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Notes -
Re: the Selzer poll.
I'd like to examine the wording of this poll and the effect had on the outcome. The wording was as follows:
The September poll, by contrast, did not include language targeted at early voters:
The 2020 wording of the Selzer poll was as follows:
The 2016 wording was as follows:
I believe the "If you already voted, for whom did you vote?" wording of the October 2024 poll skewed the results for a few reasons. First, it seems slightly confusing. It's possible that respondents could have interpreted the additional wording as being about their perception of how others would have voted. Given that Democrats tend to vote early and people tend to know this because of the 2020 election coverage, this may have skewed the result. Secondly, poll questions should be as short and simple as possible. The 2020 wording of the question was much shorter, and did not include multiple parts for poll respondents to think through. The 2016 wording, while structured similarly to 2024, also did not include language about early voting. One rule of survey design is to avoid asking multiple questions at once, and this violates that.
Lastly, the inclusion of this language may bias participation towards respondents who did vote early. And while that does tend to favor Democrats, Nate Silver has written about how early voting doesn't predict results. Therefore, the accuracy of this poll result may be skewed.
Overall: The markets moving from 60/40 to 50/50 might have happened anyway and this just happened to be the outlier poll that triggered it. It's probably a good thing that the betting markets now accurately reflect where the race has been according to aggregators like Nate. But the result seems to be due to the wording of the poll, rather than an underlying change in the Iowa (read: Midwestern) electorate.
EDIT: For contrast, the Emerson poll showed a 53%/43% lead for Trump and was worded as follows:
Also, I'm guessing that RFK and Libertarian voters on that poll are fairly likely to pull the lever for Trump in actual practice.
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538 also has an article about some kind of shenanigans with a Democratic primary poll in 2020 which Selzer was involved with. https://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blog/iowa-caucus-2020-election-live/#254963
two reasonable interpretations: a mistake was made in the poll and they withheld the results because they would always dump a poll in a situation like this and this is consistent with their strong ethical practices. another interpretation: the poll was damaging to a certain candidate so they either took advantage of a situation or created a situation in order to hide the poll results.
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It seems like she heavily oversampled democrats in a state that has gotten redder since 2020. Oddly she gave the poll results to Dems before releasing. I think it is a bad poll designed to discourage Republican turnout nationally.
Edit:
If you look more you see things like seniors moving allegedly almost 30 points away from Trump. Ditto non college voters. We aren’t seeing that kind of data anywhere else. Indeed Selzer showed Trump up over 18 points against Biden. Are we really to believe that Trump lost 21 points over a few months to Harris led by a surge in 65+ voters?
Yeah the cross tabs are damning. If she doesn’t get this one right and Trump wins by 10 or something, her credibility is a pollster is shot.
I'd kinda hope not. If you do 100 polls you will get roughly that is a 1% outlier, and those have wacky results. By itself it is damning, but aggregated with everything else it comes out in the wash. If people are constantly second guessing their polls to guess if its real or outlier and only releasing the "real" ones then not only is the data untrustworthy but what is the point of the statistical confidence levels in the first place?
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Is her credibility shot? One thing we've learned over the past four years is that people with connections can be wrong about everything all the time and still be lauded as experts so long as they maintain the right social connections and mouth the right pieties.
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I have to control for my own partisan bias and wishcasting, but the Democrat confidence in abortion being such a powerful swing issue as to decide this election is baffling to me. Does it have such a powerful grip on the female vote?
In my opinion, it's what Democratic operatives want to be true rather than reflecting the reality of the electorate - in that the most ardently pro-life voters are also women. Kamala is already winning her base of single affluent women by a lot. Increasing their turnout doesn't seem like a winning play - especially with her losses everywhere else.
Abortion is functionally the only issue that gains votes for democrats this cycle(economy/inflation, crime, the border, censorship etc all gain votes for Trump and usually other republicans. Even the damn squirrel), so it makes sense for democrats to emphasize it.
There is democrat messaging that looks, to me, like being high on their own supply- eg, the Harris ad about how nobody knows who you voted for. But punching the abortion issue, especially in the way that they're doing it(eg- Collin Allred has an ad in my market featuring an ob/gyn claiming Texas law bans abortions to save a woman's life. This is explicitly a lie, but functionally nobody wants it to be true either) is good politics. Democrats are competently and intelligently playing a pretty bad hand most of the time.
There's also the scare tactic "Trump is a Fascist! Electing him will mean the end of democracy!" which has been everywhere on Reddit the past few days.
My MIL shockingly seems to support Trump. This is a woman who voted for Biden in 2020. She is pissed off with the Nazi comps as she had family lost in the holocaust.
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Right, but the mainstream media gets to pick the issue that matters, so they only need one.
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Presuming that one of America's biggest culture war issues of the recent half-century might have electoral significance? In MY Culture War Roundup megathread?
I'm a relic of a time when pro-choice advocacy was 'safe, legal, and rare'. If that's the definition of pro-choice, then I understand (if not in favor.)
The modern incarnation is not that.
