An accurate model can output a 50-50 prediction. Sure, no problem there. But there is a human bias that does tend to make 50% more likely in these cases. It is the maximum percentage you can assign to the uncomfortable possibility without it being higher than the comfortable possibility.
538 systematically magnified this kind of bias when they decided to rate polls, not based on their absolute error, but based on how close their bias was relative to other polls' biases.(https://x.com/andrei__roman/status/1854328028480115144) This down-weighted pollsters like Atlas Intel who would've otherwise improved 538's forecast.
I'm not sure how to verify your comment since 538 was cut by ABC a month or 2 ago. But Nate Silver's pollster rating methodology is pretty much the same as 538's was during his tenure there and can be found here: https://www.natesilver.net/p/pollster-ratings-silver-bulleti...
It actually explicitly looks for statistical evidence of "herding" (e.g. not publishing poll results that might go against the grain) and penalized those pollsters.
In both rating systems, polls that had a long history of going against the grain and being correct, like Ann Seltzer's Iowa poll, were weight very heavily. Seltzer went heavily against the grain 3 elections in a row and was almost completely correct the first 2 times. This year she was off by a massive margin (ultimately costing her her career). Polls that go heavily against the grain but DON'T have a polling history simply aren't weighted heavily in general.
Here's how 538 explains how they factor in bias into their grading:
> Think about this another way. If most polls in a race overestimate the Democratic candidate by 10 points in a given election, but Pollster C's surveys overestimate Republicans by 5, there may be something off about the way Pollster C does its polls even if its accuracy is higher. We wouldn't necessarily expect it to keep outperforming other pollsters in subsequent elections since the direction of polling bias bounces around unpredictably from election to election.
> since 538 was cut by ABC a month or 2 ago. But Nate Silver's pollster rating methodology is pretty much the same as 538's was during his tenure there
Nate took his model with him. After he left, 538 rolled a new model.
> Seltzer went heavily against the grain 3 elections in a row and was almost completely correct the first 2 times. This year she was off by a massive margin (ultimately costing her her career).
> Over a year ago I advised the Register I would not renew when my 2024 contract expired with the latest election poll as I transition to other ventures and opportunities.
> Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course. It’s ironic that it’s just the opposite. I am proud of the work I’ve done for the Register, for the Detroit Free Press, for the Indianapolis Star, for Bloomberg News and for other public and private organizations interested in elections. They were great clients and were happy with my work.
You can of course choose to interpret this if you wish as her conveniently inventing a narrative after-the-fact, but that seems unlikely. The polling industry doesn't work that way, and it's particularly unlikely that the Register would have cut ties with her over a single poll after her impressive track record for nearly forty years.
Since there's no real evidence that's what happened, the most reasonable conclusion is that, as she said, she decided to retire after spending four decades doing the same thing.
The idea is not that the Register cut ties with her, but that her personal safety was at risk and she was getting brutally harassed by millions of people and the POTUS-elect. See my other comment for details.
Yeah, after reading the NYT article[0], I'll amend my earlier statement "since there's no real evidence that's what happened," since that is some pretty strong evidence that something happened (albeit more complicated than simply "her poll was wrong, so she lost her job").
Huh? It’s evidence-based speculation. Of course it’s conceivable that a 68-year-old would have less concerns about putting her career on the line. I’m trying to understand how you think a conversation on HN should operate
Seems like an absurd claim given it was less than 2 weeks out from the election and polls that show a side losing can often have a motivating effect on a base
Truth is that voter behavior changes more radically than pollsters admit from election to election. We can statistically model direction of "error" but we can't statistically model direction of "bias". A grade A pollster like Ann Selzer could have the perfect formula one election but that formula could be a total miss the next
The important thing that forecasters like Silver point out is that we need those pollsters to stick around and use the SAME methodology. Even if gets less useful at predicting the outcome, having a consistent signal with the same methodology can still be of immense statistical importance. And it's extremely important that we don't scare away pollsters from publishing "outlier" results. Doing so only encourages herding which is a growing problem in polling
you're being downvoted but you're actually pretty much right. She got a lot of backlash from the right accusing her poll of being politically motivated. To the point where they pressured institutions to force her out
You’re delusional if you think the media kowtows to him. I’m not even going to post sources, a quick search will show even left leaning sites saying the overwhelming reporting is negative about him.
Selzer announced her retirement November 17th in the op-ed below, which was after the election results were known. All the news I saw about her retirement is dated the same day, so that appears to be the announcement. In the article, she claims to have informed some people privately in 2023 that she would retire after the election.
This November 18 article - from the next day - says the police had warned her that her safety was at risk. It doesn't say when that warning happened, but it seems likely it was not in the 24 hours since announcing her retirement.
It’s more of a systemic failure than a single mistake. If you’re a business that releases one major product version every year or two that accounts for your entire revenue, and you completely blow the product on the last release, there’s a good chance you’re not getting another chance if you’re a small-medium business. Compare her firm to any number of smaller gaming and entertainment studios.
Selzer wasn’t gallup or some other big player that was continuously releasing a wide range of evolving polls, but a once-an-election shop that was multiple standard deviations away from reality in the wrong direction, on the biggest stage in history. Who would contract Selzer ever again?
Presumably anyone who is familiar with her overall body of work and the concept of an outlier.
Pollsters are increasingly herding. Perhaps after this election all unexpected results will be suppressed or adjusted, which seems to be what you're advocating for.
It isn't just human bias that makes this problematic. Their definition of success is that a prediction of 70% should be right about 70/100 times.
Give a model a big reward for "success" under this criteria and it will have a tendency to converge on the long term average. As long as the long term average stays the same, no one will be able to say the estimate was wrong.
If you've ever seen the YT videos from aspiring data scientists learning sequence prediction, you've inevitably seen a variation from people trying to predict stock prices. "Look how low the loss is!" - Sure, but it gets the direction wrong, and just consistently predicts a close value to the previous day's close. But the model is technically correct, just useless.
A 50-50 model for an election might not be giving up and might not be wrong, but it is often useless.
Forecasts will always have some level of uncertainty and if a race is very close a prediction around 50/50 will be the most honest result. A prediction like that does have value, just like a prediction that candidate A is a large favorite, it's informing you about the future state of the world.
I'm not sure what you're expecting forecasters to do when they have a 50/50 result. Put a thumb on the scale in a random direction so that you will think they are providing useful information, even though they'll be less accurate?
Agreed with the points in OP. Though we did have the story that came out shortly after the election that apparently internal polling for the Harris campaign never showed her ahead [1].
Obviously it says in the article that they did eventually fight it to a dead heat, which is in-line with a 50-50 forecast, but I do wonder what, if anything, failed such that this key detail was never reported on publicly until after the election.
As the article notes, public polls started appearing in late September showing Harris ahead, which they never saw internally. Are internal polls just that much better than public ones? Is the media just incentivized to report on the most interesting outcome (a dead heat)?
> As the article notes, public polls started appearing in late September showing Harris ahead, which they never saw internally. Are internal polls just that much better than public ones? Is the media just incentivized to report on the most interesting outcome (a dead heat)?
Intentional bias for motivational purposes is a thing - it doesn't make any logical sense, but people want to vote for the winner.
Don't rule out Harris' internal polling just being bad and the public polling was superior. We're looking at a team whos message was "our opponent is a racist, homophobic, sexist, rapist, felonic avatar of Hitler" and then saw him gain margin which is quite remarkable. What did voters have to see in Harris' team for that to happen? They're clearly doing something wrong. If the team managed that I wouldn't assume their pollsters were a lone beacon of competence.
It seems quite plausible they hired bad pollsters and their internal data was off.
What they did wrong was picking the candidate - she wasn’t popular. It wasn’t the time to try this kind of candidate, but they did it because of their own priorities. It’s OK, they won’t learn.
Democrats need to start nominating famous actors and influencers.
And who is the mythical hollywood figure untainted by the culture war that could pull voters from the other side. The only thing you have to do with any hollywood celebrity to thank their presidential campaign is just post screenshots of their Covid and BLM tweets. And if they don't have stupid Covid and BLM tweets then they will have antisemitic ones.
Michael Bloomberg already tried the "hey, I'm like that guy but without the wrong think" xerox strategy and it didn't go well. Mark Cuban has toyed with it too but keeps getting cold feet, maybe due to lack of confidence or maybe due to analysis that shows being Them-Lite rarely works.
Trump's reality tv show is not a major part of what got him elected but if someone wants to fund and convince Mark Cuban to try a doppelganger campaign, a fool and his money are soon parted. Cuban seems to know better than to try with his own fortune.
Their mistake was much more basic than that. They kept assuming that they could re-run Biden until it was too late for a switch to work.
When they did decide to switch, it had to be Harris, because she was the only one who could legitimately claim to use Biden's election funds, and they didn't have time to raise money for anyone else.
From there, they didn't fix the other mistake - the one Democrats have been making for at least a decade. The Democrats' natural constituency is the working class. They can't win without it. But much of the working class is rather socially conservative. The Democrats have spent the last decade telling working class people that if they, the working class, don't think gay marriage is a good idea, or don't think trans people belong on womens' sports teams and in womens' restrooms, or aren't comfortable with abortion, then they are moral lepers and their entire culture needs to be completely eradicated. Well, the natural result is that at least some of those people are going to flip you the bird and vote for the other guy. Democrats wonder "how could people be so stupid?" I ask, "How could you be so stupid? What did you think was going to happen?"
They didn't "have" to run anybody. They could've, and should've gone with someone else. Everyone knew when Harris was selected that the Democrats had lost. The DNC tried to turn that sentiment around, but they started from a losing position and never recovered. There were alternatives...
The gay and trans thing was a wedge issue pushed by Republicans, because they saw that it worked, and the only way Dems could have appeased the riled up masses would be to straight up start oppressing LGBT people.
I don't hold it against them that they didn't budge on this one. Beating up on a minority for political points is morally repugnant, and the whole appeal of Democrats is that they have some kind of integrity.
The "moral lepers" thing feels to me like a distortion of reality. The actual Democratic politicians generally didn't engage in denigrating their base. Maybe you mean people on the disgusting website.
It was picked as a wedge issue but the Republicans chose very wisely, as the Democrats' incessant pushing of trans issues without any consideration towards the negative impact upon women and girls was unpopular even amongst many traditionally left-leaning voters.
If you mean that the Democrats' policy of supporting transgender rights through legislation was hard to defend (not from a scientific or medical standpoint, but from a populist, political one) and Trump effectively attacked it then yes you're right.
If you mean that the messaging on trans rights alienated swing voters then I think it's probably true, but moderates and swing voters do support general anti-discrimination laws but are wary of policies on sports participation and youth medical care.
If you mean that it was the centerpiece of their identity and everything that were campaigning for, and their pivotal, most important issue, then I don't think that's accurate.
But they did deliberately elevate transgender rights as a moral and civil rights issue. This was a trade off (energize progressives, lose some moderates). Conservatives effectively focused on targeted attacks (bathrooms, sports).
I think that maybe the gamble didn't pay off. The messaging should have probably been about protecting from discrimination, and debate should be focused on attacking republican establishment for being aggressive and hateful.
But really all of this doesn't matter. A better candidate, a white or latino strong charismatic man would have beaten Trump.
Exactly my thoughts even as a complete outsider. Democrats seem to became overconfident in their own internet agenda and forgot that most people at least don’t care and on average just tolerate. Through years it seems that tolerance (which we just learned is the normal mode of operation within diverse groups) turned into mandatory praising and hitler if you don’t.
The inconvenient thing is, average people are -phobic naturally or historically. That’s just the fact of life. Tolerance, the conscious inhibition of natural processes, is a good-enough contract that keeps them away from negativity, but you cannot tell everyone they are hitler if they feel otherwise, as opposed to act against. That’s bullshit and emotional hegemony. Some of the left figures (can’t name, just echoing some clips) even explicitly enjoyed disturbing these phobias. It all seemed like contrasting mockery rather than integration. I understand that most of it was addressed at far right, but you can’t target them with such negativity without affecting the rest as well.
How could you be so stupid? What did you think was going to happen?
I think they only gained more momentum. They would do so with or without Trump winning because they demonstrate levels of illusion far beyond all return points. They are de-platforming, de-employing people, ostracizing their own people who dare to speak any sort of reasonable thought, and they cheer after doing so. Do you really think they can pause and reflect? It almost feels like US needs a third force that isn’t hitler or hitler and cares about just normal society.
