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naraburns  nihil supernum  16d ago (text post)   26868 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.

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Yesterday, I put down various cash bets around Harris winning the Popular vote. "Surely Dems win the popular vote regardless of the electoral college!"

I actually was convinced that I was onto a free money glitch by buying "Harris/Dems win the popular vote" at 25cents. I also put bets into "Trump wins 2/3/4/5/6 swing states", neglecting to even consider he wins all seven swing states.

Whoops, NOPE! I'm grossly miscalibrated. I actually did not have faith in prediction markets, and thought all "dumb" rep voters were skewing Polymarket/Kalshi etc. I'm laughing at myself that I actually thought I'm not at the top of the bell curve.

How do i get better at this? Some of my current thinking is:

  • twitter / X is actually representative: I skew center-right, so mostly see pro-DJT/Rep tweets. I thought that's a bubble + history meant for sure popular vote. Not sure how much to calibrate the other way. Will I see same amount of pro-Republican views in 2028 even though it could very well swing back towards the Dems in 4 years?
  • Betting against Elon Musk: Peter Thiel said "I would never bet against Elon... in anything. That's, sort of, hard rule number one". I think I will actually have to take this stance seriously, even though Musk is not infallible.
  • Voter turnout number expectations:
  • non-white voting blocks going towards Trump: I knew there's an undercurrent of latino and black guys voting for DJT, but didn't realize how much of the Latino vote he got. He didn't win the black vote by any means, but definitely out performed. Also, for whatever it's worth, the Michigan Muslim (and Arab in general?) vote. Will this continue, or will they flip flop back to the Dem coalition next time?
  • I didnt like Hilary Clinton in 2016 and I had even worse feelings about Harris this year. How much does that matter to the election in general? The comments on Trump and JDVance's Joe Rogan appearances were very positive, but that is in line with the "typical" Rogan fan. Does that represent the 30 year old guy vote?
  • I knew I lived in a bubble since i've only lived in coastal elite cities. At the watch party at a bar in my huge coastal city, everyone cheered for every Harris thing and booed everything Trump. I know the women feel that way, but do all the men too (or are they trying to get laid?). Two blond women did come in late and cheer quietly when some Rep senator won, but not sure if those two were tourists.
  • had 2 data points from friends that their bucks county relatives all voted Trump, but I disregarded it. This one is hard since these friends are libertarian/center right like me. But perhaps next time giving more credence.

what else have i missed? Gotta think on this more.

Maybe I will do more small prediction market bets to hone my forecasting. Does anyone here know if this is a skill that can be honed and trained, without dedicating your entire life to it?

Does anyone here know if this is a skill that can be honed and trained, without dedicating your entire life to it?

Sure, always bet on Nate Silver overestimating Democrat margins and then bet the margins. It's pretty much free money and has been for me for now 8 years. I would say Silver is vastly overrated in these spaces, but if he consistently misses that's very valuable in its own right. The same can be true about other pollsters and their inability to find certain demographics for various reasons and you can bet against them on the margins depending on the odds you can find. I figured this would fail me, but years later it still works.

If you would like to spend more time, you develop a system from the ground up based on as objective things as possible. I don't dedicate my life to political betting, but a significant amount of my time is spent following politics as a hobby since I was in politics as a young man. I figured I should make my hobby make money for me by using my general knowledge in the area to place bets.

It's going to sound cliche, but my bets are based on a set of fundamentals and then I use the fundamentals for me to filter information from polls. I also have a few proxies set up to filter information from polls. I use poll histories to compare from cycle to cycle against results. For e.g., polls overstated Dem support in swing states by 3.5 or so in 2016 and near 4 in 2020 on average. All the "gold standard" polls except for a few were even worse than that.

Examples of fundamentals would be "do people think the economy is good/bad/neutral" "which people think the economy is good/bad/neutral" and "do people feel safe/nonsafe/neutral". I would use third party indexes like Gallop economic confidence index or similar for these fundamentals. If you want to spend more time, you can look at who feel what, e.g., in 2024, the working class had abysmal feelings about the economy, so you could guess they're more like to vote GOP or at least not show up if they're Democrat leaning. What's the top issue? Does the top issues favor Democrat/Republican?

Examples of a proxy is gallop party affiliation data. How has it changed since the last cycle? Does Gallop confirm the fundamentals you're seeing? In 2024, the change from 2020 was around 3.5 which confirms the bad feelings in our chosen fundamentals above. Historically, this change will overestimate Democrat advantage in vote totals. As far as I know, this data has never overpredicted GOP turnout. Okay, so from this data, we expect a >4 lurch towards the GOP.

Now, let's go to the polls: Do we see this in the polls compared to the same pollsters' 2020 results (error corrected)? A helpful tip is university pollsters give more raw polling with higher variance. We find a near 7 point lurch on the national. So, I used these various different metrics to check each other matric to verify the pattern I thought I was picking up was there. And so I made predictions and bets based on this guess. I wasn't confident enough to bet my system straight and instead made plays for margins in non-swing states, wins in swing states, EV vote, Senate, Congress, Sweep, and some other ones.

Other rules of thumb are states correlate heavily because populations are similar, e.g., PA, MI, WI have gone the same way since IIRC 1988.

I wanted to make a top post about a few topics around the election like my puzzlement with the esteem Nate Silver gets, or talking about my approach to political betting, and listing my predictions, but I guess I'm just too lazy. I logged in on Monday to do it but instead scrolled and reply guyed.

Will this continue, or will they flip flop back to the Dem coalition next time?

they'll go back to voting Dem instead of Jill Stein because I would bet (depending on the odds of course!) the Israeli war on Gazans and Lebanese will end before the next election and it won't be at the top of their minds

I also lost money on a Harris popular vote. I'm not that surprised Trump won the presidency, but I am floored he won the popular vote. Never saw it coming.

