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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   34277 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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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).

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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