Tag Archives: polls

Why The Polls Are Wrong, by Briggs

If the polls screw up this election, it should convince everyone once and for all that they are just part of the massive mainstream propaganda effort. From Briggs at briggs.com:

This was originally written for a normie audience. See updates below.

Polls Predict Biden

On the evening of October 29th, The Economist updated their poll-based election forecast model. It gave a 96% chance for Biden to take the electoral college, and it said it was all but certain, greater than a 99% chance, he will win the popular vote.

These are incredible numbers. Yet not unusual.

For instance, on that same night, Nate Silver’s 538 site had a poll average of 52% for Biden and 43.2% for Trump (the other 4.8% going to other candidates and uncertainty). Every poll used in that average had Biden ahead. Two had Biden up 12 points over Trump.

Silver wrote that Trump’s chance of winning were “a little worse than the chances of rolling a 1 on a six-sided die and a little better than the chances that it’s raining in downtown Los Angeles,” which he cited as 1 in 10.

There are others beside these two firms, but almost all favor Biden by a large margin.

Silver rightly said, “At this point, President Trump needs a big polling error in his favor if he’s going to win.”

This is not impossible. Most polls in 2016 blew it. Including Silver’s. His last poll average gave 45.7% to Clinton and 41.8% to Trump (4.8% went to the forgotten Libertarian candidate). Silver’s poll-based model gave a 71.4% chance of Hillary winning.

Many modelers were bolder than this—and their record was dismal. There have been several lachrymose postmortems since then searching for the cause of error. There are even fresh efforts at analyzing the 2016 polls, given their eerie similarity to today’s. All these analyses say what The Atlantic says: “Don’t sweat the polls.”

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The Left’s ‘Mostly Peaceful’ Revolution/Coup, by William L. Gensert

The polls showing Joe Biden leading will be fodder for the argument that if Trump wins, he stole the election. SLL thinks Trump wins in such a landslide that there’s no way anyone will be able to argue that he stole the election. From William L. Gensert at americanthinker.com:

Since the advent of the Trump presidency, the left engaged their greatest minds in planning the “Russia Hoax Coup” and then the impeachment farce. Having failed miserably at both, they are now carrying out an information operation to sell maundering Joe Biden as inevitable in his attempt to win the coming Presidential Election.

They insist that Joseph Biden is leading Trump in the polls by an insurmountable 16%. Before the end of October, the New York Times and the Washington Post both will run articles using anonymous sources in the Trump Administration expounding on how they believe Biden will deservedly win in a landslide but fear the president is planning on stealing the election with the help of Vladimir Putin. CNN and MSNBC will have on ex-generals and other retired military officers expressing lugubrious concern for the future of the republic.

Or… something like that.

Joe Biden is not winning. It does not matter what the polls say. It is preposterous to believe that people would vote for someone in such obvious mental decline for the most important (and dangerous) job on the planet. The man almost never leaves his basement and when he meets with voters, he can barely fill a room, whereas Trump packs stadiums and their environs with many thousands of screaming, enthusiastic supporters. There is no enthusiasm for a revivified Biden who can scarcely finish a sentence or stop making borderline racial slurs by implying black women have best served his bid for the presidency by being good at stocking grocery shelves during his pandemic cellar dwelling.

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Poll Which Correctly Called 2016 Election Sees Another “Shocking” Outcome In November, by Tyler Durden

Who’s going to win the election? From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

With the help of Paul Hoffmeister, chief economist at Camelot Portfolios

With Election Day less than a month away, we look at which party will likely control the White House, Senate and House in 2020… and what to watch for on Election Night.

Currently, the major polls give former Vice President Biden more than a 9-point lead nationally against President Trump – according to RealClearPolitics National Average.

And the Predictit markets imply a 67% probability of Biden winning on November 3rd. Additionally, those markets suggest that Democrats will win both the Senate and House (66% and 88% probabilities, respectively). Quite simply, it appears that a Blue Wave is fast approaching, something which the market has not only priced in, but has successfully digested as a favorable narrative for risk assets.

It would be easy to simply close the books and call the November contest over. But, of course, the major polls were all wrong in 2016; notably about the presidential race.

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Five Quick Things: The Polls, or the Fundamentals? by Scott McKay

The polls are probably off even more than they were in 2016. From Scott McKay at spectator.org:

This week it’s all the rage among the legacy media types and even a few of the old-time conservative pundit class to screech about poll numbers and declare that President Trump’s campaign is as sick as he supposedly was with COVID-19 over the weekend.

And boy, they have the poll numbers to prove it, don’t they?

Why anybody would believe a national poll of registered, rather than likely, voters less than a month before a presidential election is beyond me.

NBC has a poll with Joe Biden up by 14 points. Not to be outdone, CNN says the margin is 16. They’re polling registered voters because they say this will be the highest-turnout election in American history and everybody’s coming out to vote.

