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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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