Oh, I would love to have a third force. Both sides are moving to extremes, and the bulk of the population is not extreme in either direction, and just want some sanity instead of extremism. A large majority is there for the taking. Will someone wake up and take it?
This pretty much covers it. Harris ran a terrible campaign in 2020 and was never popular. Biden picked her anyway, against his better judgement, because that was what the Left wanted and he was trying to appease them. His disastrous decision to run again for so long left the party with no other options.
Harris tried to correct some of her past mistakes and did better this time around but she should have never been in that position to begin with. Most of the blame should go to Biden and the activists who want to self-immolate the party on the altar of tokenism.
> What did voters have to see in Harris' team for that to happen?
Biden should have pulled out a lot sooner. When? At least a year before the election. But you can easily make arguments for earlier and earlier all the way back to having been too old to run for President in the first place, despite having had a really good term.
Also Harris needs to fire her consultants, who were still trying to play "fair" in an unfair fight and pulled back on the one attack line which was working: that Republicans are "weird".
Things are unlikely to improve until voters start primarying out anyone still trying to do bipartisan equivocation.
His approval rating was in “it would be unprecedented if you won” territory early enough that he should have been out in time to have a real primary. Folks who think switching was any kind of a mistake are going on gut and not numbers. The mistake was that he stayed in as long as he did. Even so, switching was better than not, despite still losing.
And yes, it’s so goddamn frustrating that Clinton-era consultants are still given meetings.
Clinton era consultants were the only ones saying the obvious: “it’s the economy stupid”. On the other hand it was the Obama era consultants who were fixated on the massive loser that is identity politics
Democrats are screwed on economic messaging until they join Republicans in dropping neoliberalism. Was never popular, but both parties could stick to it as long as neither "defected". Now one has.
Even when the economy's good, they're going to be hindered on messaging until they drop that.
Meanwhile a bunch of them are running around like "the problem's that we were too nice to trans people!" lol no, the problem is the latent one that's been hanging there waiting to be triggered by one party or the other since the '80s, the one any expert should have been watching for a shift in—or looking to move first on—this entire time.
> Democrats are screwed on economic messaging until they join Republicans in dropping neoliberalism.
I disagree. What we're witnessing today is that while people are happy with many of the fruits of globalization (cheap Chinese junk, cheap flights, ability to travel anywhere, remote work, etc, etc) our politicians have just about done everything in their power to increase the price of the things that actually matter: housing, healthcare, childcare, and education.
A Democrat party that could actually deliver on these things (rather than exacerbate the problems as they have done) would fare far better electorally. No need to put in place unpopular, destructive tariffs.
> increase the price of the things that actually matter: housing, healthcare, childcare, and education.
i.e. things that have large skilled labor inputs within the US and can't be exported, plus housing which half the population doesn't want to be cheaper. This is just "Baumol cost disease". The major component of healthcare, childcare, and education is the wages of other Americans.
Let's not kid ourselves that the election was a fair comparison of economic policies.
The economy was doing fine apart from a transitory inflation spike especially in eggs. Meanwhile the US is now involved in a pointless trade war with Canada before even getting to the budget; people are going to have an economic disaster that dwarfs the price of eggs, because they got invested in identity politics of the right-wing.
I predict the Trump term will be an economic disaster on the numbers, but this will have no effect on people's stuck belief that Republicans are better than Democrats at economic management.
Yes, but different kinds of weird. There's dem's "be yourself" kinda weird that supports queer people's right to exist, and there's the GOP "passes laws that require genital inspections of children in the bathroom" kinda weird that Tim Walz was calling out.
I don't know why #0 is even one of your examples: the only reason I have to think "trans?" (with the question mark in my thought) is the flag in the background, because without that flag, they look like half of the elderly women I've met over the years.
The fact you show a picture with no name and I had to figure out who they were from the URL slug and multiple google searches because they're not the most famous person with those name fragments was more confusing.
Having finally found a video, not even the Admiral's American accent causes confusion. Only surprise I've got there is that all the trans women I know in person have had voice coaching.
Me, I can see why the label "weird" would apply to Brinton therefore the Democrats would have a hard time using that word to attack Republicans… except, of course, for the fact that Brinton was fired in 2022.
And if you're going to bring up arrests, then you have to wonder about the mind of a man who frames his own arrest warrant mug shot, on charges of election interference, on the wall just outside the Oval Office: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mug_shot_of_Donald_Trump#/medi...
Or maybe the explanation is that everybody behaved "responsibly" but they never got the changes they wanted, and chances for anything different looked more and more bleak. Why do you treat this like a single event? It is not. Lots of prior experiences fed into this.
For example, as bad as this is for us (I'm German, but I lived many years in the US once), for Europe I think it is good what is happening. Now we are forced to move and mature. Crisis are not always bad. The personalities involved this time make it especially hard to look at the whole thing calmly. I admit I have a harder time seeing what the US may get out of this except for the shakeup as a general chance. However, too much is concentrated on the personalities, and, like you did, on blaming everybody. How about Democrats look what they did wrong? I mean, other than reverting to "we didn't think the voters would be so stupid", in which case I have little hope for them to get anything positive out of this.
Democrats’ mistake was putting up a woman in a leadership popularity contest, even after the previous woman lost to the same
> racist, homophobic, sexist, rapist, felonic avatar of Hitler
And a black woman at that, to further reduce Democrats’ chances.
I’m basing this on the anecdotal evidence from many people who I spoke to, who have zero problem telling me a woman cannot be a leader. Including my own non white immigrant grandmother, who grew up without rights.
Many people don’t like to see people of a perceived lower socioeconomic status pass them up. It makes themselves feel inferior.
I'll counter your anecdotal experience with my own. I can count on one hand the number of people I know well who voted against Harris because of her gender or color. And I live in the rural south. The simple truth is that Harris failed to make a compelling case to enough of the nation in enough of the right states to win. The reasons for that failure are going to be complex and varied depending on area. Any attempt to pin it on a single trait or activity is going to be somewhat wrong. This is way too nuanced a topic for "She lost because she was a black woman" to be at all useful.
> I can count on one hand the number of people I know well who voted against Harris because of her gender or color.
You can count on one hand the number of people you know well who are willing to admit they voted against Harris because of her gender or color. This is a critical distinction.
I know a lot of people well enough that they know they don't have to be afraid to admit such things to me. This is not a critical distinction because assuming you know what people think is a great way to completely misunderstand them.
As someone who spent 30 years living in the rural south, I can state this with the confidence of personal experience: some people will not reveal their worst opinions until they are extremely sure in the safety of doing so. In some cases, they'll only reveal those opinions to someone else who has repeatedly shared the same opinions with them.
So unless you're giving big racist or misogynist vibes in how you communicate with them, the racists and misogynists you know "well" may be keeping their opinions to themselves.
The Democratic white male candidate (Biden) was polling so much worse than Harris that he was removed from candidacy.
Harris was part of the Biden administration, she was the 2IC of the Biden administration, she endorsed the policies of the Biden administration and the only official difference between her and Biden was that she was a different race & gender and polled much better than he did. Although unofficially she looked mentally sharper than Biden.
It is difficult to say it was race and gender when the approved candidate of the appropriate race and gender was clearly unelectable. At least Harris was a close call, Biden had lost before the race started. If the Biden administration had been popular and had some achievements to run on then she'd probably have won.
Why is it so hard to accept that hundreds of millions of Americans are racist, sexist, dumb fucks who don't know what's in their own best interests? They elected a crazy, raging megalomaniac over two sensible women. Twice. "How about Democrats look what they did wrong?" Well, maybe the obvious explanation is the best? They ran with women. So the solution is to only field male candidates in the future? You can see why that doesn't work for a "liberal" (< 100% right-wing) political party.
I always get a chuckle out of this. Both parties are full of NPCs who have mostly lost the ability to reason themselves out of anything partisan. This becomes even more apparent when you see each side hurl the same insults at each other, trying to rationalize the state of the world through ad hominem attacks.
It's depressing not to fit into either side, to be honest. I'm both a racist, sexist homophobe, and a libtard, depending on which echo chamber I am engaging in.
No, they ran with "horrible" women. Had they not screwed Tulsi Gabbard over and pretty much pushed her out of the party, I would have loved to have voted for Democrat woman.
Shes weird. There’s something just very insincere about her. I’m not sure if Russia really bought her off or not, but she definitely has some wacky opinions
Suggesting that she was "bought off" by Russia without even the slightest bit of evidence is pure idiocy. Attacking people as being foreign agents for not fully falling in line with the orthodoxy is really what I consider to be "weird" and straight-up un-American.
Sexism was probably a small part of why Democrats lost, but much more important reasons were the economy, alienating their base with their Israel policy, moving to the right on immigration instead of permissive policies which are popular with their base and strategically important for future demographics, and focusing most of their attention on highly divisive culture war issues that effect a vanishingly small portion of the population.
Why is it so hard to accept that Harris was _that bad_ of a candidate? Democrat voters didn't want her in the 2020 primaries (not a single delegate won) and she was basically invisible during the entire Biden campaign until the massive pre-election astroturf campaign that tried to revamp her image.
You don't get it. I agree with you. She is a woman and thus "that bad" of a presidential candidate. But to argue that it somehow was rational for the Americans to reelect Trump over her is to engage in some seriously dangerous mental gymnastics.
Well sure, but if that is the attitude they're not going to bother hiring good pollsters. Pollsters are going to do what, come back and explain that the Devil himself is outpolling your campaign. Now what? They were already catastrophising as hard as they could and the entire English speaking world knows how the US Dems feel about Trump. A majority (although admittedly a slim one) of voters just don't believe them.
Good pollsters would have been a waste of money in that environment and I'm sure the Harris campaign was judiciously watching their budget.
What's surprising to me is how many ex government employees they're able to find who voted for Trump and just didn't think they would get downsized because they're actually doing what they're supposed to be doing. I think it's interesting that Trump consistently gets the benefit of the doubt even in cases where the people he puts in positions of power pretty clearly intended to demoralize people by firing them.
> If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
This quote doesn’t apply just to white men, or even just men.
That is interesting. Presenting public poll results is not really about poll results, but about shaping opinion. The struggle with the media in general is between reporting on the reality that they see vs the reality they want to create. It's an infantile make-belief: "If I put my gloves on, it will start snowing". But, take a large outfit like WP or NYT and it could sort of work that way, too!
But, this also doesn't disagree with the original article that there was a large margin of uncertainty. In that case, a newspaper had a choice of mentioning the uncertainty and emphasizing it, or presenting the 3% in favor or their candidate. I think they went with the latter.
Also, when Bezos blocked WP from endorsing Harris, I always wondered if he had his own better polling results, and he was pretty sure Trump would win, or he just gambled. It's like there are these secret reliable set of poll results to which billionaires get access too, while the public gets the watered down version. Going by the article at hand, perhaps him or his team could better read the results and didn't drink the kool-aid.
Suppose you want to know whether it will rain on your wedding day. Without any forecast, there are two scenarios you need to prepare for: it will rain, or it won't.
A 50-50 forecast doesn't change anything. You still need to prepare for both scenarios. There's a sense in which it's "useless" even though it's a valid forecast.
Forecasts are most useful when they allow you to eliminate a possibility, so you don't need to prepare for it. This means even something like an 80% chance might be of limited use, if you still need to prepare for the 20% case.
(Gambling and investing are different, because you can accept losses and make up for them with repeated bets. You still need to be prepared for losses, but that's a matter of not betting too much compared to your bankroll.)
Even if the forecasters don't do anything wrong, for many people, presidential election forecasts are of limited use. Either they don't have anything they need to do to prepare, or they still have to prepare for either candidate to win.
50-50 forecasts can be massive depending on your priors. If someone (who I trusted) told me there was a 50-50 chance I would get shot tomorrow if I went outside, you couldn’t pay me enough to go leave the house.
Absolutely! It didn't work that way for recent presidential elections, though. The prior odds weren't always 50:50, but they were well within the range of "both sides could win" and didn't go outside that.
In the case of an election, a 50:50 forecast is a clear reminder to the wise of the importance of voting, no matter how certain the outcome might seem from the necessarily limited perspective of your acquaintances and your consumption of possibly (or likely) biased news media.
