Topic: US Elections 2020 - very self such moderated - page 14. (Read 4670 times)

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Indeed, the enthusiasm of the Biden Harris crowd shows.

Harris's appearance in Fort Worth gathered TRILLIONS of human cells. They were organized neatly into a few dozen actual humans.

https://www.breitbart.com/2020-election/2020/10/30/dozens-attend-kamala-harris-campaign-event-fort-worth/

I'll pass, thanks though.  Already have enough on the line to make things plenty exciting for me.

I feel like Florida is closer to a coin flip than any other state, btw, not anywhere near a Biden 2:1 favorite.

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They're reacting to a conservative Media (and Trump) narrative that the media is the enemy of the people and only Trump can save them.

In other words:

They're reacting to the Federal Government narrative that the media is the enemy of the people and only The Federal Government can save them.


I would give you a ton of examples of Trump claiming something was fake news with made up 'phony anonymous sources' that were later proven to be true with Trump fully aware they were true while calling them fake - but we both know that no amount of evidence would ever change your mind if it involved Trump looking really bad.

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538 has been doing daily election podcasts recently - definitely worth a listen.

Their forcast has Biden winning about 90% of the time.  The gap is so large that Biden would still win if he was on the bad end of all the battle ground margins of error. The only way they see Trump winning is if the the polls are completely missing something - which they put at 10%.

In Texas of all places more people have already voted than the total turnout in 2016:

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/30/929578710/more-than-9-million-texans-cast-ballots-early-topping-states-total-turnout-in-20

Overall 80+ million people have voted, or 60%+ of 2016 turnout.

This is really my line of thought. I really can't see pollsters making the same mistake twice when it comes to Trump and his voters.

I'd think that they may be polling a little bit in his favor to ensure that they don't embarrass themselves again. Literally all bullshit theory that I'm just pulling out of my ass, though that's just what I expect to happen this time around.

I've voted though. I trust the mail system and think that it's fine to just send an absentee ballot in. At least in my state there aren't any concerns relating to voting by mail.

i voted the other day around 10am on a weekday. about a dozen supporter for each candidate, each group on either side at the entrance. they didnt interact with the others or voters, just waved sighs at cars.

no line. one voter leaving and one voter in a booth, which were well spread out. registration person took my info, informed me the mail in ballet i had requested (as a backup) wouldn't count if it turned up. i assured her it would be shredded as soon as i saw my vote sealed. btw they used a water bottle thing to seal the envelopes so no masks need to be removed or any somewhat nasty sponges at the stations were needed.

i went in with an n95 and face shield with a P100 respirator as a backup, which i didnt use. i had all that cause there was no friggin way my vote wasnt gonna get counted by some "mail fraud" sleight of hand crap. i was gonna vote in person unless i was covid positive or physically in the hospital or something.

edit: 2016 there were tons of trump signs, like everywhere, along with hillary ones too of course. this year? very few of either candidate.

The Trump voters are reacting to a hostile and suppressive media with massive, spontaneous demonstrations. These cannot be suppressed from Facebook, Twitter and the mainstream media. If they suppress one, there's six more popping up.

I'm seeing it around here also. Quite impressive.

I don't see any Biden people. ....

The part of that statement that should be of concern is the "any." And I agree, I've seen  zero for Biden.

Those who are betting in favor of Biden please note these points:

1. Postal voting numbers are as expected. Early voting has helped to reduce the Dem-Rep gap, as per the data from Hawkfish. Check this: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/23/early-voting-numbers-swing-states-431363

2. A number of very recent polls are showing Trump ahead in Florida and North Carolina. Some of them are showing that he's ahead in Arizona and Pennsylvania as well.

3. Hardly anyone is noticing this point. Libertarian candidate is not getting as much support as in 2016. This will bolster the chances of GOP in states such as Arizona and Michigan. Gary Johnson received 3.28% of the vote in 2016, while the Green Party candidate received only 1.07%. This time the trend indicate that both the parties will poll somewhere around 1% to 1.5% each. Jill Stein didn't received more than 1.5% of the vote in any of the battleground states, but Gary Johnson got 5.18% in Colorado, 4.15% in New Hampshire, 4.13% in Arizona, 3.84% in Minnesota, 3.78% in Iowa, 3.59% in Michigan and 3.58% in Wisconsin. Evan McMullin also chewed up some GOP votes in 2016.