I've heard rumors that may change by the time mail-ins come in, but still shocking for the election night results.

The main thing you missed is that the swing states are correlated. If the polls miss extra Trump support, that will most likely materialize across demographically similar states. A 2-3 point polling error in Trump's favor (one standard deviation) wins him all the swing states.

Except there’s three groupings of swing states by demographic- older and whiter(the blue wall), blacker and more religious(Georgia and NC), and secular urban with lots of Hispanics(Arizona and Nevada). We wouldn’t expect these three groups to be correlated with each other much at all.

Polling errors are usually reported at two-sigma, but regardless this misses the real problem -- which is that they don't account for systemic error at all, which clearly exists in spades for Trump. (although not uniquely so -- this phenomenon seems to exist globally, to the point where you'd do better considering it to be baked in than not.

I know the women feel that way, but do all the men too (or are they trying to get laid?).

I've been really thinking about how gendered this election is. I use Instagram. If I could turn off every woman in my feed for the next week and the past one, I would take that option in a heartbeat.

My wife is a fairly conservative catholic and has been heavily swayed by her friends opinions and groupthink. You and I are here and in a twitter algorithm bubble - Women are marinating in snapchat, insta, and group threads in which 75% of of the people are (for lack of a better term) screeching about politics. Relentlessly.

There has been an extremely loud contingent of women both angry and confident in Harris throughout the election. Men are subservient to women's opinions. Myself included albeit at a reduced intensity than some.

If I were to update a prior it would be to discount the female voice slightly more than I normally do. I think they either don't know they're blinding themselves through their strength (the ability to compel silence/dishonesty in men) or do not care.

Women are subject to groupthink, but only on surface level. I think it is a strategy of conflict avoidance and reducing negative emotions. But privately they act differently. There are many examples regarding this, just remember the whole "man vs bear" kerfuffle, another example is when women rate each other's looks in public when they give huge bumps even to obviously hideous women. I heard a theory that this is evolutionary strategy, women are more vulnerable and therefore tend to be more "socialistic" for lack of better term - at least on the outside. But privately they are as aggressive and vicious as men especially in social environment, they just have to be careful not to be seen as such. Saying something out loud and then voting differently is prime example of such behavior, similar to being all smiley and warm toward another woman only to "carefully" badmouth her behind her back by using wannabe compliments in game of social status.

It's worth reflecting at times like this that these screechers are not normal.

Trump won white women by 5%.

My wife specifically referred to "The loudest people" in her groups making themselves feel more important and representative than they actually are.

Breaking it down by race shows one small part of it, but when you include all women you see who was voting for Kamala despite how weak her candidacy and case was.

Trump's wins among non-white and college-educated people were almost all men.

I couldn't understand how abortion could be such a rallying cry among women. Sure, there are many analogs with gun control which I do obsess over, but at the end of the day this was people joined both celebrate and demand the ability to deal death to innocent life. Turns out it wasn't quite as strong as it seemed, which of course makes sense with 20/20 hindsight.

My wife specifically referred to "The loudest people" in her groups making themselves feel more important and representative than they actually are.

I doubt the harridan element would screech so loud if they were certain the consensus they were trying to build already existed. This concept extends out to Twitter space.

I think a lot of mothers voted for Trump. Schools secretly transitioning children and giving them pornography is radicalizing a lot of women. Boys in girls sports to a degree as well. Shitty dehumanizing language like "chest feeder" and "birthing person" too. Watching my wife put out feelers with other moms at the park, slowly building a repour rapport, until they were having 3 hour long conversations on the phone about this shit, validating each other that they weren't crazy has been an experience.

Sports are profoundly important to lots of kids, and messing with them is, politically, on par with saying we should kill house cats to protect the environment.

11 years ago in NZ a man named Gareth Morgan seriously proposed eradicating/phasing out domestic cats for conservation reasons and it was enough to make him a household name. So much so that when he tried to launch his own political party three years later 'the cat thing' hung around the party's neck like an albatross. It wasn't even party policy, the meme was just too strong.

rapport?

Auto correct on my phone has failed me once again.

I've been really thinking about how gendered this election is. I use Instagram. If I could turn off every woman in my feed for the next week and the past one, I would take that option in a heartbeat.

This applies even (or especially) outside US. I expect to see much social media wailing from some of the women I know while the few men to comment anything are likely to be about what Trump's win means for European defence and economy.

Given the election results it’s clearly a lot less gendered than we thought. I suspect that there’s a pretty large contingent of female silent Trump voters that just keep their support to themselves to avoid social stigma.

I don't think you "missed" anything. All our sense making organs have been purposely smashed to bits, and it's impossible to tell who's telling the truth anymore. The experts burn their trust, and then invent a machine to burn things that have already been burned so they can do it again next year. Meanwhile they point mockingly at the "wisdom of crowds" X seems to enable, or point to all the other heavily FBI/CIA influenced social media networks as the "normal" ones that should be representative. For you to have seen this coming would have required these people to stop lying about everything systematically.

I've seen this refrain over and over that Putin's misinformation playbook isn't to flood the zone with one big lie, but a million contradictory lies so that finding truth is like finding a needing in a haystack. But I'd say our intelligence services have learned that trick pretty well themselves. I'm not, or wasn't at least, a religious man, but I can only thank god that we had a seemingly free and fair election that showed the Emperor was naked once again.

How do the FBI/CIA influence social networks?

Facebook, Twitter stocked with ex-FBI, CIA officials in key posts

Circa 2022. Naturally Twitter, now X, has been purged. Facebook and others, not so much.

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