If a modern US election went far outside that that would just mean some fool was burning a huge amount of money and probably to no purpose as it would cause a response from donors on the other side who would like an outcome but also aren't going to throw money away.
You have a choice to go out or not but the example of the wedding is a given obligation, so the apples-apples comparison would be "if you had to go outside, would a 50-50 chance of being shot change anything"
This is an interesting hypothetical, and I hope people with better understanding of statistics would weigh in.
But lets change the example a bit:
- There's a 10% chance of getting shot on any day you leave the house
- You are able to get 5 days of food any time you leave the house
- There's a 100% chance of starving if you go 8 days without leaving your house
How long can you avoid getting shot or starving?
Presumably if you don't want to go hungry at all, you have to leave the house every 5 days to get more food. After 50 days, the odds of you having been shot are pretty darn high.
I guess I was trying to get the parent comment to reconsider their position on 50/50 being useful because they would never leave the house. But I guess it's still "more" useful than 90/10 even, in their example, the chance during one day isn't reflective of long term odds.
But an election (particularly presidential) is only once every 4 years. And it's not "50/50" or "90/10" every election - it's typically a different match up of options, and a slightly different mix of percentages.
But fair criticism, I didn't successfully make a good point with my attempt.
Suppose it rains on 50% of days. One forecaster gives a 50% chance of rain every day. Another gives a 90% chance of rain/not rain and is "wrong" 10% of of time. Both stations are giving you accurate information from a probability perspective (when station A says a 50% chance, you know there's a 50% chance of rain tomorrow, when station B says 90%, you know there's a 90% chance of rain tomorrow) but the 50% chance station is less useful as the number is lower. They have effectively given up in the same way pollsters have given up.
I don't think so, though I often find someone has thought of the same thing I have and given it a name. The root of the issue is a matter of language. Events don't have probabilities. You don't predict a 50% chance of rain, you predict rain with a 50% certainty. (There are a lot of internet brain teasers that exploit this subtle ideological difference.) The 50% is talking about how often you're correct, not how likely the rain is to happen. Probabilities don't really exist; it either rains or it doesn't.
Weddings are unusually locked in dates. Canceling a hotel a few days out is generally free and 50% odds of rain can easily be high enough to postpone a weekend trip. 10% odds however may be worth the gamble even if both possibilities exist.
With elections you need to take both a short term and long term perspective. True 50/50 odds mean doubling down at the last minute is likely more valuable vs saving that money for the next election. I think the pollsters got things wildly wrong with that estimate because their underlying assumptions where off, but that’s a different issue.
The utility of consulting weather forecasts prior to events like weddings lies in the non-trivial possibility that it will give you a clear indication of what will happen.
The problem is that there are two 50-50 odds definitions.
First one, is where you have no information about the event what so ever.
Second is where you have information, and it turns out that the outcome is still 50-50.
While the use of that information in planning (pricing things, betting, investing) is identical, they fundamentally represent 2 different sets of information.
There's a pretty clear test of whether a pollster is about reporting or influencing: the partisanship of their errors. Neutral pollsters have differences with the results randomly distributed across parties. Propagandists have errors that favor their patrons. This essay leans on the magnitude of the errors, but that's less probative than their distribution.
Does any poll aggregator order by randomness of polling error?
This mixes up accuracy with precision and 538 had written at length about this.
There's a big difference between pollster bias correction vs rating.
There are many pollsters that are pretty consistently +2D/R but are reliably off from the final result in that direction. These polls are actually extremely valuable once you make the correction in your model. Meanwhile, polls that can be off from the final result by a large amount but average out to about correct should not be trusted. This is a yellow flag for herding
A pollster can have an A+ rating while having a very consistent bias in one direction or another. The rating is meant to capture consistency/honesty of methodology more than result
This doesn't account for poll bias that biases both parties, of course. Not all polling is designed to wage parties against each other: some is designed to pit parties against populace.
Prediction markets are usually implemented as binary options. Like vanilla options, their price depends not just on the most likely outcome, but the whole distribution. When uncertainty increases (imagine squishing a mound of clay), you end up pushing lots of probability mass (clay) to the other side of the bet and the expectation of the payoff (used to make a price) tends towards 1/2.
It's the same as bookies, right? They are often seen as predicting the odds of an event happening, but that's actually the odds they estimate so that the bets are roughly divided 50/50, to limit their exposure, which is pretty different and depends on their market. English bookies will always overrate the chance of England winning at football, because English people will disproportionately place a bet for their team to win.
I don't think it's that simple - if other people find out English bookies overrate England, then they make a profit by betting against. I'm not saying every market is perfectly efficient but it would be surprising if a major inefficiency lasted for a while. And if "enough" bets are placed the set odds will always be an unbiased estimate of the true odds.
Sports bookies have a significant informational advantage over the everyday gambler; they index massive amounts of historical data and have access to live data which is lower-latency than radio or television broadcasts. That helps make the market inefficient.
> When uncertainty increases (imagine squishing a mound of clay), you end up pushing lots of probability mass (clay) to the other side of the bet and the expectation of the payoff (used to make a price) tends towards 1/2.
This doesn't make any sense. If you think the chances of someone of getting elected is very high (eg. Putin getting re-elected), nobody will be buying shares in him losing. True, the shares of "putin loses" is dirt cheap, but that doesn't mean much if he has a high chance of getting elected.
It matters a lot what the price is of "putin loses." If Putin does in fact lose 5% of the time, but the odds are 3%, you should bet on it. It may feel silly to do that in this instance but consider what happens if you regularly bet in prediction markets. Always betting on the "putin wins" outcome loses money in the long run.
Lets says I have a coin. I have no data on it. I do not know if it will come up heads or tails or if it is a fair coin.
I throw the coin N number of times and determine the coin is fair. I still do not know which side the coin will come up.
But this isn't the same as having no data on the coin. I've determined the coin is fair by gathering data, which otherwise I would not know. Often this added piece of information is crucial to making good decisions and not at all equivalent to the first case.
For instance, I might want to bet you that the next 10 throws in a row will all be heads. If you know the coin is fair, this is a good bet - but without data on the coin, it could be a trap.
You state the case of no knowledge vs knowing 50/50 probability are equivalent, but they are clearly not.
If you have no data but one side is actually heavily favored to win, you cannot determine how much you should bet on that probability even though there is an opportunity to make good sized bets. If neither side is favored to win, then you can still make good sized bets if the payout is not 1:1.
The Kelly Criterion formulates all this - the probability of win/loss does in fact matter, and if you don't "know" that, you cannot make a good bet. Knowing it is 50/50, you can bet on it.
And this is exactly why you should not rely on AI without fundamental understanding.
That would only be true if the payout odds are even. And in my comment I explicitly say not 1:1 payout. Go ahead and ask the AI for clarification, I’m sure it can explain it to you. On Wikipedia, the factor is “b” - ie 2:1 payout and you would bet on a 50/50 event.
The intuition should be incredibly obvious here. I have a fair coin and will pay you 200 dollars for heads and take 1 dollar for tails. You would flip that coin as many times as I let you.
Even in your reply to this - ChatGPT is telling you in one situation you should not bet because the expected gain is nothing, and the other you don't know what to do - which is not equivalent. But the edge it is talking about is the expected gain over the probability of the event with the payout odds. If there is no edge, you won't bet. But you can have an edge with 50/50 odds, and if so you would bet.
Fails to see any difference other than "N/A" and "unpredictable":
In the 50/50 case, the Kelly Criterion does provide an answer: don’t bet, because there’s no edge and no expected growth.
In the unknown probabilities case, you can’t apply the formula at all, and you don’t have enough information to make an informed decision. You're essentially in the dark about how much to bet, and thus you cannot use the Kelly Criterion.
I think the lack of signal from the electorate does represent an entropic state and is likely because available information channels are saturated with noise.
A close race, creates more excitement and more cash for the media.
If you get on a horses and your horse keep losing and losing ground,
watching the race becomes quite boring.
If the horses are neck on neck you will be captivated watching it
till the very end.
The media has a strong incentive to sell the elections as close to
keep more people seeing their ads and buying subscriptions.
The odds on Polymarket (and other betting markets) started diverging at the start of October; by the end of the month, the odds were 65/35 in favour of Trump.
At the time, many commentators were arguing that this was obvious market manipulation. It turned out that the trader who had supposedly manipulated the market had in fact commissioned private polls using an alternative methodology - rather than asking people how they would vote, it asked how they expected their neighbours to vote.
Interesting. If you think about it, that's how the stock market works. It's not how much you think a stock is worth; it's really how much you think everyone else thinks the stock is worth.
That is similar with stocks. I'd say the difference is that PolyMarket has an end date where everything gets resolved one way or another. Stocks can go on forever.
Oh you're right, it is basically the same, the undervalued stock is the one to buy. I guess I was thinking about another difference which is that the value of stocks seems more vibes-based and a really stupid product (from the investor's perspective) can sometimes become popular. In prediction markets the outcome is more concrete.
No, it was fairly well known a decade or more ago as a very good way to remove bias for how low-effort it is. We were using a variation of it at work back then for an unrelated subject.
How much it's used in political polling I can't say.
I always get annoyed when people look at election outcomes and say “the polls were wrong” when the most likely outcome didn’t happen. It’d be like saying there’s a 5/6 chance that a 6-sided dice will not roll a 4, rolling a 4, and then concluding that the initial proposed probability was wrong.
That's not how polls work though. A poll shows how a sample of people say they'll vote. An ideal poll would have the same proportions as the final popular vote count.
The problem is using statistical models at all for predicting the probability of one time events. (elections are every 4 years, but those future models will be different).
You can't validate such a model, and it's not useful since any upset victory was "accounted for" simply because its possibility was named.
It is a rational behavior to question a prediction if an event that was deemed to have low probability actually happened, I don’t like the implication that it is stupid to do so.
In fact, after thorough investigation, most polling agencies did identify significant factors that let to bias, and almost all major pollsters have adapted their methods in later elections as a result: education weighting, compensating for nonresponse bias, diversified polling channels beyond phone calls (online surveys, text messages, in-app polling), likely-voter modeling…
I don’t think any professional pollster will tell you that the prediction you mentioned was reasonably accurate in retrospect, regardless of affiliation.
I don’t attribute malice or incompetence, it’s clear that the game changed suddenly and new confounding factors became significant. People that would previously vote together diverged significantly, lots of politically inactive people became involved, people were afraid to be honest, and people that were harder to reach were voting much differently to those that were more accessible to pollsters. That will really mess with any sampling strategy that proved reliable for many years before.
If someone predicts something will happen with a 90% probability, then they should be wrong roughly 10% of the time. We can't determine that from a single event, but we could look at 10 events predicted by the same model. In the case of election forecasts, we would expect 1/10 elections predicted at 90% probability to have the wrong estimate. So we would expect the average person to see it at least once, and probably twice, in their lifetime.
There is the statisticians aphorism often attributed to George Box that "All models are wrong but some are useful". This goes against the core argument of this essay that pretty much says that "The models were mostly right, but not useful" which not a useful argument itself, even if its right
I think polling these days is all but useless just because a very small proportion of people actually respond to pollsters and it's next to impossible to statistically account for "what would the other 80% say if they did't tell the pollster to fuck off". There's no way to build a "representative sample" to account for that. People are way more likely to respond to a "friendly" pollster and if they don't know whether pollster is "friendly" (works for the organisation aligned with their party), they assume they are from the other camp. It's a mess.
I don't know about the framing of "giving up." But I think anyone who's been following election models since the original 538 in 2008 has probably gotten the feeling that they have less alpha in them than they did back then. I think there's some obvious reasons for this that the forecasters would probably agree with.
The biggest one seems to be a case of Goodhart's Law, leading to herding. Pollsters care a lot now about what their rating is in forecasting models, so they're reluctant to publish outlier results, those outlier results are very valuable for the models but are likely to get a pollster punished in the ratings next cycle.
Lots of changes to polling methods have been made due to polls underestimating Trump. Polls have become like mini models unto themselves. Due to their inability to poll a representative slice of the population they try to correct by adjusting their results to compensate for the difference between who they've polled and the likely makeup of the electorate. This makes sense in theory, but of course introduces a whole bunch of new variables that need to be tuned correctly.
On top of all this is the fact that the process is very high stakes and emotional with pollsters and modellers alike bringing their own political biases and only being able to resist pressure from political factions so much.
