#polling

[la-principessa-nuova]

if you want to share your answer and roughly what country/region you’re from in the tags as well I’d be very interested to hear

[originalleftist]

If you're wondering why polling averages are suddenly showing Trump winning despite all the bad news he's gotten lately- it might have something to do with this:

Basically, Republicans are ratfucking the polling averages by churning out huge numbers of partisan polls, and the polling aggregators/analysts like 538 aren't doing due diligence to compensate for it.

Now, what is the purpose of this?

Well, in the immediate-term, it creates a narrative that Trump is winning, boosting morale of his supporters while demoralizing support for Democrats and Harris.

Beyond that, if polling averages show that Trump is winning ahead of election day-which we can pretty much guarantee they will, because see above-then they will use that as "proof" of fraud if Democrats subsequently win.

Basically, they are engineering a pretext for their next coup attempt in front of us.

The only numbers that decide anything are actual votes. So ignore the polls, and VOTE.

[marcotheflychair]

reblog for size or whatever yada yada yada

[saywhat-politics]

[quasi-normalcy]

So, in science & technology studies, one of the words we throw around is "scientization," the act of making something into a science. And, you know, a lot of this is good, or at least neutral: the scientization of medicine; the scientization of cosmology; it means that a field has gotten more rigourous and definitive than it used to be.

But in politics, what scientization often means is that something that should be a policy issue is kicked over to scientists as a means of naturalizing or normalizing it, exempting it from normal political debate, or avoiding responsibility for unpopular decisions. "Oh, we needed to bomb this place because our models said it would end the war faster"; "Oh, we needed to privatize this service because our economists said it would save us money"; etc. And a lot of the debate in the field of science policy is given over to the question of when is it legitimate to kick something over to scientists, and in what contexts, because it's often kind of arbitrary. Like, I think that anyone who takes climate change seriously believes that science needs to inform the response to it, but you can build whatever assumptions you want to into your models, and the math will gobble them up indifferently; and Western liberal governments have overwhelmingly chosen to imagine scenarios where we can just keep doing capitalism because magical new "carbon capture" technologies will probably be invented down the line, and cap-and-trade will probably work perfectly, and anything that might be lost due to climate change can be straightforwardly assigned a monetary value and compensated, and refugees from desertification and rising sea levels will probably just not exist and so on. [Obligatory reminder that Climate Change is way worse than pretty much anyone in mainstream politics is willing to admit]

And anyways, I think that a special case of this "scientization-as-political-bullshit" phenomenon is at play in the field of polling. Like, consider Kamala Harris's entire campaign (or if you prefer, practically any neoliberal politician's campaign anywhere in the world since 2008 or so). This was a campaign where seemingly every decision was kicked over to pollsters. Can't call conservatives weirdos--you might offend moderates! Can't call on Israel to stop bombing Gaza--you might offend moderates! Can't stand up for transgender rights--you might offend moderates! Can't call for single-payer healthcare--you might offend moderates! And so on, and so forth. In every case, it's trying to do politics without being political, and it's doing so by embedding a bunch of incredibly insidious assumptions into models and then calling it science! Like, maybe "moderate" voters would get on board with a ceasefire, or trans rights, or single-payer healthcare, if a prominent politician with a billion-dollar war chest to get her message out fucking tried to make a case for it! Like, remember when the overwhelming majority of Americans opposed gay marriage? I do! I wonder why that changed? Or, for that matter, why courting moderates--as all of these models seem to assume--should necessarily be a higher priority than inspiring disenchanted voting-age adults to turn out at all?

And I worry I'm making this sound like innocent incompetence--it's not. This was done very specifically and very intentionally to foreclose upon discussion of progressive priorities while saying that you're being scientific; while saying that you are, ridiculously, being apolitical when a running a political campaign. And now we have these useless, disingenuous assholes patting themselves on the back and saying that this campaign was never winnable! Because the "SCIENCE" says so!

