Why I’m skeptical of some puzzling polls
There was actually some news recently that these polls might actually be wrong here: apparently there’s a large amount of people lying that they’re Hispanic/young in online polls. This was discovered both because: 1. The “20% of youth are Holocaust deniers!” Poll that made the waves wasn’t reproducible and 2. There’s some BIG inconsistencies being found in many polls too, like some polls somehow managing to have a cohort of Hispanics that are 20% nuclear submarine engineers.
Basically, we might have a vicious cycle making polls wildly inaccurate here: youth (and Hispanics?) are harder to poll -> pollsters value the data more vs other demographics-> people lie to obtain the rewards being offered to get this data -> youth/Hispanics become harder to poll.
Polls usually can handle some “lizard man’s constant”, but everything falls apart if there’s significant lying.
“National head to head polls”
Which is meaningless since our elections ARE NOT “National”.
States like Washington, Oregon, and California are going to Biden. Full stop.
States like Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana are going to Trump, full stop.
So the ONLY polling that’s worth following is in the states which may be questionable and, frankly, there aren’t a lot of them.
Arizona - Trump +7
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/arizona/Georgia - Trump +6 to +7
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/georgia/Michigan - Tied to Trump +3
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/michigan/Nevada - Trump +6 to +10
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/nevada/New Mexico - Biden +8 but from August, not useful.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/new-mexico/North Carolina - Trump +9 to +10
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/north-carolina/Pennsylvania - Biden +1
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/pennsylvania/(this one has been flipping back and forth)
Virginia - Biden +4
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/virginia/Wisconsin - Trump +3 to +4
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/wisconsin/Here’s what that looks like on a map:
293 to 245 Trump.
Biden CANNOT win without Michigan and Wisconsin, two states that Clinton infamously neglected to campaign in and lost. Getting them, with this equation, puts Biden EXACTLY at 270.
Unless the Electoral College magically goes away, this will be a rough election for a majority of Americans. Lots of long-standing issues are coming to a head with the realization that we’ve already been fascist for a while.
There IS a plan to move to the popular vote, but it only kicks in if we get enough states to represent 270 electoral votes.
As of now it’s at 205 enacted with 88 pending.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
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Genuine question, what’s wrong with it? Isn’t it basically just a blog/self publishing platform?
Its had some “nazi bar” issues, i.e “we dont like nazis, but its cool if they come to our bar with their nazi friends and spend their nazi money here. If more Nazis show up, the more the merrier!”
They back tracked from the above a ways after outrage, but it’s soured people on the platform.
Except it’s not a bar, it’s a web site where you only interact with people you have affirmatively decided to interact with.
It’s like if there is a Nazi living in your apartment building, and specifically forbidden by the laws of physics from doing anything physical to anyone or making any statement or posting any literature to anyone who hasn’t decided they want to hear from them. The risk of everyone in the apartment building deciding to become a Nazi in that situation is small.
I actually agreed with their viewpoint, and the fact that they had to backtrack after a noisy section of the community blew up at them, and that noisy section of the community decided that they were still bad people even though they’d backtracked, and now are “soured,” is to me much more of an indictment of that section of the community than it is of Substack.
Being unaware is very different than knowingly accepting their company.
I think you and I are just not gonna see eye to eye on this.
The one additional thing I’ll say is, the Nazis on Substack were absolutely undetectable to anyone who didn’t choose to interact with them, but a bunch of people absolutely freaked out about them, to the point that it did a bunch of damage to a platform that was absolutely a positive force for good, just because people would have had to share the platform with literally about 0.05% Nazis somewhere out of sight.
Contrast with that, Lemmy clearly has some level of infestation of shills masquerading as real people with political opinions, and they impact the discourse every day. Some of them, if I had to guess, I would guess are actively funded by people who are actively in league with Nazis. You know the ones. Although, that’s pure speculation on my part with basically nothing at all behind it beyond guessing. The impact to the discourse is the only part I’m confident about.
I haven’t seen any level of freakout about that. Just an occasional bleat of “yo it’s not cool that this is happening,” and then business as usual.
Me
Being unaware is very different than knowingly accepting their company.
You
The one additional thing I’ll say is, the Nazis on Substack were absolutely undetectable to anyone who didn’t choose to interact with them, but a bunch of people absolutely freaked out about them, to the point that it did a bunch of damage to a platform that was absolutely a positive force for good, just because people would have had to share the platform with literally about 0.05% Nazis somewhere out of sight.
It’s like you can’t read and understand a simple sentence. Or you just like defending nazis, that could be it too.
My point is that the Nazis were not “in my company” on Substack. I didn’t read them, I wouldn’t even have known where to find them or how to interact with them without putting some effort into finding out. The fact that I knew they were there somewhere doesn’t change that.
There’s no call to get insulting with me about that or pretend that I’m saying it because there’s something I can’t understand. It’s simply the truth. You have your viewpoint, which as best I understand it is that even using the same platform as an overt Nazi is unacceptable to you, which, okay, fine. But pretending I just can’t understand something or I like Nazis is why we’re disagreeing is just condescending and wrong.
Like I say, I think we’re just not gonna see eye to eye on that aspect. Just repeating ourselves at each other probably isn’t productive.
Yeah this is exactly what it is.
The commenter above likely read something they disagree with on substack and has chosen to hate the entire platform because of it.
They let like 2 Nazis on, taking the viewpoint basically (1) it’s in the spirit of the 1st amendment to allow even reprehensible speech (2) guys it’s like 2 of them and the number of people reading and being convinced by them is likely to be 0
And the entirety of the knee-jerk fediverse politics community saw an opportunity to take a pointless stand on something, and in their eyes shone the promise of being able to make some smug self-important postings about how something good is actually really problematic and you’re just not enlightened enough if you don’t agree
And now Substack is literally Hitler even though it was doing a whole bunch of great things, outside of the 2 Nazis
When you sit at a table with 2 nazis, there are three nazis.
And a table. A Nazi table.
I think the problem is that a lot of political discourse is super constrained, most of these polls are “do you like trump or like Biden” there’s no option to express the opinion of “I hate both of them but one slightly more”. Of course that’s going to create weird results! If they have to twist the answers to get there displeasure across and scare the DNC in to taking them seriously, that’s what they have to do.
I think there is possibly a dissonance being created by how lobby money influences the thinking of campaigns. Say voters care about reducing fossil fuel dependency, say they care about ending support for Israel, say voters care about ending for profit health insurance, say voters care about breaking up corporate oligopolies, these are all toxic pills to many donors. Campaigns don’t feel they can endorse or condemn these things, so they refuse to even engage with the topics. These incredibly important political issues are just… removed from official political discourse, thus such things are kept out of the polls or reduced to anemic platitudes, so people can’t accurately express what they care about.
Younger voters are pissed at the democratic establishment and there is no statistical data based way for them to measure why. So the democratic establishment is left flailing in the dark, boxing with ghosts because they’ve blinded them selves to issues that pit their continents against donors. WHICH ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUES FOR MOST YOUNGE VOTERS.
I don’t know how the polling would catch them, but the idea that people under 30 are more progressive socially or economically is probably a huge simplification. I only have anecdotal information, but what is see is they are spilt, and largely along gender lines, with both sides taking the idea of a breakdown of government as we know it almost as a moot point.
I recently saw a poll of current 18 year olds that showed the women are very democrat leaning, while the men are very right leaning, though not as extreme as the female lean was. Young people are leaning left more than ever, but primarily due to the women