The analogy I kept coming back to watching election models during this last cycle was that it looked like an ML model that didn't have the data it needed to make good predictions and so was making the safest prediction it could make given what it did have. Basically getting stuck in this local minima at 50-50 that was least likely to be off by a lot.
Even if polling had been exactly right, you wouldn't have been that confident in the outcome.
In my unsophisticated toy model, plugging in the exact actual result as the polling average (but not telling it how the actual vote went) spits out 66% R-34% D. Clearly one side favored, but hardly a guarantee. Because the result was close, and even highly accurate data in a close result yields an uncertain forecast.
Remember that asteroid a month ago? We knew what its position would be seven years in the future with a precision of a few hours. But because the position was very close to an impact, even that high precision was not enough to rule out an impact.
> Due to their inability to poll a representative slice of the population they try to correct by adjusting their results to compensate for the difference between who they've polled and the likely makeup of the electorate.
This is where polling becomes race science.
> This makes sense in theory
It does not make sense in theory. It is a necessity for the profession, but all justifications for it are specious. Polls only get it right when everybody is getting it right. What they offer is false precision and justification for the current narratives.
It's similar to AI in that way. It's also similar to the mythical prediction markets that polls have been compared to lately, the "mythical" here meaning with no insiders involved. On issues where there are no real insiders, like close elections, the prediction markets are simply a lagging indicator of what pundits said in the paper this morning. That goofy Iowa poll swung them so hard that I thought Seltzer should have been investigated for whatever the prediction market equivalent to securities fraud is.
It might be more accurate in light of the OP to say that polls get it right when everybody is getting it right, and when everybody isn't sure what's going to happen, polling accuracy is around 50/50.
The best book to read about polling is The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading by Ian Rowland. It also tells you how to write defenses like this, which are part of the con.
-----
edit:
Section headings from "The Win-Win Game" from TFFBoCR, which teaches 10+1 ways how to make failures seem like successes:
> 1. Persist, wonder and let it linger.
> (Phase A: The psychic persists with the official statement and tries to encourage at least partial agreement. B: she acts puzzled, and invites the client to share the blame for the 'discrepancy.' C: she leaves the discrepancy unresolved, in case the client finds a match later on.)
> 2. I am right, but you have forgotten.
> 3. I am right but you do not know.
> 4. I am right but nobody knows.
> 5. I am right, but it's embarrassing.
> 6. I am wrong now, but I will be right soon.
> 7. I am wrong, but it doesn't matter.
> 8. I am wrong in fact, but right emotionally.
> 9. I am wrong in fact, but right within [the] system.
> 10. Wrong small print, right headline.
> [+1]. Accept, apologise, and move on.
> (In this way the psychic cuts her losses and moves on. She leaves the problem behind, where it will be quickly forgotten, and at the same time she comes across as extremely honest.)
Very much worth reading for entrepreneurs looking for investment or any other confidence men. Rowland even tried to brand it a few years ago in Cold Reading For Business as the "CRFB" system.
okay, now change "election prediction models" to "Climate models" and see if you feel like downvoting me merely for pointing out the (slight?) hypocrisy in "excusing" every other model we humans use for being "inaccurate" or "not having the full details" or the "whole slice of"...
when none of the models tend to agree... and the IPCC literature published however often they do it is hung upon the framework of models.
Climate modeling is way messier than the media portrays, yet even optimistic models show drastic change.
I'm not in the catastrophy camp, but it's worth preparing for climate change regardless of origin. It's good for humanity to be resilient to a hostile planet.
Yeah my view is a little trite but... "we cleaned the air and closed the ozone hole and reduced our dependency on oil from a small number of OPEC countries all for nothing?".
I support the climate change mitigation and adaptation moves that would be nice anyway (many of the most important ones) and would prefer alternatives to things like turning all the arable land into pinus radiata plantations to generate ETS credits or voluntarily paying "climate fines" to shadowy international organisations if we don't hit certain "targets".
There are massive costs of not doing those things – and, as far as I can tell, those costs are greater. Coal is expensive and irradiates the atmosphere. Oil drilling causes spills, fracking causes earthquakes, and oil dependency has been a major driver of war for the past century.
> Coal is expensive and irradiates the atmosphere. Oil drilling causes spills, fracking causes earthquakes, and oil dependency has been a major driver of war for the past century.
Fracking lowers emissions. As far as I've been able to tell, earthquakes aren't a major problem with it.
This is where the activists end up showing their true colors, and why many people have grown to distrust them over time. On the one hand, they claim Global Warming is going to bring us to the brink of human extinction unless we act rapidly. On the other, they're trying to stop things that will lower emissions if it doesn't follow their preferred course of action.
How? Burning fuel from fracking emits CO₂ into the atmosphere, just like any other fossil fuel. On top of that unburned methane is often released into the atmosphere, which is much more potent than CO₂ is a greenhouse gas.
> On the one hand, they claim Global Warming is going to bring us to the brink of human extinction unless we act rapidly.
Extinction is exaggerated (I'm not even sure who exactly claims that?), but we are indeed making our environment tougher and tougher to live in. There are already places that have become too hot to live in for parts of the year, to name just one thing.
And I'm not sure how fracking lowers emissions? It results in large quantities of methane being emitted: methane is a very potent greenhouse gas (which eventually decays to carbon dioxide, also a greenhouse gas albeit a less potent one). Seems like fracking increases emissions, to me – not that I'm an expert.
Jevons Paradox tells us that embracing fracking to reduce coal emissions isn't enough, because any gains in lowering emissions will be offset by people burning more oil. There's a lot of underserved demand for energy, so gradual increases in efficiency (or, in this case, per-watt emissions) do not actually reduce total consumption.
Unless your plan to reduce emissions by embracing fracking comes with laws to restrict consumption - like, the kind of laws you'd have the villain in an Ayn Rand novel pass - then all you will do is increase emissions.
Of course, deliberately enforcing energy poverty is a bad idea and most[0] environmentalists aren't in favor of it. The reason why activists push renewables so hard is because the externalities on those are way better. i.e. pollution will not 'catch up' on solar and wind nearly as quickly, if at all, because solar panels don't emit anything when you're harvesting energy with them.
Also, solar is really, really cheap. It's pretty hard to argue against an energy source that gives you energy too cheap to meter, even if it's only during the day.
[0] i.e. the ones that aren't outright enviro-fascists. Though, if you were an enviro-fascist, your best bet would be to just do nothing and embrace fossil fuel accelerationism.
Hyperaccurate voter profiling and predictions is a tool of oppression in democracy.
It highlights precise means for the rich to use targeted propaganda to maximum effect for wedge issues and electioneering to serve their ends, both in forming the winning coalition, and it neutering the opposition.
I’m gonna take this opportunity to clarify a comment I wrote earlier this week: Sure, polling may be difficult to interpret when uncertainty is high and margins are small, but there are many elections every year that are easily predictable blowouts, but which are often not portrayed that way depending on your information diet.
Like, I can’t count the number of times someone will show me an awesome political ad for an awesome person who’s going up against an awful politician I hate, and there’ll be all this hope and the person showing me the ad will be thinking this person has a chance of winning. And then I’ll look at the polling and realize they’re down by 20 points in a state Trump carried by 30 and the error bars are only 3 points in each direction.
So even if polling close races can get messy, polling overall provides an extremely powerful antidote to a lot of propaganda and echo-chamber thinking.
Nate Silver also had an article saying that the most likely scenario would be a blowout. There was a 25% chance that Trump would win all 7 battleground state, a 15% chance Harris would win all 7. No other permutation of the 7 states was anywhere close.
True, but the word "blowout" in this case is just a crazy side-effect of our weird electoral college system.
Everyone knows that in all the swing states (except Arizona), the final vote margin was just a few percent, and that was well within the MOE for all the "50-50" polling in each of those states.
No one seriously believes that any President has had a blowout election since maybe Obama in 2008 or Bush in 2004, but the media sure loves the word "blowout".
So basically, if you ignore how the entire system works then it wasn't a blowout lol. I'm guessing the media was taking into account that we indeed use an electoral college system so that is all that matters.
I think "blowout" to some (most? vast majority?) without more context implies that the voting citizens strongly preferred a candidate. So people pushback against the clickbait word being used to drive engagement.
The only score that matters is the one used to call the game, because that’s the only score anyone is trying to win. We simply don’t know what would have happened under a different set of rules.
The “ground game” is extremely expensive: https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4934604-kamala-harris-g.... Especially for republicans, whose voters are spread out over rural areas. In post-election interviews, Trump campaign strategists revealed that to save money they largely eschewed a traditional ground game in favor of target outreach to low propensity voters. Even then, Trump received a lot of criticism on the right for doing a handful of rallies in California and New York.
As it is, both campaigns focused most of their resources on the seven swing states, and Trump swept all of them. Had the election been close you would’ve expected by sheer chance each candidate to get some of the swing states, but that didn’t happen.
Certainaly there are no rules for what is a blowout or a mandate... But we can look back and see Reagan won all but one state, and say yeah, that was a blow out, and Reagan had a mandate.
IMHO, if you don't win in any of your opponent's stronghold states, it's not much of a blowout. Yes, it was a win and any win gets you the whole four years, so it doesn't really matter what you want to call it, but it's yet another gaslighting IMHO.
To be clear, I don’t think it was a blowout or a landslide or anything like that. I’m just saying it’s not as close as the PV would make it seem. Harris’s campaign said their internal polling never showed her ahead, and the result was consistent with that.
In particular, he wiped out two decades of immigration-driven leftward shift in the electorate, which was how Biden was able to win traditionally red states like Arizona and Georgia. Trump won Nevada, which is now under 45% white, by more than Bush did in 2000, when it was 65% white. He lost New Jersey by less than six points, doing better now that the state is only 55% white than Bush did in 2004 when it was 70% white. He won Texas by a similar margin to Bush in 88 and Florida by more than Reagan did in 1980.
When 0.1% of the total voters can swing the vote from being 60 for red to being 60 for blue, polling is obviously going to be pretty tricky to predict.
no, he means a blowout is entirely dependent on the few people that are in the states that count. Therefore your MoE is higher because your population size is significantly lower.
You can pretty much ignore every non-swing state and the result of polls would be the same.
How the specific electoral system works is irrelevant. In our case, our electoral system is designed to make most voters' votes not actually matter, so I really don't care about it one bit when talking about who had more or less support in the country as a whole. Trump only got 1.5% more votes than Harris did. That's not a blowout.
Even if you insist on going by electoral votes, 58% to 42% isn't a blowout either.
Trump won the popular vote by 1.5%. That's the 8th closest election in all of US history.
Maybe he meant an EC blowout. But that's easier to predict. Most polling had almost all the swing states as extremely close. The outcome was likely to swing in the same direction across all swing states so an EC blowout is likely
Why does it matter? If the system was different the whole campaign would have changed. Only the votes that matter actually matter. The rest is just speculation and you really have no idea what would happen to the popular vote if that’s what was important. He won!
Also the idea that people's votes don't count because they are in a "safe seat" is bananas. Of course it counts: they count it, and it goes towards the final result. It is like saying that the only purchase to really bankrupt you is the last one you made. No, of course not, it is the aggregate. The straw did not actually break the camel's back, and seven states do not decide the election. 271 electoral votes do! All 271+ of them.
I think it's a bit more complicated than you make it sound. I live in California, so of course all my state's electoral votes went to Harris. I could have not bothered to vote, but the problem is that if everyone like me were to think the same way, those electoral votes could go to someone else.
So yes, in a literal, technical sense, my vote counted. But in reality, my vote had little to do with the outcome, whereas the votes of someone in Pennsylvania or Arizona had everything to do with the outcome. Those seven states absolutely did decide the election.
I do think that tallying the overall popular vote is a useful metric, even if the election's outcome doesn't depend on it, so I guess in that sense my vote "counted" as well.
So how many seats is a vote worth in Iowa vs California? Is it the same?
If Elections would be done via tokens and you had 10 and another person gets 60 to vote, would you say that is unfair?
Using the popular vote in a system where the popular vote means nothing seems a bit odd. Why not use the candidate's hand sizes instead? It's just as arbitrary.
It's helpful in the same way opinion or approval polls are helpful.
It also shows potential for how things could've otherwise gone.