And meanwhile, you have Donald Trump--idiot nazi bastard thug child of a demon and a swine Donald Trump, cursed be his name--bowling through the political scene like a bull in a china shop, utterly indifferent to all of these fancy-schmancy mathematical models and too stupid to understand them...and winning enormously! Making his own coalition. Because thick as he may be, ignorant as he may be, incurious as he may be, he at least knows one single solitary thing that the Democrats don't: Politics isn't science; it's magic. And you don't get anywhere in magic without the will to power.

[agreed-upon-solutions]

Today is the Agreed Upon Solutions election day voting snapshot! We've reset all votes and are recalculating from scratch, so come vote!

Agreed Upon Solutions is an experimental freelance democracy, designed to find out what people would support if given a much more expressive voting system; then to backport the results in bulk to our actual government. We're building it like a game, but the ultimate goal is to design and build voting software capable of tackling really complex and nuanced questions. Our roadmap goes all the way to writing fully fleshed out laws.

We're holding a vote we call Every Thing, over 157,000 topics extracted from Wikidata. If Wikipedia knows about it, it's on this list. You can comment and vote on literally all concepts: everything from "abortion" and "climate change," to "fatigue as safety concern" and "infant mental health". Our goal today is to get as accurate a summary as possible of opinions on the day of the election, both to have a record and to provide an explicit example of how democracy can be used to reach consensus decisions.

We need votes, and we especially need comments on topics, because every comment is a potential new dimension for analysis. We'll be using this data going forward for visualizations, experiments with automated summaries, cluster finding, everything you can imagine.

If you've ever thought to yourself, "Man, wouldn't it be great if we had a democracy where we could vote on absolutely anything," you have a chance to do that now. Come check us out!

[liberalsarecool]

Keep on fighting the good fight. Every election.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are gaining because they have great policies and possess morals, integrity, and principles.

Democrats are clearly better at economic stability, job creation, and empathy/character.

Stay engaged. Vote. Donate. Stay positive. 💙✌🏻

[mostlysignssomeportents]

When prophecy fails, election polling edition

In Canto 20 of Inferno, Dante confronts a pit where the sinners have had their heads twisted around backwards; they trudge, naked and weeping, through puddles of cooling tears. Virgil informs him that these are the fortunetellers, who tried to look forwards in life and now must look backwards forever.

In a completely unrelated subject, how about those election pollsters, huh?

Writing for The American Prospect, historian Rick Perlstein takes a hard look at characteristic failure modes of election polling and ponders their meaning:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-09-25-polling-imperilment/

Apart from the pre-election polling chaos we're living through today, Perlstein's main inspiration is W Joseph Campbell 2024 University of California Press book, Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in US Presidential Elections:

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/lost-in-a-gallup/paper

In Campbell's telling, US election polling follows a century-old pattern: pollsters discover a new technique that works spookily well..for a while. While the new polling technique works, the pollster is hailed a supernaturally insightful fortune-teller.

In 1932, the Raleigh News and Observer was so impressed with polling by The Literary Digest that they proposed replacing elections with Digest's poll. The Digest's innovation was sending out 20,000,000 postcards advertising subscriptions and asking about presidential preferences. This worked perfectly for three elections – 1924, 1928, and 1932. But in 1936, the Digest blew it, calling the election for Alf Landon over FDR.

The Digest was dethroned, and new soothsayers were appointed: George Gallup, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossler, who replaced the Digest's high-volume polling with a new kind of poll, one that sought out a representative slice of the population (as Perlstein says, this seems "so obvious in retrospect, you wonder how nobody thought of it before").

Representative polling worked so well that, three elections later, the pollsters declared that they could predict the election so well from early on that there was no reason to keep polling voters. They'd just declare the winner after the early polls were in and take the rest of the election off.

That was in 1948 – you know, 1948, the "Dewey Defeats Truman" election?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman

If this sounds familiar, perhaps you – like Perlstein – are reminded of the 2016 election, where Fivethirtyeight and Nate Silver called the election for Hillary Clinton, and we took them at their word because they'd developed a new, incredibly accurate polling technique that had aced the previous two elections.

Silver's innovation? Aggregating state polls, weighting them by accuracy, and then producing a kind of meta-poll that combined their conclusions.