I cannot imagine being fired up to vote for the new, aggressively feminist formulation of it, that views an abortion as a empowering, independent act of a liberated woman bereft of moral weight or consideration. Or rather, I don't want to understand the kind of woman that would be attracted to that kind of rhetoric. If there are enough women like that to sway an election, it would make me very sad.
That's not it. Abortion is about a woman's absolute right to control her body, and any quibbling with that has been pushed outside the Overton Window.
If women can't figure out how to have an absolute right to control their bodies and a replacement fertility rate, then Stein's law applies.
So if we’re to think about this like Stein did, there’s no need to worry about women figuring that one out because the problem is self-correcting anyways.
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What people state as their most important issue is as much a result of campaign strategies as a cause. People decide on a candidate; candidate says the campaign is about issue X; supporters of the campaign say that they support the candidate because of issue X.
Democrats probably believe abortion is an important issue to voters, but that's downstream of intra-coalition politics determining that abortion is the most important issue. It also is an issue that lends itself to sound bites and anecdotes, which is great for acting as a rallying point and ads.
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Does anyone know if there are models that take into account sentiment analysis (ie ingest lots of data from TV viewership, FB,YT, comment sections, clean it, weight it, etc)? This is how I'd solve the game for betting purposes.
Just by eyeballing it, Trump seems to have a massive advantage. Trump-positive yt vids are more viewed and have a better like/dislike ratio than any vaguely Dem positive video. The top comments are often mostly pro Trump. A large percentage of MSM TV coverage is pro Trump, FB used to lean more pro Trump, Twitter is operated by a Trump fanatic. Polling leans old, this leans younger. The comment section of NYT, WaPo are obviously anti Trump, but these are comparatively microscopic players. What does themotte think, and what might I not be seeing?
Many people build their own. I know Bloomberg and probably also Refinitiv have at least some election-related alternative data and then there are countless smaller providers and consultancies selling their own models and datasets to others. I don’t think it would yield any actionable insights radically different to what the markets are expecting now, though.
Some further digging and it seems "election prediction by SM (usually twitter) sentiment analysis" is an academic area of research with dozens of papers going back at least to 2010, getting more advanced. However I can't find anyone doing publicly. This is why I wish the election prediction markets were more accessible and liquid. Eventually it'd be profitable to build the most accurate model even if you gained only a few percentage points in accuracy. With enough to be gained you'll get a Jim Simons team of election forecasters.
if all the polls are 'herding' the results in order to remove outliers then there should be some kind of opportunity for someone with a lot of cash and willing to take the risk to produce 'real' polls, keep them a secret and make EV bank on polymarket.
This is kind of how it worked at the top levels of online poker in ~2016ish. Various groups spent 100kish each to build analysis software years before a dev released a version for sale. Top regs eventually pooled resources to build GTO bots, prompting top poker sites to learn how to ban them. For prediction markets the stats are way different (ie fewer trials, lots of noise) and a 10% edge wouldn't translate translate into a lot of money unless you could bet many millions, plus the variance would be insane. With active trading (ie more trials) I could see decent profits, but I don't know what liquidity looks like.
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the fun part about polls herding is that we rarely see the outliers, so we don't know if it is a fluke, a trend or massaged because we have nothing to compare it to.
My expectations for the election (btw - it is time to open the megathread since everything that will be coming next few days will be about it) is that:
It won't be close electoral college wise, doesn't matter who wins. There will be at least two states that are not battlegrounds that will actually turned out to have been battlegrounds. I have steeled myself for Kamala win.
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Polling wording absolutely influences results, so although I don't see it as at confusing, I would not be at all surprised if some respondents did.
That said, Trump won IA by 8 points in 2020 and by 9 points in 2016. I have a hard time imagining the wording shifting the results by over 10 points. It's either a really bad poll with an unlucky non representative set of recipients; Selzer cooked the numbers, either intentionally or not; or Trump is in deep trouble among white Midwestern voters.
Thought this tweet was interesting. Seems like you might be right about the non-representative sample (Independents didn't move, so the shift if it exists is being driven by republicans flipping).
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Iowa is not exactly a reliably red state either. We're not taking about Texas here. Obama won it by almost 10 points in 2008 and by over 5 points in 2012. "Dem wins Iowa by 2-4 points" is not, historically, a crazy outcome.
Democrats aren't competitive in Ohio anymore, either. This isn't 2012, when Missouri elected a democrat for the senate.
The 2012 senate election in MO was complicated by Todd Akin being an idiot and talking about "legitimate rape," during a time when such a scandal could actually bring a candidate down. McCaskill's margins were much smaller in 2006, and when her seat came up for re-election in 2018, Hawley won handily. A more apt comparison for the 2012 Missouri senate election would be the 2017 special election in Alabama, where Doug Jones (D) beat Roy Moore (R) because of accusations of sex abuse (which he essentially admitted were true) against Moore, and then in the very next election lost his seat. Although the margins were much smaller, because we're definitely more polarized in the past 8 years than in 2012!
Ok, fair, I’d forgotten about Todd Akin.
I stand by my statement that Iowa voting for Obama in 2012 doesn’t make it competitive for democrats. So did Maine’s 2nd district, so did Ohio, so did Florida.
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