If you wanna use the electoral college, be my guest. But know that making that data is useful is MUCH more difficult. In theory a candidate could win every single state by 0.01% and lose a state by 99%. They would win in a blowout in the EC but in the popular vote they actually lost. And you would get a highly skewed and unhelpful representation of the actual election results
The popular vote result in the US is neither an opinion poll or approval poll. If it was, it would have been helpful, but it's not, because the popular vote would be very different if US election outcomes were determined by the popular vote as opposed to the current system.
> If you wanna use the electoral college, be my guest.
It's part of the constitution of the US, not my personal preference.
No, that's not just as arbitrary. Please don't make bad-faith arguments.
The popular vote count is a measure of the level of support for the candidate.
The electoral vote count is, unfortunately, how we determine who gets the office, and that's literally it. It just tells us who did better at influencing voters in a handful of states that actually matter in the idiotic electoral college system, putting the result of the election into the hands of a small minority of voters. That says nothing about the overall support a candidate has.
In the end, Trump had the support of 1.5% more actual voters than Harris did. It wasn't a blowout, he has no mandate. And we really have no idea what would have happened if our system was based on the popular vote. If candidates had to campaign in every state, to get every voter out that they can to support them, the final results would probably not look the same as what we go.
>putting the result of the election into the hands of a small minority of voters
Are you referring to the final 538 electors who actually make the final vote? Most of them are bound to vote based on who their state voted for. Aside from some rare exceptions (like that WA elector that voted for Chief Spotted Eagle in 2016 as some sort of weird protest).
Or are you trying to claim that only swing voters in swing states are responsible for the outcome of the election? Because that's a fallacy I've seen a lot of people make recently that I'm just going to start calling "the tiebreaker fallacy". If you have a panel of 101 voters where 50 people vote one way, 50 vote the other way, and one person is the tiebreaker, you can not make the claim that only the tiebreaker's vote counts. All 101 voters were part of the process. At any time, any of the other 100 voters could have changed their votes and the outcome would have changed.
> At any time, any of the other 100 voters could have changed their votes and the outcome would have changed.
This is where your analogy is getting tripped up. The EV outcome for the vast majority of states is certain. California's EVs were never going to go to Trump in any possible reality. Louisiana's EVs were never going to go for Harris. These states cannot "change their votes."
If the makeup of the 50-50 split voters in your scenario is fixed and known with certainty ahead of the election, then it really is the case that only that 101st vote matters and the other 100 people have to live with that 1 person's vote.
This is how the EC works. The EV outcomes for most states are fixed and known ahead of time. The only votes that matter for the presidential election are those in the ~7 or so states that we call "swing states," because the outcome of the election in the other ~43 states is known with certainty ahead of time.
Note: I'm using "fixed" here to mean "unchangeable," not something like "rigged".
>The EV outcome for the vast majority of states is known ahead of time.
There's a world of difference between being predicatively partisan and not being able to vote at all.
>only that 101st vote matters and the other 100 people have to live with that 1 person's vote
No, its actually that 50 people have to live with 51 people's votes. That one person is not voting alone. Your post is the perfect example of the tiebreaker fallacy.
This seems like a distinction without a difference. It is still the case that the only people influencing the election outcome are the voters in the swing states. The outcome will always be "40% + swing-states" versus "40% + other-swing-states." If you're in one of those 40%s, your vote does not matter to the result, because your state's result is already determined. This is unlike your analogy, which supposes that no votes are fixed.
> California's EVs were never going to go to Trump in any possible reality.
California was reliably Republican in the 80s, so no, you can't really say that for certain.
All states shifted to the right in this election. Illinois for example has been reliably Democrat, but if it shifts as much in the next election as it did in this past one, it would become a swing state.
> The popular vote count is a measure of the level of support for the candidate.
This would only be true if the popular vote result would be entirely unchanged if the election system was changed to be based on popular vote. And the popular vote would almost definitely have been different if the election results were based on popular vote, so it's then not a measure of the level of support for the candidate.
> The electoral vote count is, unfortunately, how we determine who gets the office
Why is it unfortunate?
> That says nothing about the overall support a candidate has.
Can you cite any evidence that the popular vote is a better indication of the candidate's popular support than the electoral college?
> In the end, Trump had the support of 1.5% more actual voters than Harris did.
Again this would only be true if the popular vote would be unaffected if the election was based on popular vote, which is a false assumption.
> he has no mandate.
Please cite.
> And we really have no idea what would have happened if our system was based on the popular vote.
This seems to contradict everything else you wrote as your reasoning is only valid if you work under the assumption that the popular vote would not have changed at all if the system was based on the popular vote.
As I recall none of the big polls the mainstream media was pushing projected Trump to win. They even refused to call the election until the wee hours of the morning, when the results were pretty clear. Just like in 2016, the polls were intended to deceive people into thinking there was no hope for an alternative candidate.
Major decisions desks (AP, Edison, and Fox News; plus a recent newcomer called DDHQ) have made about 3 incorrect calls in their entire history (they were house races, not senate or presidential calls). An incorrect call is a HUGE deal and they have an extremely high bar for certainty. Even for Obama, who's wins were basically a landslide compared to the past 3 elections, calls weren't made until around midnight. Historically it's even common for presidential candidates to concede even before decision desks have made an official call (another norm Trump has challenged).
Anyways Decision Desks are a very different topic than pollsters and have no overlap.
I don't know what "mainstream media" you were consuming but as a bettor, I definitely didn't get the sense that the race was locked in. All major polls had Biden trailing Trump. Harris got a big boost but that only pushed her to being neck and neck with Trump. We can check the Wayback Machine to verify your claim
The Democrat-leaning media is obviously the culprit I'm talking about, and they do it to try to win. While there is some Republican-leaning media, approximately 80% of the media leans toward Democrats.
> Trump won the popular vote by 1.5%. That's the 8th closest election in all of US history.
You're kind of glossing over the fact that a Republican hasn't won the popular vote since 1988 and the prevailing wisdom was that the EC was the _only_ thing giving Republican candidates a fighting chance in presidential elections (so much so that every election we hear much wailing and gnashing of teeth that the EC system should replaced by popular vote, and in fact there is an "electoral vote compact" that several states have entered into that pledges to give all electoral votes to the popular vote winner as a way to nullify the EC). For Trump, with his MANY issues, to win the _popular vote_ by 1.5% is monumental, and I guarantee you not a single model predicted that in any way whatsoever.
You put a Nikki Haley up there and she would've won the popular vote by 5-10%, easily. Which would be astounding numbers for a Republican candidate in this day and age.
It is insufficient to make a prediction like 50-50 in a US election unless you also can explain turnout. Anyone can throw out numbers like "51-49" or "55-45" but how did you get to those numbers? How are different demographics voting? How is there turnout changing? I've seen people laud their own accuracy in 2020 while being off by about 30 million in predicted turnout.
The way different demographics vote in US elections doesn't change much from election to election. What does change is turnout and turnout is a function of many things: enthusiasm for the candidate, voter suppression, ease of access to voting and so on.
2020 was unprecedented because of the pandemic. We greatly expanded early voting and mail-in ballots, which greatly increased participation.
A perfect example of this is Arizona. In 2020, Native Americans were crucial to flipping the state to Biden. Arizona state lawmakers responded to this by essentially punishing them and making it way more difficult to vote. Voter ID requirements, birth certificates and even having a physical address are all impediments to people who were born on and/or reside on reservations. There were fewer voting places and voting options. A rural voting place might randomly close early too after being an hours long drive.
Some looked at this and said Native Americans in Arizona swung hard to Trump. No, they were simply largely prevented from voting such that the only Native Americans who could reliably vote were more affluent and thus more likely to be Trump voters.
My point is: what polling model captured this prior to the 2024 election? I guarantee you it's none.
What really happened in 2024 was:
1. Biden voters swung to the couch in the millions;
2. Trump basically didn't lose white women, despite the abortion issue; and
3. Trump activated a previously low-propensity voter demographic: angry, young, terminally online white males, basically the Andrew Tate and 4chan crowd.
Any model has a difficulty with low-propensity demographics. Did any model capture this? I think it only started to become apparent with early voting exit polls.
I don't think the 2024 polls were particularly accurate. I do think they threw their hands up and simply converged to 50-50. Small differences in turnout predictions for different demographics can massively impact the result.
I think it's fascinating that the colorized maps of each voting precinct are always almost perfect population maps where high-population centers are blue and low-population areas are red.
My pet conspiracy theory is that the monetary influence in US politics is a deciding factor in keeping it close to 50/50 as this allows for the biggest footballification of politics and thus allows politicans/donors to extract the most from people who vote against their interest just to see the other side lose.
The only thing I am unsure about is whether this needs coordination (a conspiracy) or is just a systemic dynamic that emerges from the rules of the system.
The whole question of using probability here is philosophically fraught. If you are saying "this has a probability of 50%" then you're saying "this will happen half of the time if you repeat the test". I don't think Harris would win 5 times if you ran that election 10 more times. From that regard, the 50% guess is quite inaccurate, and does just seem to be the pollsters "giving up" in the sense that they're pretty clueless and so ended up going with an even split. This is speculation on my part, but I think that election was decided in Trump's favor pretty decisively long before the publishing date of the last 50/50 poll.
Edit: to elucidate, suppose it rains on 50% of days. One forecaster gives a 50% chance of rain every day. Another gives a 90% chance of rain/not rain and is "wrong" 10% of of time. Both stations are giving you accurate information from a probability perspective (when station A says a 50% chance, you know there's a 50% chance of rain tomorrow, when station B says 90%, you know there's a 90% chance of rain tomorrow) but the 50% chance station is less useful as the number is lower. They have effectively given up in the same way pollsters have given up; they're saying there is no information that could give them a higher probability. The reason a single event can have many different probabilities is because probability is about repeated events. Both stations are predictions accurately reflect the distribution of rain/not rain days.
>Trump and Harris are both a normal polling error away from a blowout
If this is the conclusion from all the data gathering and analysis then what's even the point? If the conclusion is: it could be a blowout either way, we have no idea. Seems like a waste of a lot of time and resources, for what gain exactly?
It seems to be a matter of indifference to many that a persistent societal division of fifty-fifty is symptomatic of a profound societal schism. This is because such a division, in any configuration, maximizes the number of those who are discontented. As it is written, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." To my mind, this matter is of far greater significance than any secondary, tangible processes that may be occurring in consequence.
Furthermore, the mechanisms that ensure the mathematical expectation of electoral outcomes to hover around a fifty-fifty split — a phenomenon observable in many nations — are fundamentally economic in nature. Both factions commit resources to the electoral contest to secure a mere one percent advantage, as such is the foundational principle of democracy: a majority of fifty-one percent prevails.
Thus, economic factors — for an electoral campaign is, in essence, a contest of capital—having, in effect, subverted the very system of democratic elections, inevitably lead to the decay of nations that religiously adhere to the mathematics of a single percentage point as the sole criterion of legitimacy. In optimizing for democratic representation, social stability and equilibrium have been forfeited.
It is akin to the psychological paradox: "I am correct, and all acknowledge it, yet why do I not experience contentment?" It is because one has optimized for correctness — or in the context of elections, for fairness and representativeness — rather than for overall well-being. Such is the predicament inherent in the pursuit of a mere fifty-one percent majority.
> as such is the foundational principle of democracy: a majority of fifty-one percent prevails.
There are other ways of doing voting and organizing a democracy that are less prone to this winner take all dynamic. The foundational principle of democracy is consent of the governed. The details of how that's achieved can vary widely.
One is to do the vote differently, such as with ranked choice voting where voters are free to choose the candidate they actually want without "wasting" their vote.
Another is parliamentary style systems with proportional representation, which allow more than just two parties to have a voice and require the parties to form coalitions to govern.
Lastly, you can vote on actual policy proposals instead of just on politicians and parties. It's not either-or -- it's possible to have a system with both representatives and direct voting on major points of contention.
That is indeed the case. Perhaps I should have clarified that my comments are directed at the current political system of the United States. The purpose of my message was to highlight that there is a certain opposing force at play, one that is shifting the working system – specifically, the US electoral system – towards a range of diminished effectiveness. Essentially, the rules are being manipulated in such a way that while they may technically function, the fundamental objectives are still being undermined. These objectives, as outlined in the US Constitution, are to ensure domestic tranquility and promote the general welfare. It is necessary to address this systemic vulnerability, as this issue is becoming increasingly relevant in many places.