When Silver's prophecy failed in 2016, he offered the same excuse that Gallup gave in 1948: when voters are truly undecided, you can't predict how they'll vote, because they don't know how they'll vote.

Which, you know, okay, sure, that's right. But if you know that the election can't be called, if you know that undecided voters are feeding noise into the system whenever you poll them, then why report the polls at all? If all the polling fluctuation is undecided voters flopping around, not making up their mind, then the fact that candidate X is up 5 points with undecided means nothing.

As the finance industry disclaimer has it, "past performance is no guarantee of future results." But, as Perlstein says, "past performance is all a pollster has to go on." When Nate Silver weights his model in favor of a given poll, it's based on that poll's historical accuracy, not its future accuracy, because its future accuracy can't be determined until it's in the past. Like Dante's fortune-tellers, pollsters have to look backwards even as they march forwards.

Of course, it doesn't help that in some cases, Silver was just bad at assessing polls for accuracy, like when he put polls from the far-right "shock pollster" Trafalgar Group into the highly reliable bucket. Since 2016, Trafalgar has specialized in releasing garbage polls that announce that MAGA weirdos are way ahead, and because they always say that, they were far more accurate than the Clinton-predicting competition in 2016 when they proclaimed that Trump had it in the bag. For Silver, this warranted an "A-" on reliability, and that is partially to blame for how bad Silver's 2020 predictions were, when Republicans got pasted, but Trafalgar continued to predict a Democratic wipeout. Silver's methodology has a huge flaw: because Trafalgar's prediction history began in 2016, that single data-point made them look pretty darned reliable, even though their method was to just keep saying the same thing, over and over:

https://www.ettingermentum.news/p/the-art-of-losing-a-fivethirtyeight

Pollsters who get lucky with a temporarily reliable methodology inevitably get cocky and start cutting corners. After all, polling is expensive, so discontinuing the polls once you think you have an answer is a way to increase the enterprise's profitability. But, of course, pollsters can only make money so long as they're somewhat reliable, which leads to a whole subindustry of excuse-making when this cost-cutting bites them in the ass. In 1948, George Gallup blamed his failures on the audience, who failed to grasp the "difference between forecasting an election and picking the winner of a horse race." In 2016, Silver declared that he'd been right because he'd given Trump at 28.6% chance of winning.

This isn't an entirely worthless excuse. If you predict that Clinton's victory is 71.4% in the bag, you are saying that Trump might win. But pollsters want to eat their cake and have it, too: when they're right, they trumpet their predictive accuracy, without any of the caveats they are so insistent upon when they blow it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jDlo7YfUxc

There's always some excuse when it comes to the polls: in 1952, George Gallup called the election a tossup, but it went for Eisenhower in a landslide. He took out a full-page NYT ad, trumpeting that he was right, actually, because he wasn't accounting for undecided voters.

Polling is ultimately a form of empiricism-washing. The pollster may be counting up poll responses, but that doesn't make the prediction any less qualitative. Sure, the pollster counts responses, but who they ask, and what they do with those responses, is purely subjective. They're making guesses (or wishes) about which people are likely to vote, and what it means when someone tells you they're undecided. This is at least as much an ideological project as it is a scientific one:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-09-23-polling-whiplash/

But for all that polling is ideological, it's a very thin ideology. When it comes to serious political deliberation, questions like "who is likely to vote" and "what does 'undecided' mean" are a lot less important than, "what are the candidates promising to do?" and "what are the candidates likely to do?"

But – as Perlstein writes – the only kind of election journalism that is consistently, adequately funded is poll coverage. As a 1949 critic put it, this isn't the "pulse of democracy," it's "its baby talk."

