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naraburns  nihil supernum  16d ago (text post)   26860 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.

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Probably anyone who has spent more than five minutes on the Motte knows that I mistrust corporate news media a lot. I am even aware that polls are politically slanted. And yet, somehow, every time I went looking into the polls behind the media's unapologetic shilling for Harris, I came away thinking, "even if that result is wrong, surely it's not so wrong that Trump could actually pull this off." And maybe this just goes back to my difficulty with numbers. But I am such a skeptical person by nature that it feels too convenient to conclude that, no, I need to be even more skeptical.

Nara my friend. It was not that hard. Trump barely lost in 2020 in spite of terrible polls, and was tied in 2024. He was doing palpably better in both the polls and the vibes. Ergo.

The most accurate pollsters in 2020 were dead accurate in 2024. AtlasIntel wears the crown again. Their polls showed a Trump swing state sweep.

If you couldn’t see through the Selzer poll, I don’t know what to tell you. The sample was like, 50% college educated women over 65 in a state full of farmers. Your mistake was not putting enough weight on the obvious conclusion that the poll was just not a bad sample, but entirely fraudulent. In which case, it carries 0 information.

I will admit that poll kept me up at night. But it forced me to think through the obvious conclusions, and I became totally convinced Trump would win. I put money in PredictIt on Monday and bought TSLA calls on Tuesday. But it was only after I had convinced myself that the race was not even close to a toss up.

You know, a data point that made me skeptical was a "lesson" I kept hearing from the 2022 midterms that polls over estimated Republican turnout. That was supposed to be a red wave that kind of fizzled outside of Florida. So it was hard to apply the same "It's the economy stupid", "The polls are just as wrong as 2016 and 2020" rules to them for 2024. At least for me.

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