Well, OK.

Monday, former RedState editor Erick Erickson wrote that the poll numbers are sending Republican operatives he knows into a panic:

This is why, if you know where to look, panic is starting to set in with Republicans. The public polling now is reflecting internal Republican polling from last week. Multiple campaign strategists and pollsters from states as diverse as Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and even South Carolina are starting to see the bottom falling out.

Senior citizens, suburban women, and white men from up north are drifting to Biden. The President’s debate performance excited a portion of his base but alienated more. He has not grown his base nor done enough to offset it with Hispanic voters and black men.

We are less than thirty days from the election. The President is battling COVID-19 and unable to campaign. His best hope is that Mike Pence has a stellar debate performance and hits the campaign trail in lieu of the President.

This kind of talk seems to be everywhere.

But is all of this real? Here are five things to consider that might make you doubt those polls.

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Trump Takes MAJOR Polling Lead Against Biden, Democrats PANIC, Shift Message As Riots BACKFIRE, by Tim Pool

If Trump gets even a semi-honest vote count he’ll win going away. From Tim Pool:

Are The Tables Starting To Turn? by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

The shortcomings of the “Orange Man Bad” strategy for the Democrats are becoming increasingly apparent. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

A Pew Research Center poll that’s already a month old (and a lot happened since) concluded that violent crime is a major issue according to 59% of voters (almost as much as coronavirus): 74% of Republicans and 46% of Democrats. But during the DNC, held after the poll was already out, the issue wasn’t addressed at all. Democrats talked about police violence, but not riot violence.

At this week’s RNC, this situation is -of course- very different. The DNC pushes the GOP into the role of the party of law and order, and they’re all too willing to take up that role. But I was wondering about something else, or “bigger”, this morning. That is, Joe Biden et al are very light on policies, because in their view their most important issue is to get people to vote *against* Donald Trump, rather than *for* Biden.

And I’m thinking maybe that’s starting to boomerang, to blow up in their faces, whether perhaps people are beginning to lean towards NOT voting for Joe Biden, instead of NOT voting for Donald Trump, “at any cost”. In that context, it appears telling that according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, Biden saw no “convention poll bounce” in his numbers after the DNC, while ironically, Trump did.

Whereas according to a Zogby Analytics poll, Trump’s job approval numbers are now at record high levels. And I know polls -and pollsters- can be biased, and so can the press quoting them, but to see three in a row, Reuters/Ipsos, Rasmussen, Zogby, all reporting similar movement, may still be significant.

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The Tide Turns Toward Trump, by Kurt Schlichter

It’s hard to see how Trump can lose to a candidate who can’t put two sentences together and probably won’t debate him. From Kurt Schlichter at theburningplatform.com:

The Tide Turns Toward Trump

Remember how Donald Trump was totally doomed just a couple weeks ago? Grandpa Badfinger was ridin’ high down in his basement and the GOP was going to be destroyed in November. All the smart people of smartness who make up liberal blue check Twitter tweeted it so it had to be true.

Good times.

And then last week it all changed, turning 180 on a dime as Biden stomped on his Pelosi. It’s looking good for Trump and the Republicans again, and while there will be twists n’ turns, and while we best not get cocky (Hat Tip: Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds) the victory most of us patriots expect is coming clearly into focus as Biden becomes clearly more unfocused.

The polls have improved not just for Trump but for the Republicans running downticket too, not that we should put great store in the polls. Keep in mind that the polls were literally the only indicator showing Biden and the Dems were winning. There’s no other manifestation of a blue wave out there. Do you see any Biden signs? There’s just one in my neighborhood, which is all LA suburban woke wine women, and that’s in a creepy house that the children fear. No, there are no Trump signs either, but then that would invite a hassle. A Biden billboard would presumably invite hosannas for wokeness. And yet, only a single strange-o has one and that’s the guy we all suspect is eating the cats that go missing.

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Pollsters suffer huge embarrassment, by Jonathan Easley

The pollsters did no better in 2016 than they did in 2012, when most of them had Mitt Romney winning. Their errant predictions can be blamed on methodological flaws and, in some cases, the biases they incorporate into their methodologies. However, SLL has another factor: many people voted differently than how they told the pollsters they would vote. After all the stigmatization of Donald Trump, some people were simply embarrassed to admit they were going to vote for him. As SLL said in “Trump in New Mexico”:  “In the privacy of mail-in balloting or the voting booth, a surprising number will choose the former [Trump], regardless of what they’ve told family, friends, and pollsters.” From Jonathan Easley at thehill.com:

Pollsters and election modelers suffered an industry-shattering embarrassment at the hands of Donald Trump on Tuesday night.

Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, had long said the polls were biased against him. His claims — dismissed and mocked by the experts — turned out to be true.

“It’s going to put the polling industry out of business,” said CNN anchor Jake Tapper. “It’s going to put the voter projection industry out of business.”