4. After a fierce spat between Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the SCOTUS ruled that the state of Wisconsin doesn't need to count the postal ballots which are received after the election day on Nov 3rd. This is perhaps the first legal spat related to the outcome of the POTUS elections that landed in the supreme court. We'll see more in the coming weeks. The indications are clear.

Note: I don't want to pick sides. Just pointed out some of the observations.

I work for a living so I commute. I drive past people that gather by the side of the highway with Trump signs. One such gathering has easily upwards of 100 people. And it happens all the time. These people have votes and they're going to use them.

It's also completely possible that the Biden crowds are not dumb enough to congregate during a pandemic, but there is still a big difference in the amount of Trump signs versus Biden signs.

Also I've talked to people and there really are a lot of passionate Trump people even right now. People who believe all that right wing propaganda about Antifa and BLM and that if Biden becomes president it's over for America and all that nonsense.



Yep, if Twitchy accepts we PM, get our own thread, I wouldn't dream of hijacking yours.  I'm just putting some BTC on the line to show I'm serious.

What do you mean by "gatherings"? And in what way does it affect the election? I don't know how it works in Florida but I'm in one of the battleground-ish states and there isn't any great enthusiasm for crowds, mainly due to the pandemic, but the turnout in early voting is still massive on both sides.


LOL everyone's so feisty with the bets... If Twitchy accepts could you please take it to a new thread - better for you two to hash it out and less distraction here.

I mentioned that I look at the polling material. I know that it's 87/100 a Biden win. And for the record I'm an independent that was leaning heavily towards Bernie. I don't have a horse in this race.

I live in the densest county in Florida. I see pro-trump gatherings all the time. I don't see any Biden people. My place in the state of Florida is kind of important. It would be a fair assessment that any place north of where I am goes to trump. If you add that to my area also going to Trump I'm really confident that he will win Florida.

So if you only trust that the polls are accurate than Trump should lose florida 2/3 times. Are you willing to bet BTC0.02 that Biden wins florida? Because I am willing to bet that it goes to Trump. I certainly can't call the whole election, it's more than likely that Biden wins, but if you're in that camp you can't get complacent. Remember in 2016 Hillary was supposed to win (and even though she won the popular vote), she lost.

I never claimed I'm more qualified than the experts, but if it's raining outside and the weatherman says it's not and I'm wearing clothes made out of newspaper, I'm not stepping out and getting arrested for public nudity. 

Out the dozen or so tracked by RealClearPolitics, there was one poller that got the election right in 2016: USC Dornsife (back then it was listed as "USC/LA Times"). They consistently showed Trump up by a few points in places where it mattered throughout the 2016 election while everybody else showed Hillary with relatively wide leads. I thought they were crazy, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one.

This year, as of right now they have Biden up overall by 12.3%, which is higher than all the other pollers listed on RCP.

Rasmussen currently has the only poll with Trump ahead, by 1% (with 2% of likely voters still undecided).

If Trump wins, it will indicate that polling has utterly failed, which would be interesting. However, the 2016 polls weren't actually that far off, with most being within their margins of error; it was mainly an issue of people ignoring the margins of error and "just knowing" that Trump couldn't possibly win. Now the situation is more-or-less reversed: a lot of people "just know" that the polls are wrong and Trump will somehow pull it off, so they're baking in a several-point swing from current polls. However, if the election were held today, polls would have to be much more wrong than they were in 2016 for Trump to win, and if pollsters overcorrected as I suspect, then the real result may swing against Trump compared to polls, not even for him.

While there are several very bad things about Trump, I think that a Trump victory would be far better than a Biden victory. Trump is more anti-war and anti-regulation, and he's much less effective at actually getting the government to do things. It'd also lead to increased distrust of government and perhaps some serious anti-federalist and secessionist movements among blue states, which is excellent from a libertarian perspective. And on a personal level I'd also find it hilarious to see Democrats' reaction if Trump pulls off a surprise victory again. But I just don't think that it's going to happen. The best we can probably hope for is that the Republicans retain the Senate and we get at least 2 years of gridlock, though even this is in serious doubt.