I disagree. I think the US system with 2 parties is superior to the systems in many other nations where there are multiple parties. The problem with multiple parties is that it is difficult to form a governing coalition. In the US the problem of coalition building simply does not exits (I wonder how many people in the US are even aware of the concept). Basically, the coalition building is done ahead of the elections, by various interest groups aligning themselves with one of the two parties. This alignment is voluntary and dynamic, so the shape of the two parties continuously changes. The debate seems quite polarized and this is indeed a problem. But I think it stems more from the way people's exposure to information has changed with the advent of the internet and social media, and less from how the US organizes its electoral process.
Without nitpicking the typical coalition details here, I want to consider a more general point. It's somewhat self evidently not a great thing for countries to be swapping systems back and forth dramatically based on margins of a few percent. It's unstable and will inevitably lead to a systemic collapse as the shifts grow greater and greater over time. It's rocking a boat back and forth.
I would go one step further and say that executive power should be dramatically reigned in, and that laws should take an 80% consensus to pass. And laws also have to be renewed every 'x' years with a similarly large consensus, perhaps with a method similar to constitutional amendment to allow for permanent laws. Under such a system you'd absolutely have to collaborate to ever do anything. And I think this would be a very good thing.
Such a system would also completely do away with divide and conquer as a political strategy, which again is also a very good thing - as that's likely one of the biggest causes of instability in the Western world today.
> you'd absolutely have to collaborate to ever do anything
You could also refuse to collaborate to do everything. This would result in an anarchist system where power/money has the ability to do whatever they want without regulatory oversight and the public are unable to vote to give themselves any rights they can't take by force.
I think that's assuming the status quo of horrible divides. In the past many social bills passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. For instance the Pure Food and Drug Act [1], which would lead to the FDA, was passed in 1906 by a 90%+ margin in both the House and Senate. I mean who's going to oppose outlawing mislabeled products? In a country that hasn't been trained to hate 'the other side', basically nobody.
But in modern times a typical social experiment (of which there are a zillion on YouTube) is to describe some policy passed by a President/party but swap the names to 'the other side.' People's response to the policy will invariably sharply shift. People aren't even thinking about what they think is a good idea anymore, but seeing everything through a hyper-partisan lens. That's obviously not conducive to bipartisan acts, pretty much ever.
> and that laws should take an 80% consensus to pass.
I think this is trying to solve the wrong problem. If our concern was that the second the new party gets that 51% margin they suddenly start passing a ton of laws, that would help reign it in. But that's not really what is happening. Congress has become profoundly unproductive in the last few decades. As an example, the last time Congress passed a budget on time, which is the bare minimum of functioning, was in the 1990s. By basically any metric, Congress is becoming less and less capable of passing laws. Requiring 80% consensus would make that even harder. And requiring laws to be reviewed every X years would greatly increase the responsibilities of Congress to keep the government functioning.
It's more about the equilibrium and motivations that this system creates. When everything is decided on a 1% majority, there's no real need to cooperate on anything. If you don't have power now, you probably will in a few years and then you can do whatever you want. So you can just focus on getting reelected in the mean time and vote no on everything until then. This, btw, is exactly what happens - Congress spends most of their time in office simply working on their next election. Term limits would seriously help here.
What you mention about budgets is a good example of this. Neither side wants to cooperate on anything at all. So in the House you get things like one side votes 100% yes, the other side 100% no. And then it gets passed to the Senate. The reason budgets freeze up in the Senate is the filibuster where you need a 60% majority to pass. So suddenly there's actually some cooperation required which is when both sides tend to start working together, a little, to add this or remove that.
But with an 80% consensus required, you need to start the cooperation immediately in the House because you can't just roughshod your fantasy budget through on a 1% margin. And none of this is going to change in 4 years, or 40. If you want to get things done, you need to start viewing 'the other side' as just other people working towards what they see as a desirable direction for the country, instead of an opposing team to be conquered and strawmanned into the worst evil since Hitler.
The party that actively attempts to destroy a government by blocking all bills, then point to the underfunded, broken system and say "government does work, you should sell all of that to a billionaire" would LOVE your idea.
The problem with two parties is everything is left or right. Coalition building can be hard but the work bridges ideas/approaches which pull more people together.
Two party systems end up governing from their extreme positions while trying to pull 1% over.
> Two party systems end up governing from their extreme positions while trying to pull 1% over.
Why must it be so? If one party was non-extreme, would it not be better at pulling the 1% over? (In fact, there are a lot more than 1% who don't bother to vote because neither party speaks to them.)
It seems to me that the thing that pushes parties in the US to the extremes is the primary system.
The problem is not in getting the 1% at the end but it si the primary system.
But that is true in all two party states.
The people who take part and organise the party will not be in the centre undecideds they will be those who are off centre. To become the leader you need to get the votes from the party workers, these will tend away from the centre so you get more extreme leaders.
With the two party system the coalitions are made behind closed doors in the party.
> Why must it be so? If one party was non-extreme, would it not be better at pulling the 1% over? (In fact, there are a lot more than 1% who don't bother to vote because neither party speaks to them.)
Primary elections are the problem. The moderates who would win bigly in the real election are rapidly washed out during the primary season.
All the more reason why we shouldn't vote for parties and politicians but rather vote on specific individual decisions/topics/choices.
It's 2025, we should be able to have more granular control over the direction our governments take, and not have to rely on some nebulous "party" or politicians grouping that forces us to deal with compromises. And not only compromises, but all the deal-making and trading that the groups make with eachother.
Representative democracy is not a technical challenge, it's a human challenge. If reigned in, electing representatives to act on your behalf is a far better system because being even close to informed on the topics and nuance and long-term thinking it takes to govern is a full time job that most people simply are not equipped - in terms of time and expertise - to handle. And we don't even have guaranteed holiday time to research and vote once every year, let alone every few days as this would require.
Sucks that they keep electing lunatics. But do you really think the party who ran almost entirely on hurting others wouldn't independently vote for hurting others? Or that the 100,000,000 people who didn't vote to stop it would suddenly vote? Or that people wouldn't look toward leaders and form parties so they can quickly get a feel of the room based on like minds?
Politicians being corrupt is, at the end of the day, mostly the fault of the people. They refuse to hold them accountable. I mean, they elected a convicted felon - a convicted rapist - an impeached president - a known con man and womanizer - who works with dictators and mafias and tried to overthrow America. And they're still cheering on every insane idea.
> All the more reason why we shouldn't vote for parties and politicians but rather vote on specific individual decisions/topics/choices.
This sounds nice but if people can't even vote for favorable outcomes now, how can we expect them to make informed decisions on dozens of matters of public policy?
The solution usually proposed in systems like Liquid Democracy, is in the form of an online platform where issues to be voted on are presented alongside all the different opinions and perspectives relevant to that decision. Education needs to go hand-in-hand with empowerment.
Having all the information available is but one part of the challenge. It has never been easier to get educated on all sides of every issue we face, yet...
The problem still remains that we can't expect individuals (let alone millions of them) to be able to appropriately weigh in on things that require more than 5 minute reading on an online platform. One cannot gain an expert understanding, nor an appreciation of the nuances that come with that, in that situation.
I think this is some sort of fallacy that (us) intellectuals easily fall into. Education and understanding of a topic for the most part does not sway peoples' opinion. And democracy shouldn't be about that, because then it becomes a game of "who can convince the most people" and "who can indoctrinate the most", rather than simply being the will of the people that they naturally form as part of existing as individuals and interacting with the world around them.
I'm confused. Are you suggesting that people can/should be able to make decisions about individual policy decisions - as I took your GP comment to mean - or are you saying that that's antithetical to democracy...?
Yes - I 100% think we should allow all voters to be able to vote on individual policy decisions.
But democracy shouldn't be about giving them that choice only if they are educated and informed on the topic, that is antithetical to democracy. Their choice matters whether they are informed on it or not, that's their choice - period. Of course, it would be good to give them all the info we can on the topic and we should strive to do our best to help them be informed. And if that's the case, and we agree democracy is about the will of the people, not their "expertise" and "knowledge" on a topic, then there is absolutely no reason why we should deny the possibility of more direct-democracy type decision making.
I don't think anybody was suggesting it as some kind hard requirement - that would indeed probably be dangerous. I am still confused by your comment though
> Education and understanding of a topic for the most part does not sway peoples' opinion. And democracy shouldn't be about that, because then it becomes a game of "who can convince the most people" and "who can indoctrinate the most", rather than simply being the will of the people that they naturally form as part of existing as individuals and interacting with the world around them.
It sounds like you're saying understanding of a topic should come second to how citizens "feel" about it. There's no denying that's how it is much of the time, but should it be?
People, as part of existing as part of the world, naturally form hatred or distrust of various groups of people based on their personal interactions. How is it healthier for society to act on those feelings, vs electing people and building institutions that act based on reason and good faith?
I'm not sure how to parse/take your comment. Are you saying people are too uninformed to make decisions on public policy?
Look, if that's the case, and that's how we want government to be run, then let's just come out with it. Let's not pretend that people have a choice. But until that day comes, democracy means will of the people and in this modern technological age that translates to people being enabled to choose what they want.
We've lost the "excuse" to use coordination, tallying and "time to count votes" as a means to push representative-type democracy, and the sooner we get there the better the world will be. Because right now we have this schism, and it's tearing societies apart.
You suggested we should stop voting for parties/politicians and instead vote based on individual policies. I suggest that's not a great idea, since to make informed decisions on such things requires more expert understanding than an individual has. This is not, I think, a crazy position - it is why we elect politicians at all.
It’s well documented how harmful the two party system is and I don’t find this even close to convincing me it’s not the biggest problem with the US, as far as our system of government. Many of our other problems stem from it.
That persistent societal division of fifty-fifty is emblematic of a failed political system. There's never just two sides to any real-life issue, but having only two parties forces everything to be viewed through that binary lens. This damage runs much deeper than just politics, everything in society has to be all-or-nothing: it's always good vs evil, you're with us or against us, you're successful or an utter failure, you're either rich or poor, etc.
People act as if it's a fluke, as if "if we could get back to how things were just before all this, things would stay better!". No, we don't want to drive off the cliff, but we do want back to that time we barged full speed past all the "road closed ahead" signs.
The U.S. did have a brief flirtation with what other countries call "failure to form a governing coalition" in 2023. It was a bit less embarrassing than elsewhere because (for somewhat related reasons) our legislature is historically weak right now, but it did happen.
I think we'll see more of this, now that the parties are so ideologically separate from each other. With such a narrow majority, any tiny intraparty fracture has the potential to break a coalition.
These problems could be prevented by a ranked choice vote (your vote transfers to your next candidate when your favorite is eliminated) to determine the executive, and your first choice used to determine legislative seats proportionally. This would often mean that the winning party is governing without majority in the parliament (or equivalent), but I actually see that as a good thing. I mean, what happened to Checks and Balances?
Coalition building is not a problem, but it is still very difficult to govern in the US. In order to enact meaningful legislation aside from a budget, you need a majority of the House of Representatives, 60 Senators (in practice, because of the filibuster), the President, and the Supreme Court to all align.
It's not all or nothing. Within EU nations, you will find many systems that sit within a spectrum between a rigid 2 party system like the US, and a full blown multi-party coalition type government broken down into specific levels, like Belgium.
By that logic a one party system is the most superior system, since by definition everyone is on the same page.
We got Trump in part because people felt unable to fully express their opinion - they felt it was either the status quo person or the anti status quo person, with no nuance in between.
And there are still divisions - the freedom caucus, the progressive "squad", the swing politicians. Those politicians should be in parties that reflect them rather than Frankenstein's monsters of parties.
Coalitions are made to enable things like voting on government budgets before funding runs out .... But that problem does not seem solved in the US
Thats why no laws should be possible to pass without a 2/3 vote. 50% + 1 vote will always lead to a weak mandate and an accusation of tyranny. Let them haggle and if it's not worth passing at 2/3 of a vote it's not worth passing at all.
> Furthermore, the mechanisms that ensure the mathematical expectation of electoral outcomes to hover around a fifty-fifty split — a phenomenon observable in many nations — are fundamentally economic in nature.
What? No they are not.