Going into Election Day, a strong majority of pollsters and election modelers forecast that Democrat Hillary Clinton would coast to victory, with many predicting she would sweep the battlegrounds and win north of 300 electoral votes.

The final University of Virginia Center for Politics model had Clinton winning 322 electoral votes to 216 for Trump, with Clinton winning Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all states that she lost.

Liberals lashed out at data guru Nate Silver for giving Trump a 35 percent chance of victory heading into Election Day, claiming he was putting his thumb on the scale for Trump by making the race appear closer than it was.

Of the 11 national polls to be released in the final week of the race, only two — a Los Angeles Times/USC survey and one from IBD/TIPP — showed Trump with the lead.

The L.A. Times survey was criticized as “experimental” by industry experts for polling the same pool of people and for the way it weighted black voters.

But for the second consecutive presidential cycle, the L.A. Times and IBD/TIPP surveys were among the most accurate, making them the gold standard going forward.

The rest of the polls showed Clinton with leads of between 2 and 6 points, boosting the Democrat to a 3.3-point national lead in the RealClearPolitics average.

And the battleground data was just as biased against Trump.

There were no surveys released this year from Wisconsin that showed Trump with a lead.

Clinton held a 6.5 point lead in the Badger State heading into Election Day, and the state was not even discussed as on par with Michigan or Pennsylvania as a potential blue state pick-up for Trump.

Trump’s victory in Wisconsin — a state that has not gone for the GOP nominee since 1984 — helped him seal the deal.

In Michigan and Pennsylvania, deep blue states the GOP candidate has not won in decades, polls showed the race tightening in the home stretch, but only one poll, from Trafalgar Group, showed Trump with the lead.

Election modelers declined to flip either state into Trump’s column, even as the Clinton campaign rushed furiously to defend those states in the final days of the election.

And Trump won North Carolina by nearly 4 points, despite polls showing a toss-up there.

 

To continue reading: Pollsters suffer huge embarrassment

US Presidential Election – How Reliable are the Polls? by Pater Tenebrarum

The polls this election season are going to be as trustworthy as everything else the mainstream media puts out, which means not very. From Pater Tenebrarum at acting-man.com:

Is Clinton’s Lead Over Trump as Large as Advertised?

Once upon a time, political polls tended to be pretty accurate (there were occasional exceptions to this rule, but they were few and far between). Recently there have been a few notable misses though. One that comes to mind is the Brexit referendum. Shortly before the vote, polls indicated the outcome would be a very close one, while betting markets were indicating a solid win of the “remain” vote. The actual result was around 52:48 in favor of “leave”, so this was quite a big miss.

Another case that confounded even the most seasoned forecasters was the race for the Republican nomination. See for instance this article by Mish from January, in which he rightly berates famous election forecaster Nate Silver for vastly underestimating Trump’s chances to win. Silver held them to be around 12% to 13% at the time, which turned out to be a miss of truly monumental proportions. He kept missing the mark for many more months to come (essentially until the point in time when Trump had made the transition to “inevitable nominee”).

We currently follow press coverage on the presidential election only cursorily, for lack of time, and also because it seems both very superficial and one-sided. The mainstream media bias in this election seems astonishingly blatant. To quote Stefan Molyneux, there is apparently no mud one cannot sling at the orange-haired maniac. We are of course well aware that Donald Trump has an uncanny ability to put his foot into his mouth, but it seems almost as if little else is discussed (skim through a few MSM articles at random and see how much you learn about his policy proposals – good luck).

On the other hand, it is not as if Hillary Clinton were widely considered an angel. The woman has spent decades mired in scandals, from her credulity-stretching career as a cattle futures trader in the 70s, to the Whitewater affair, Travelgate, the harassment of women pointing fingers at her philandering husband, to the recent questions about the Clinton foundation, the gigantic speaking fees she gets for mouthing platitudes at corporate gatherings for 20 minutes a stretch, the e-mail server controversy (and not to forget, her sociopathic streak)… and we’re sure we have left a few things out.

In short, she is just as polarizing a figure as Trump is widely held to be. Then there is the fact that Donald Trump continues to draw huge crowds wherever he goes to speak, a feat Hillary Clinton is not known for. Perhaps this is merely a sign that Trump voters are more energized for their candidate – but that seems quite an important factoid by itself. Remember the Brexit post mortem in this context: the “remain” camp mainly failed because it was unable to create even the slightest bit of excitement for its cause.

All of this made us wonder why Hillary Clinton is so solidly ahead in political polls. Below is a chart of the NYT’s “national polling average”, which concludes that her current lead boils down to an “89% chance of winning the presidency”. Really? That sounds a bit like Nate Silver judging Trump’s chances to win the Republican nomination back in January, i.e., it is a bit hard to believe.

To continue reading: US Presidential Election – How Reliable are the Polls?