Oh 100%

I'm pretty sure that like, in regards to how stuff gets listed on a ballot, everyone is randomized in terms of order based on the county that you're in. I know that's been a common thing to complain about like:

"WHY IS TRUMP ON THE TOP OF THIS BALLOT" (You can insert Biden for that too)

"WHY IS JO JORGENSEN ON THIS ONE, IT CONFUSES PEOPLE TO VOTE FOR THEM INSTEAD OF JOE BIDEN" - wtf?

People are amazing.

Quoting myself from another Trump thread:


With a week and a couple of days to go I still see this as a major issue. And I really think a lot of the republicans' are going to get blindsided by it.
Beyond Covid there are a lot of people who have been hit hard by the current administrations economic policies and they are pissed.

theymos said it well too.


But I will add to it. They are talking about the wrong things in the wrong areas.
If you are a Republican in PA you care about JOBS, coal / steel / manufacturing, whatever yeah you might have opinions / views even strong ones about immigration but for most of them it's probably not their main concern. Reversing it in AZ, more probably care about immigration then manufacturing and farming jobs. But you are not seeing the targeting of ads where they should be in my opinion.

Putting the 2 together:

Having ads that say Biden bad, Trump good. Biden raise taxes, Trump lower taxes works in some areas. But not the ones where people have been looking at their tax bill that went up big time for the last 2 years.

Same with many small businesses that sprung up along the US / Canada border. In the grand scheme of things NAFTA might have been good / or it might have been bad.
For the people who setup businesses that relied on it and certain functionality of it, well they are not happy. Saw a bunch on TV the other day their congressman was talking about how much better it was now. Yeah, closed border due to covid and 50% loss of cross border traffic before that. It's sooooo much better. Long term it might be better. But for now they seem to feel that long term is so far down the road it's not coming.

-Dave

Let's try to get back on track. Democrats said this, Republicans said that - doesn't matter much anymore with about a week to go.

I find it quite amazing that 40% of 2016 turnout have already voted... 55 million people by some estimates. Democrats up by about 8-10% (by party registration numbers where available) but as TwitchySeal noted about Florida, Republicans will likely keep catching up as the election day draws closer. Makes me wonder what the total turnout is going to be.


I don't believe the margin of error is going to be exactly the same... if for no other reason than demographic and other changes in the 4 years. Some polling issues specific to Trump (underweighing non-college-educated voters for example) have probably been addressed so I would expect smaller and less-one-sided errors this time around.

I know this is all stemming from Trumps 'fake polls' rhetoric, and I'm never going to convince you to not be a poll-denier, but...

The polls for the 2018 House, Senate and Gubernatorial races were over remarkably accurate.  As in they got lucky.  The average poll was within 2.8% with a slight bias for Democrats of 0.4%.   And that included state and district polling which is far less accurate historically than the major polls you see in the days before a presidential election.

Looking at just the polls that were off the most and then using those handful of poll to calculate the reliability of the thousands of other polls doesn't really make sense.  You have to look at all the results.

After what happened last time, I don't have faith in the pollsters at all. To come up with my results what I did was look at an average of polls from 2016 at this time of year and find the difference between what they projected vs. what actually happened (what I referred to as "M.O.E." in the table below). It's basically working on an assumption that they will be equally as wrong this time around. If they are even just slightly more correct, Biden has a good shot of winning Florida; WI and AZ not so much.

State	M.O.E.	Biden has	Biden needs
Pennsylvania	5.9	5.1	0.8
Florida	2.0	1.5	0.5
Wisconsin	7.2	4.6	2.6
Michigan	6.5	7.8	-1.3
North Carolina	6.2	1.5	4.7
Arizona	5.0	2.4	2.6

It has become difficult to conduct polling with the advent of the cell phone, and the outrageous number of spam calls in recent years have made it even more difficult.

I don't think pollsters have been able to fix their problems from 2016. In 2018, there was one poll that had Andrew Gilliam up by 7 points right before election day (FL governor), and DeSantis ended up winning. The other polls right before election day had DeSantis down by 4-5 points.

Part of the problem is the strength of the Democrat propaganda machine and its strategy of labeling Trump supporters and Republicans as racist. This makes Republicans more likely to hide their political views, especially from strangers (pollsters). I would trust voting data regarding party affiliation more than polls, but this is infallible, for example, approximately 30% of people at Trump rallies are Democrats, and may vote for Trump.

That's rational assuming the slant isn't purposeful and an attempt to create an impression Biden's ahead.

Wanna bet me another 0.01? Or?