This is 100% created by the FPTP voting system. It is the single cause that leads to this, everywhere where it's used. FPTP means that if your party cannot hoover up a base that gets 50%+1 of the votes, you change your platform until it can. The stable equilibrium is two parties at very nearly 50% split. Then both parties have to cater to their 50%, can ignore the other 50%, and do not benefit from co-operation across party lines.
This equilibrium is not visible in democratic countries that use some kind of proportional representation. In such systems, parties tend to be smaller, and necessarily have to co-operate to form government.
Moreover, I'm thinking that modern information tools (Internet, polls, tracking, etc). have lead to better and more accurate forecasting, which in turn allowed the parties to apply ever narrower targeting at hyper-focused groups and minimize wasted effort past getting the majority needed to win elections. Basically as there is less and less noise the battles get closer and closer to the theoretical equilibrium point.
And this is bad because it causes huge shifts based on the whims of what, fractions of a percent of the population?
The mechanisms are economic in nature if you assume the context of a first past the post electoral system.
It's worth repeating that FPTP maximizes the number of those who are discontented: Parties lose all incentives to appeal to more than 50%+1, so the remaining 49.9% are left high and dry. This implies that a proportional representation system will be more stable, because a higher percentage of the voters will be represented.
> Both factions commit resources to the electoral contest to secure a mere one percent advantage
That only makes sense if the factions are interchangeable for their members, i.e. if it's the same to them whether they win as part of one faction or the other, as long as they're on the winning side in the end.
And I'm pretty sure that's not true for most regular people.
It may be true for large corporations and wealthy individuals, though.
Rambling about why a 50-50 forecast on a blowout election is "fine" and actually, like, totally cool and actually you're the dumb one for thinking it isn't, holds no water in my book. Election forecasters are not scientists discovering the nature of the universe, where it might be ok to say "yeah there's nothing to discover here" / "we don't know what we don't know". They're businesspeople selling a product. If AWS says "well, actually, hosting servers is just really really hard and its totally normal that 10% of your requests are failing!" they'd go out of business, full stop. No one is going to buy your product.
Trump did not win by a little bit. They missed something about the 2016 election, and it is wild that they missed it again EIGHT years later. Don't let them hide behind the veil of "we said it was 50-50!"
Trump won 49.8% of the popular vote, compared to Harris's 48.2%, giving him a margin of 1.6% (approximately 2.3 million votes).
This margin ranks as one of the smallest in modern history, smaller than Joe Biden's 4.45% margin in 2020 and smaller even than George W. Bush's narrow win in 2004 (2.46%).
Trump won 312 Electoral College votes to Harris's 226, marking a margin of 86 votes.
This is larger than his 2016 victory (304-227) and Biden's 2020 win (306-232), but it does not approach historical landslides like Reagan's 1984 victory (525-13) or Lyndon B. Johnson's in 1964 (486-52).
Trump's popular vote margin is the fifth smallest since 1960, ie #12 in the last 17 largest, #13 by vote % margin.
The President is not elected by popular vote, and I should hope that the polling probabilities take that into account.
312 to 226 (58%/42%) was the final electoral college count. Do you know what the Polymarket odds for the race were at 11:30pm on November 4th, the day before election day? 59.8% Trump, 40.2% Harris. Yes, actually, seriously, go look them up, they didn't just correctly predict the winner, the odds themselves were within an incredibly accurate margin for the actual electoral vote share. The Robinhood election market odds were similarly placed. The Harris campaign said recently that they basically knew they were going to lose very early on. This information was out there, everyone knew it, except the "professional pollsters" who are now begging/pleading that their 50-50 models aren't worth giving up on.
You don't need to white knight the pollsters. They're selling a defective product. The marketplace for their product will punish them in 2026 and 2028 far more than any of our comments on HackerNews will.
It was who he won that mattered. Democrats are using 1.5% to justify a "we didn't do that badly" attitude and yes, they did do badly. Trump won demographics he had no reasonable right to win and He took all of the swing States. He won the popular vote that no Republican has been able to do since 2004.His Electoral College win was resounding. That and the Republicans winning the House and Senate. The Democrats really really need to rethink things.
For each of the 2024 7 swing states, the winner was <1% ahead on average, so what good are these polls if the results are going to be within their margin of error?
They need to either find a more accurate way, or... give up!
What they're good for is telling you that things are close. A tied poll or a 50-50 model can tell you that if your beliefs think it's 99% to go one way, you're probably overconfident, and should be more prepared for it to go the other way.
I cared about the result, because it was going to decide whether I settled down in the US or whether I wanted to find a different place to live. And because I paid attention to those polls, I knew that what happened was not particularly unlikely. I prepared early.
A lot of people I know thought it couldn't happen. They ignored the evidence in front of them, because it was distasteful to them (just as it was to me). And they were caught flat-footed in a way that I wasn't.
That's not the benefit of hindsight: I brought receipts. You can see the 5,000 equally-likely outcomes I had at the start of the night (and how they evolved as I added the vote coming in) here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11nn9y9fusd-6LQKCof3_... .
We had a pretty weird year in general. Harris did bad across most safe states but seemed to do much better than her average in swing states (not enough to win them, but much better than she did in non-competitive states)
Many election models rely heavily on historical correlation. States like OH and IN might vote quite differently but their swings tend to be in the same direction.
The weirdness this year (possibly caused by the Harris campaign having a particularly strong ground game in swing states) definitely challenged a lot of baked in assumptions of forecasts.
At the end of the day it was a 312 vs. 226 in the Electoral College. Seems a bit odd that this is supposed to be impossible to be predicted with any useful amount of certaintly. But perhaps that says more about the nature of the Electoral College than it says about pollsters.
Not that I'm claiming this for this particular discussion, but a lot of people in favor of what is happening in the USA want to justify what's going on by claiming this was some sort of overwhelming political sweep in this country instead of being a close race at all levels (roughly handful of votes in House and Senate to achieve parity). Who would have picked a Arab American protest vote as major factor in swing states in 2024 when asked in 2020?
It's beyond the Arab American vote. It's also the youth vote
When the George Floyd uprising happened, it was the largest civil rights protest in human history. Over 70 nations held demonstrations. Where I was, the Students for Justice and Peace in Palestine organized most of the protests. Black-Palestinian solidarity has an extremely long history. So does Irish-Palestinian and Palestinian-Native American solidarity. They've been engaged in building a worldwide network of solidarity with oppressed people for decades now. Almost every George Floyd protest included chants about freeing Palestine and it's shocking how little coverage this got
I think people continue to radically underestimate how much youth, Black, and other minorities will continue to follow the lead of Palestinian organizers. And the Democratic party needs to take it seriously if they want to win again
But they can’t take it seriously. Going against Israel is an election loser in just about every district, and definitely at the level of the Senate in the presidency. The Lobby is just way too powerful
They have to claim it was hard to predict, because they deliberately led people to believe that the establishment-favored candidate was going to win. They knew better the whole time but hoped to help their candidate by making the situation look hopeless for the true popular choice.
An accurate model can output a 50-50 prediction. Sure, no problem there. But there is a human bias that does tend to make 50% more likely in these cases. It is the maximum percentage you can assign to the uncomfortable possibility without it being higher than the comfortable possibility.
538 systematically magnified this kind of bias when they decided to rate polls, not based on their absolute error, but based on how close their bias was relative to other polls' biases.(https://x.com/andrei__roman/status/1854328028480115144) This down-weighted pollsters like Atlas Intel who would've otherwise improved 538's forecast.
I'm not sure how to verify your comment since 538 was cut by ABC a month or 2 ago. But Nate Silver's pollster rating methodology is pretty much the same as 538's was during his tenure there and can be found here: https://www.natesilver.net/p/pollster-ratings-silver-bulleti...
It actually explicitly looks for statistical evidence of "herding" (e.g. not publishing poll results that might go against the grain) and penalized those pollsters.
In both rating systems, polls that had a long history of going against the grain and being correct, like Ann Seltzer's Iowa poll, were weight very heavily. Seltzer went heavily against the grain 3 elections in a row and was almost completely correct the first 2 times. This year she was off by a massive margin (ultimately costing her her career). Polls that go heavily against the grain but DON'T have a polling history simply aren't weighted heavily in general.
> I'm not sure how to verify your comment
Here's how 538 explains how they factor in bias into their grading:
> Think about this another way. If most polls in a race overestimate the Democratic candidate by 10 points in a given election, but Pollster C's surveys overestimate Republicans by 5, there may be something off about the way Pollster C does its polls even if its accuracy is higher. We wouldn't necessarily expect it to keep outperforming other pollsters in subsequent elections since the direction of polling bias bounces around unpredictably from election to election.
- https://abcnews.go.com/538/best-pollsters-america/story?id=1...
> since 538 was cut by ABC a month or 2 ago. But Nate Silver's pollster rating methodology is pretty much the same as 538's was during his tenure there
Nate took his model with him. After he left, 538 rolled a new model.
>Nate took his model with him. After he left, 538 rolled a new model.
So they let him leave with the only part of it that had value, that's insane. They essentially just paid him for the name?
I'm aware. It's sad to see 538 gone though. I was looking forward to seeing how the new 538 model would compare to silver's model
538 was cut by ABC 6 days ago.
https://archive.is/E2nre
Wow thanks. As a former regular reader it's felt a lot longer
They've had several major cuts in the past couple of years so maybe that's why it's felt like that
> Seltzer went heavily against the grain 3 elections in a row and was almost completely correct the first 2 times. This year she was off by a massive margin (ultimately costing her her career).
Why did one mistake cost her career?
> Why did one mistake cost her career?
It didn't.
> Over a year ago I advised the Register I would not renew when my 2024 contract expired with the latest election poll as I transition to other ventures and opportunities.
> Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course. It’s ironic that it’s just the opposite. I am proud of the work I’ve done for the Register, for the Detroit Free Press, for the Indianapolis Star, for Bloomberg News and for other public and private organizations interested in elections. They were great clients and were happy with my work.
You can of course choose to interpret this if you wish as her conveniently inventing a narrative after-the-fact, but that seems unlikely. The polling industry doesn't work that way, and it's particularly unlikely that the Register would have cut ties with her over a single poll after her impressive track record for nearly forty years.
Since there's no real evidence that's what happened, the most reasonable conclusion is that, as she said, she decided to retire after spending four decades doing the same thing.
[0] https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/2...
The idea is not that the Register cut ties with her, but that her personal safety was at risk and she was getting brutally harassed by millions of people and the POTUS-elect. See my other comment for details.
Yeah, after reading the NYT article[0], I'll amend my earlier statement "since there's no real evidence that's what happened," since that is some pretty strong evidence that something happened (albeit more complicated than simply "her poll was wrong, so she lost her job").
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/us/politics/ann-selzer-io...
The most likely scenario is that it didn't. Selzer, a successful 68-year-old, was likely about to retire anyway.
That is pure speculation without evidence, which isn't helpful. There is evidence in other parts of this subthread.
Huh? It’s evidence-based speculation. Of course it’s conceivable that a 68-year-old would have less concerns about putting her career on the line. I’m trying to understand how you think a conversation on HN should operate
You could provide evidence - just look at the rest of the subthread.
Would you be satisfied with stats on average age of retirement?
She faced heavy retribution from Donald Trump who claimed the poll was a politically motivated one to shift the narrative
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/us/politics/ann-selzer-io...
Seems like an absurd claim given it was less than 2 weeks out from the election and polls that show a side losing can often have a motivating effect on a base
Truth is that voter behavior changes more radically than pollsters admit from election to election. We can statistically model direction of "error" but we can't statistically model direction of "bias". A grade A pollster like Ann Selzer could have the perfect formula one election but that formula could be a total miss the next
The important thing that forecasters like Silver point out is that we need those pollsters to stick around and use the SAME methodology. Even if gets less useful at predicting the outcome, having a consistent signal with the same methodology can still be of immense statistical importance. And it's extremely important that we don't scare away pollsters from publishing "outlier" results. Doing so only encourages herding which is a growing problem in polling
Because it pissed off Donald Trump and the media is busy kowtowing to him.
you're being downvoted but you're actually pretty much right. She got a lot of backlash from the right accusing her poll of being politically motivated. To the point where they pressured institutions to force her out
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/us/politics/ann-selzer-io...
I'm fine with the downvotes. There are others saying the same thing as me much more cogently -- they should be upweighted and mine downweighted.
Who pressured what institutions?
Trump sued her, after she retired as planned. Trump sues everyon.
