Aren’t the same people freaking out about Biden the ones perfectly happy to weekend-at-Bernie’s Feinstein — or play along with that — as long as they could?
This is a genuine question; I don’t know.
Oh yes, definitely.
Eh. I’m not freaking out about Biden; I am freaking out about the press, the pundits, the donors, and especially the campaign.
This seems to me to be the You Have One Job of a campaign and that they can’t manage it scares me. It’s not a surprise!
Right. And folks can (and plainly do) have lots of opinions on what to do now, but the overriding concern here, and in the D party apparatus isn't "will Biden be ok in the Oval Office" but "is his campaign going to get him there" and if not, can we fix it, and can someone else fix it, in that order
I didn’t much like Biden and never liked the primary system. I thought he was too old in 2020! But the time to fix it was before the primaries. I don’t have the impression that he’s changed much, only the world, both in very predictable ways.
I think the thing for me is there's still 4 months left. That's not a giant amount of time, but it's also plenty if they really did light the fight in the campaign
The problem is this is just a really hard election to properly model; in some profound ways it's not like any election up to 2016, and has some very important differences to 2016 or 2020 too in lots of important directions. Which isn't great for anxiety. But it does mean it's still all to play for.
Is it? Most international commentary I read have been assuming a Trump WH for months - not as something that will necessarily happen, but as a strong likelihood. Most polls have went only one way so far.
Aren't there still big money differences, campaign offices, staffing and staff quality differences favoring Biden - the mechanics aren't much changed are they?
Yes. Lots of advantages there. The number that worries me more than favorability tho (which is the big one that's usually quoted) is "enthusiasm to vote" numbers, where Ds consistently poll below Rs
The flipside to that as well is that the R groundgame is basically trash, which makes even those types of numbers a bit hard to interpret. Basically the whole cycle is a flock of black swans and everyone's trying to peer through frosted glass a bit to interpret what's going to happen
A lot of both problems: people imputing to polling a false precision, or throwing up their hands and saying polls don't matter they're all junk. Interpreting them can be nuanced, even experts can misread all the time. But sometimes they're not that ambiguous, and that Biden's losing is such a case.
oh 100% agree. My comment isn't a "ignore the polls" thing, and the trendlines very much don't fill me with happy thoughts. Just the D campaign is really struggling to give lean-Ds a lot of enthusiasm to vote, which is ... well it's not great
But that's also sort of where I see opportunity for the campaign. The problem isn't a lack of plausible D votes; it's giving them the oompf to /want/ to line up for hours to put their X next to your name
For better and worse, that is, unfortunately, giving their campaign a bit of sparkle and leaning into the theatrics of it. Should it be? No. But such is life.
It's too soon to say definitively, but I'm skeptical that Biden fighting back as he is will do much firing up the base in his favor, at least not as broadly as he needs. And even less picking up persuadables, who do still matter.
But that's why you do weighting and it's not perfect but it can still do a pretty decent job. All these things you hear causing problems for pollsters are true, response rates etc. But they're not without tools to address them, and even if they contribute to the error gap, it's not by a huge amount.
Election held tomorrow, he'd have a shot. But not a good one. 1 in 4, being generous. 1 in 6 would be plausible.
And worth remembering, Trump overperformed the polls in both 2016 and even more in 2020. If there's a polling error, it could be cutting the other way and Biden's in even worse shape.
Poll misses aren’t really predictive of future poll misses (and if they were pollsters would already account for them)
I don’t know what the odds are. I know people hate Trump and he’s lost the popular vote in two straight presidential elections.
We’ll see.
True it's not predictive itself, but we know something of the reason why and it hasn't changed: Trump boosts turnout by marginal voters. It's why Dems have been doing better in special elections and midterms and worse when he's on the ballot. He brings out people who otherwise don't usually vote.
To @pwnallthethings.bsky.social's point about enthusiasm: Trump fires up marginal voters in ways that make up for, by some indications more than make up, his other weaknesses and the groups he does worse with. A polling error understating his performance is still likelier than the reverse.
I get texts all the time “will you vote for Joe?” (of course), but I don’t truly know where they’re coming from so I always delete. Polling now is dicey at best: who is being polled? Who answers the phone? So it’s a media panic attack right now that may or may not have a basis in reality.
Exactly, so how do legit pollsters get respondents? Who is being polled and how do they reach them? I honestly don’t see how any poll in the-year-of-our-lord-2024 can be accurate.
The smell test is not data, of which we have quite a lot.
There is a wide range of nuance in how you interpret the polls. But I don't think there's any reasonable case to be made his chances are any worse than tossup right now, and a lot of indication they're a good deal better than that.
