accurate. What I can reasonably assert though is that the reality will be somewhere between the less optimistic and the more optimistic outlooks. Taking these poll results at face value is probably the better strategic option anyway to create pressure to go vote and campaign.
I agree though, we shouldn't be totally dismissive of these polls. It's fine to scrutinize and question them like I've said, but it shouldn't take away from the very real possibility that these are correct. Oddities don't create impossibilities.