Today, Tor Books publishes VIGILANT, a new, free LITTLE BROTHER story about creepy surveillance in distance education. It follows SPILL, another new, free LITTLE BROTHER novella about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/26/dewey-beats-truman/#past-performance-is-no-guarantee-of-future-results

[acerunaway]

I drew these in celebration for Klapollo First Meeting day for @transapollozine! Consider following, or filling out and sharing our interest check! (both would help a TON!)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dan Pfeiffer at The Message Box:

The pace and breadth of the Trump/Musk Administration's actions feel overwhelming. Anything and everything is under attack. One day, it’s USAID; the next, it’s the National Institute of Health, air traffic controllers, and the Education Department. How can we keep up with what’s happening and respond before Trump moves on to the next thing? This is by design. This is the “flood the zone” strategy described by Trump ally Steve Bannon. Bannon explained in a 2018 interview:

[Every day we hit them with three things. They'll bite on one, and we'll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never—will never be able to recover.]

If the Trump presidency's first month taught us one lesson, it is that playing whack-a-mole doesn’t work. We need a broader strategic framework to stay ahead. There are no easy answers. Democrats are at a massive media disadvantage. We have neither the messengers nor the platforms to compete with Trump and Musk (And don’t get me started on the message). We need to solve these problems as soon as possible without stepping back and while simultaneously addressing our long-term challenges. To that end, I want to put forward a framework to simplify the task ahead for Democrats. Make Donald Trump unpopular. This task is easier said than done, but it’s the only way to slow down — and eventually stop — Trump. As with everything in politics, the most significant forces are beyond our control. Despite messaging and media advantages, the primary reason that the GOP is now in power was a global spike in inflation as the world came out of COVID. But there are methods to bring down Trump’s numbers.

Why Make Trump More Unpopular?

A president’s power is directly related to their popularity in three ways. One, vulnerable members of the president’s party are more likely to take tough votes when the president is popular. Two, party performance in the midterms is historically correlated with the incumbent president’s approval rating. Finally, the media narrative around a president is based on their poll numbers. When the numbers are good, the president is portrayed as strong and successful; and when the numbers go down they are seen as weak and feckless. In the first six months of Joe Biden’s presidency, he was treated as a transformational figure akin to FDR or LBJ. Once his poll numbers took a dive after Afghanistan, his press coverage turned. While legacy media coverage matters less these days, it can still set the tone and tenor for larger online conversations. The less popular Trump is, the more challenging it will be for him to pass his agenda in a narrowly divided Congress; and the more likely it will be that Democrats win the majority in 2026; and the sooner members of Trump’s coalition will abandon him. While Trump is less popular than any recent newly elected president, he is more popular than he has ever been before. [...] Therefore, Democrats need to adopt a “no layups” rule. This is a concept borrowed from basketball. There are no easy shots. If the other team tries to make a layup, you foul them before they can. This is the mentality Democrats need. We must complicate everything for Trump and the Republicans and use every lever of power to slow things down and gum up the works. Time is the only non-renewable resource in politics. Every day that Trump doesn’t move his agenda is a day he won’t get back. This is what McConnell did to Obama and it’s what Democrats need to do to Trump. The real test will come when government funding runs out and the debt limit expires. The Democratic approach must be in total opposition to any Republican proposal. We have all the leverage. If Republicans want Democratic votes, they must pay in concessions. This doesn’t mean we demand Medicare For All or an expansion of Social Security, but we can insist on concessions to protect many of the priorities being slashed by Musk and his minions. To be clear, Democrats are not forcing a shutdown. Republicans have the votes to keep the government up and running. I am simply saying that Democrats shouldn’t bail out the Republicans due to some sense of civic duty.

Dan Pfeiffer is right: The Democrats must drive Donald Trump’s approval ratings into the negatives, especially with all the evil and anti-American things he’s done in his time in office.

[la-principessa-nuova]

in either case it takes about the same amount of energy to do as getting up off the couch.

Edit: 500 miles is about 800 km (how did i remember to convert on one option but not the other???)

Thoughts on 500 miles: you can go really far, really fast, but you need to have been somewhere exactly 500 miles away from where you are to use it at all, and then you need a series of places 500 miles apart to work your way towards your destination. If you can first do a little traveling and build up a network of places 500 miles apart to jump around between, this could help you get around pretty quickly. Requires a lot of planning but could be used for crime.

