Kevin Collins: This Nate Cohn article on Trump’s over-performance among less frequent voters is worth your time, and has at least two important implications folks should be considering that the article doesn’t directly address, one substantive and one methodological www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/u...

This Nate Cohn article on Trump’s over-performance among less frequent voters is worth your time, and has at least two important implications folks should be considering that the article doesn’t directly address, one substantive and one methodological www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/u...

If Everyone Voted, Would Biden Benefit? Not Anymore.www.nytimes.com Inside the unusual dynamic shaping the 2024 campaign.

And credit where credit is due, @dhopkins1776.bsky.social made a very similar point in an article (linked to by Cohn) in FiveThirtyEight back in April abcnews.go.com/538/vote-bac...

The less you vote, the more you back Trumpabcnews.go.com Joe Biden is polling better than Donald Trump among voters who turn out more often.

Implication 1: Voters may be sorting on their concern about, and dedication to democracy. After all, Trump (who questions the validity of elections he doesn’t win) does best among those who vote least regularly, and democracy-defending Biden is doing best among the most regular voters

Cohn doesn’t address this directly, probably because the Times’ surveys haven’t included a survey item that tries to measure voters’ dedication to democracy. (He does talk about issue prioritization of democracy and abortion among Dems, though that’s not quite the same thing)

So if you’re running a national voter-file sample or -matched survey, let me suggest that you ask people directly how much they value elections as a mechanism for selecting leaders. Something like below

There are other questions you could ask too, like measures of authoritarianism, but I think it would be particularly important to ask directly about commitment to the democratic institutions of elections if we’re trying to assess the attitudinal origins of this support split by past vote turnout

Implication #2: Sample from, or match to, the voter file. What this shows is that support is correlated with past turnout, and we know past turnout to generally be correlated with political interest (and interest in taking political surveys).

This is a great example of why polling is bunk and why democrats are over performing in every election for the last 6 years, especially in red states. Deriving data from people who don’t vote often is logically stupid. Hello! lol @chrislhayes.bsky.social @cnn.com

This is an extremely uninformed argument. It’s not at all an example of why polling is bunk; it is a description of voter attitudes based on polling data that shows exactly why Dems have performed well in midterm and special elections

My supposition is that polling data isn’t data in the same way horoscopes aren’t data ether. Broken clocks are right twice a day. Everyone needs to find another way of more accurately determining actual voting behavior. @chrislhayes.bsky.social @cnn.com

Yes, i understood your arguments, and find it deeply uninformed. The fact that you took a post I wrote that is *grounded in polling data* and said it’s evidence polling data is broken is proof that you’re missing the point

Everyone who works in survey research, including me, understands the limitations of survey methods. But they remain the best way to measure public opinion. Some random state house special is much less informative, particularly about presidential elections

The media use polling data to tell stories which just aren’t true. Perhaps to engage an audience (rage driven “news”) so their ratings go up.Essential to seeking advertising revenue which keeps them alive. In itself that is an undermining factor @brianstelter.bsky.social @chrislhayes.bsky.social

I don’t agree. Polling has been weaponized, used to gaslight Americans. There are no standards to determine accuracy. Margin of errors are mythical. Comparing polls to actual voting behavior identifies just how inaccurate most of them are. @chrislhayes.bsky.social @cnn.com

I can’t comment on the methods, but I wonder about the implications for applied politics. At the state level, Reps have worked to make voting harder (e.g. voter ID, limit vote by mail) and it was assumed to be for political advantage. Are they actually hurting their own voters?

Possibly. But at least in some places, they have been targeting voting methods that have been used by Democrats, like mail voting, as opposed to early in person voting, which was more heavily used by Republicans.

Oddly enough in FL mail voting was very Republican, if I recall, until Trump discredited it in 2020. Now they have indeed made it more difficult but it remains to be seen who will be more disadvantaged. This predates the 2020 election: www.brennancenter.org/our-work/ana...

Who Votes by Mail?www.brennancenter.org There is little reason to believe that mail ballots would uniformly help Democrats in November.

Yes, agreed

In the early naughties, republicans completely dominated absentee voting in Colorado. Starting in 2004, Democrats copied them. Then Dems passed automatic mail ballots in 2014 (everybody always gets a ballot) and they probably caused enough low propensity republicans to vote that Mark Udall lost.

If we are so polarized as a society that there are fewer persuadable voters in the middle, does that mean Dems need to turn out people who rarely vote in order yo win?

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