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.
If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.
Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.
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Notes -
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.
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
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