Thoughts on 500 feet: not useful for going far fast, because it’s slower than walking having to wait 10 minutes between uses. But it can let you get around barriers and into closed off areas if you’ve been there before. Can still save time if you just need to jump once to somewhere within 500 ft and then more than 10 minutes later jump back. Like there’s a pizza place less than 500 ft from my house that I could jump to, order, wait there for my pizza, and then jump back home. Might save time in complex 3D environments or when there are many doors involved, idk. i guess it does save a little time while walking in that you can walk during the 10 minutes and so it really makes you move an extra 500 ft per 10 minutes. Also huge potential usage for crime.

[saywhat-politics]

Donald Trump’s co-president, Elon Musk, is deeply unpopular, and his unlawful meddling in the federal government through the Department of Government Efficiency, a federal advisory commission he leads, could become a serious liability for Trump and the GOP.

House Majority Forward, a progressive nonprofit, released polling from Impact Research on Thursday that found Musk's approval rating underwater, with 42% viewing him favorably and 51% viewing him unfavorably.

HMF said that voters are not a fan of Musk and his DOGE bros reportedly meddling in Treasury Department payment systems, which could impact Social Security and Medicare payments as well as tax return disbursement, among many other things. And HMF encouraged Democrats to go after Musk and DOGE on that issue.

"While not opposed to the concept of DOGE initially, registered voters fear DOGE may endanger the programs working families and seniors rely on for the purpose of enriching members of the Trump administration. These participants voiced strong opposition to gutting Social Security benefits, raising the retirement age, and cutting other government-sponsored retirement benefits," HMF wrote of their poll's findings.

[bodhrancomedy]

(My previous cosplays were Varian from Tangled, Timothy the Deaf Vampire, a random Newsie & Tristan Thorne from Stardust if you’re interested)

[tomorrowusa]

David Doel is a Canadian videographer who has previously dabbled in left of center politics up north. He has a well regarded YouTube channel called The Rational National. In the episode above, he describes the astonishing turnaround in Canadian politics over the past few months. Actually, astonishing is one of the milder words which could be used.

Just three months ago Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party of Canada (LPC) was sinking in the polls. The LPC in some polls was below 20% – even sometimes losing second place to the New Democratic Party (NDP). The Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) was in the mid to upper 40s – putting them on track to form a majority government after the next federal election. CPC leader Pierre Poilievre was probably picking out new curtains for the prime minister's office.

Then along comes Donald Trump. His tariffs, bellicose statements, and threats to the sovereignty of Canada sent shockwaves through Canadian politics. Pierre Poilievre, who has been seen as Trump friendly or soft on Trump, saw his party's popularity sink. And when Justin Trudeau announced his resignation, Poilievre was deprived of his political scapegoat. When Trudeau was replaced by Mark Carney as Liberal leader, the Liberals got a bounce which made Poilievre's situation even worse.

This is from the latest poll by Angus Reid, an established and respected pollster. The colors are somewhat different in Canadian politics than in the US. See the key at the bottom.

So on Christmas Eve, the Liberals were at a miserable 16% while the Conservatives were coasting at 45%. NOW the Liberals are 5 points ahead of the slumping Conservatives.

Canada does not have proportional representation. Its system largely mirrors that of the UK. So let's look at a province by province seat projection for the next parliament from 338Canada.

So instead of sinking in quicksand, the Liberals may be on track to form a majority government – an improvement over their current status. And there's still some room for improvement over their projected 177 seats.

If you were ever tempted to take an interest in Canadian politics, there has probably never been a better time to start than now.

Parliament returns next week. The most likely dates for an election are April 28th or May 5th. Anything short of a Conservative win would likely be interpreted as a slap in the orange face to Trump.

EDIT: A couple of very recent news stories from the CBC which illustrate the attitudes of the two main parties.

Carney signals he's in no rush to speak with Trump after visit to U.K., France

Conservatives won't allow reporters to travel with Poilievre during upcoming election

Prime Minister Carney just got back from a trip to Europe where he met with the leaders of Britain and France. But he's not in a hurry to see Trump. Meanwhile, the Conservatives are barring the media from their campaign planes and buses; like Trump they shun transparency.