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A lurking issue with the vast bulk of the polls so far: they all show a tossup. Not "they follow a distribution that's consistent with a tossup," but "they follow a distribution that's tightly clustered around a 0-1% margin for one or another candidate, in all the swing states." It's statistically impossible for this to arise by chance. You never see significant outliers. You would with the sample sizes they're working with.
This isn't indicative of a tight race: it's indicative of pollsters being scared to publish results favoring a candidate one way or another. If it were the former, you'd see obviously wrong outliers in one direction or another, but you don't.
If there's a single pollster I trust, it's Selzer. She has a reputation, and it's an earned reputation: she's been willing to publish outliers before, and consistently those outliers have been more consistent with the actual results than the mainstream popular wisdom and other pollsters.
Iowa itself doesn't matter: if Harris wins it, she's already won (and if I had to guess, I'd still bet Trump wins Iowa). But even if the actual results are at the pro-Trump edge of her confidence interval, he's very likely cooked: there is no way Iowa doesn't vote substantially to the right of all the swing states, particularly PA, MI, and WI.
It’s a BS poll. A prior poll had Tru o up 18 over Biden. Do we really think there was in a few months a 21 point swing in Iowa? Look at the cross tabs. It is just a really bad sample.
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It would be odd for that result to show in polls, however I think it could be correct simply because everyone is measuring the exact same data. They should be getting results within the error margin of the correct answer. And the reason I tend to buy a dead heat is that Americans are highly polarized on almost every topic. Abortion, Israel, Ukraine, the economy, education, culture, etc. all are by now completely coded blue or red. There’s very littLe left to persuade in the middle. It’s all about the base. That should be producing a very tight race.
Even if the ground level truth is an exact tie in all the states, you would still expect more outliers than there are: there's always the luck of the draw, and it's irreducible. If someone has a process to massage the sample data enough so that these outliers never show up in the final published numbers, they're destroying information in the process.
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Interesting, except the number of people claiming to be "independent" is near all time high.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/548459/independent-party-tied-high-democratic-new-low.aspx
I'd say the bases of each party are probably smaller than it has been in a while. Lot MORE people to be persuaded.
I think its a tight race because the Democrats managed to pick a candidate that is arguably less popular and likeable with independents than Trump.
I suspect that's just because it's fashionable among Democratic party-line voters to claim independence. Has been for a long time, but the weaker Harris ticket likely encourages that more.
and not only with the voters, let's not forget that supposedly Bernie Sanders is an independent. In my opinion, the number of true independent voters in any given year is half or less of what we are told.
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