Trump and others were attacking her and physically threatening her before she retired. See my other comment for evidence.
You’re delusional if you think the media kowtows to him. I’m not even going to post sources, a quick search will show even left leaning sites saying the overwhelming reporting is negative about him.
> Why did one mistake cost her career?
It didn’t. She retired before Trump came for her and before the election outcome was known.
So I looked around a bit ...
> before the election outcome was known.
Selzer announced her retirement November 17th in the op-ed below, which was after the election results were known. All the news I saw about her retirement is dated the same day, so that appears to be the announcement. In the article, she claims to have informed some people privately in 2023 that she would retire after the election.
https://eu.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/20...
> before Trump came for her
I can easily find earlier news saying Trump attacked Selzer; for example, this is from when her poll came out, pre-election.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/04/politics/video/ann-selzer...
This November 18 article - from the next day - says the police had warned her that her safety was at risk. It doesn't say when that warning happened, but it seems likely it was not in the 24 hours since announcing her retirement.
https://www.kttc.com/2024/11/19/iowas-ann-selzer-responds-tr...
(For all: it's Selzer, not Seltzer - there's no 't'.)
It’s more of a systemic failure than a single mistake. If you’re a business that releases one major product version every year or two that accounts for your entire revenue, and you completely blow the product on the last release, there’s a good chance you’re not getting another chance if you’re a small-medium business. Compare her firm to any number of smaller gaming and entertainment studios.
Selzer wasn’t gallup or some other big player that was continuously releasing a wide range of evolving polls, but a once-an-election shop that was multiple standard deviations away from reality in the wrong direction, on the biggest stage in history. Who would contract Selzer ever again?
> Who would contract Selzer ever again?
Presumably anyone who is familiar with her overall body of work and the concept of an outlier.
Pollsters are increasingly herding. Perhaps after this election all unexpected results will be suppressed or adjusted, which seems to be what you're advocating for.
Someone who understands that 97% success rate is better than much smaller success rate?
Sounds like the success rate of Arthur Andersen. Whatever happened to them?
A pollster’s reputation isn’t everything, but it’s close.
> Who would contract Selzer ever again?
People like hedge funds, who don't care about perception, have a mechanism to turn accuracy into dollars and can ride out occasional misses.
It isn't just human bias that makes this problematic. Their definition of success is that a prediction of 70% should be right about 70/100 times.
Give a model a big reward for "success" under this criteria and it will have a tendency to converge on the long term average. As long as the long term average stays the same, no one will be able to say the estimate was wrong.
If you've ever seen the YT videos from aspiring data scientists learning sequence prediction, you've inevitably seen a variation from people trying to predict stock prices. "Look how low the loss is!" - Sure, but it gets the direction wrong, and just consistently predicts a close value to the previous day's close. But the model is technically correct, just useless.
A 50-50 model for an election might not be giving up and might not be wrong, but it is often useless.
50-50 means "I have 0 no useful information". Some facts are more useful than others.
Forecasts will always have some level of uncertainty and if a race is very close a prediction around 50/50 will be the most honest result. A prediction like that does have value, just like a prediction that candidate A is a large favorite, it's informing you about the future state of the world.
I'm not sure what you're expecting forecasters to do when they have a 50/50 result. Put a thumb on the scale in a random direction so that you will think they are providing useful information, even though they'll be less accurate?
Agreed with the points in OP. Though we did have the story that came out shortly after the election that apparently internal polling for the Harris campaign never showed her ahead [1].
Obviously it says in the article that they did eventually fight it to a dead heat, which is in-line with a 50-50 forecast, but I do wonder what, if anything, failed such that this key detail was never reported on publicly until after the election.
As the article notes, public polls started appearing in late September showing Harris ahead, which they never saw internally. Are internal polls just that much better than public ones? Is the media just incentivized to report on the most interesting outcome (a dead heat)?
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/...
> As the article notes, public polls started appearing in late September showing Harris ahead, which they never saw internally. Are internal polls just that much better than public ones? Is the media just incentivized to report on the most interesting outcome (a dead heat)?
Intentional bias for motivational purposes is a thing - it doesn't make any logical sense, but people want to vote for the winner.
Well, trying to have 'safe' opinions is not completely illogical. It's a survival strategy.
People want to vote for whomever.
People want to DONATE to winners.
Don't rule out Harris' internal polling just being bad and the public polling was superior. We're looking at a team whos message was "our opponent is a racist, homophobic, sexist, rapist, felonic avatar of Hitler" and then saw him gain margin which is quite remarkable. What did voters have to see in Harris' team for that to happen? They're clearly doing something wrong. If the team managed that I wouldn't assume their pollsters were a lone beacon of competence.
It seems quite plausible they hired bad pollsters and their internal data was off.
What they did wrong was picking the candidate - she wasn’t popular. It wasn’t the time to try this kind of candidate, but they did it because of their own priorities. It’s OK, they won’t learn.
Democrats need to start nominating famous actors and influencers.
They had all of Hollywood this year and quite a lot of nonpolitcal content creators came out for Harris in the last days.
Having hollywood endorse a candidate is not the same as having hollywood be a candidate.
And who is the mythical hollywood figure untainted by the culture war that could pull voters from the other side. The only thing you have to do with any hollywood celebrity to thank their presidential campaign is just post screenshots of their Covid and BLM tweets. And if they don't have stupid Covid and BLM tweets then they will have antisemitic ones.
Bill Maher
Your point restated, nobody cares about endorsements.
Michael Bloomberg already tried the "hey, I'm like that guy but without the wrong think" xerox strategy and it didn't go well. Mark Cuban has toyed with it too but keeps getting cold feet, maybe due to lack of confidence or maybe due to analysis that shows being Them-Lite rarely works.
Trump's reality tv show is not a major part of what got him elected but if someone wants to fund and convince Mark Cuban to try a doppelganger campaign, a fool and his money are soon parted. Cuban seems to know better than to try with his own fortune.
If Cuban ran against Kamala he wouldn’t even have to campaign.
Cuban would have done much better against Trump. Any white southern male would have but Cuban might have pulled in Texas.
Their mistake was much more basic than that. They kept assuming that they could re-run Biden until it was too late for a switch to work.
When they did decide to switch, it had to be Harris, because she was the only one who could legitimately claim to use Biden's election funds, and they didn't have time to raise money for anyone else.
From there, they didn't fix the other mistake - the one Democrats have been making for at least a decade. The Democrats' natural constituency is the working class. They can't win without it. But much of the working class is rather socially conservative. The Democrats have spent the last decade telling working class people that if they, the working class, don't think gay marriage is a good idea, or don't think trans people belong on womens' sports teams and in womens' restrooms, or aren't comfortable with abortion, then they are moral lepers and their entire culture needs to be completely eradicated. Well, the natural result is that at least some of those people are going to flip you the bird and vote for the other guy. Democrats wonder "how could people be so stupid?" I ask, "How could you be so stupid? What did you think was going to happen?"
They didn't "have" to run anybody. They could've, and should've gone with someone else. Everyone knew when Harris was selected that the Democrats had lost. The DNC tried to turn that sentiment around, but they started from a losing position and never recovered. There were alternatives...
> don't think gay marriage is a good idea
That's the culture war of a decade ago: Obergefell v Hodges was in 2015.
And Roe v Wade was in 1973. That that war didn't end then, though.
The gay and trans thing was a wedge issue pushed by Republicans, because they saw that it worked, and the only way Dems could have appeased the riled up masses would be to straight up start oppressing LGBT people.
I don't hold it against them that they didn't budge on this one. Beating up on a minority for political points is morally repugnant, and the whole appeal of Democrats is that they have some kind of integrity.
The "moral lepers" thing feels to me like a distortion of reality. The actual Democratic politicians generally didn't engage in denigrating their base. Maybe you mean people on the disgusting website.
It was picked as a wedge issue but the Republicans chose very wisely, as the Democrats' incessant pushing of trans issues without any consideration towards the negative impact upon women and girls was unpopular even amongst many traditionally left-leaning voters.
If you mean that the Democrats' policy of supporting transgender rights through legislation was hard to defend (not from a scientific or medical standpoint, but from a populist, political one) and Trump effectively attacked it then yes you're right.
If you mean that the messaging on trans rights alienated swing voters then I think it's probably true, but moderates and swing voters do support general anti-discrimination laws but are wary of policies on sports participation and youth medical care.
If you mean that it was the centerpiece of their identity and everything that were campaigning for, and their pivotal, most important issue, then I don't think that's accurate.
But they did deliberately elevate transgender rights as a moral and civil rights issue. This was a trade off (energize progressives, lose some moderates). Conservatives effectively focused on targeted attacks (bathrooms, sports).
I think that maybe the gamble didn't pay off. The messaging should have probably been about protecting from discrimination, and debate should be focused on attacking republican establishment for being aggressive and hateful.
But really all of this doesn't matter. A better candidate, a white or latino strong charismatic man would have beaten Trump.
Exactly my thoughts even as a complete outsider. Democrats seem to became overconfident in their own internet agenda and forgot that most people at least don’t care and on average just tolerate. Through years it seems that tolerance (which we just learned is the normal mode of operation within diverse groups) turned into mandatory praising and hitler if you don’t.
The inconvenient thing is, average people are -phobic naturally or historically. That’s just the fact of life. Tolerance, the conscious inhibition of natural processes, is a good-enough contract that keeps them away from negativity, but you cannot tell everyone they are hitler if they feel otherwise, as opposed to act against. That’s bullshit and emotional hegemony. Some of the left figures (can’t name, just echoing some clips) even explicitly enjoyed disturbing these phobias. It all seemed like contrasting mockery rather than integration. I understand that most of it was addressed at far right, but you can’t target them with such negativity without affecting the rest as well.
How could you be so stupid? What did you think was going to happen?
I think they only gained more momentum. They would do so with or without Trump winning because they demonstrate levels of illusion far beyond all return points. They are de-platforming, de-employing people, ostracizing their own people who dare to speak any sort of reasonable thought, and they cheer after doing so. Do you really think they can pause and reflect? It almost feels like US needs a third force that isn’t hitler or hitler and cares about just normal society.
Oh, I would love to have a third force. Both sides are moving to extremes, and the bulk of the population is not extreme in either direction, and just want some sanity instead of extremism. A large majority is there for the taking. Will someone wake up and take it?
This pretty much covers it. Harris ran a terrible campaign in 2020 and was never popular. Biden picked her anyway, against his better judgement, because that was what the Left wanted and he was trying to appease them. His disastrous decision to run again for so long left the party with no other options.
Harris tried to correct some of her past mistakes and did better this time around but she should have never been in that position to begin with. Most of the blame should go to Biden and the activists who want to self-immolate the party on the altar of tokenism.
> What did voters have to see in Harris' team for that to happen?
Biden should have pulled out a lot sooner. When? At least a year before the election. But you can easily make arguments for earlier and earlier all the way back to having been too old to run for President in the first place, despite having had a really good term.
Also Harris needs to fire her consultants, who were still trying to play "fair" in an unfair fight and pulled back on the one attack line which was working: that Republicans are "weird".
Things are unlikely to improve until voters start primarying out anyone still trying to do bipartisan equivocation.
His approval rating was in “it would be unprecedented if you won” territory early enough that he should have been out in time to have a real primary. Folks who think switching was any kind of a mistake are going on gut and not numbers. The mistake was that he stayed in as long as he did. Even so, switching was better than not, despite still losing.
And yes, it’s so goddamn frustrating that Clinton-era consultants are still given meetings.
Clinton era consultants were the only ones saying the obvious: “it’s the economy stupid”. On the other hand it was the Obama era consultants who were fixated on the massive loser that is identity politics
Democrats are screwed on economic messaging until they join Republicans in dropping neoliberalism. Was never popular, but both parties could stick to it as long as neither "defected". Now one has.
Even when the economy's good, they're going to be hindered on messaging until they drop that.
Meanwhile a bunch of them are running around like "the problem's that we were too nice to trans people!" lol no, the problem is the latent one that's been hanging there waiting to be triggered by one party or the other since the '80s, the one any expert should have been watching for a shift in—or looking to move first on—this entire time.
> Democrats are screwed on economic messaging until they join Republicans in dropping neoliberalism.
I disagree. What we're witnessing today is that while people are happy with many of the fruits of globalization (cheap Chinese junk, cheap flights, ability to travel anywhere, remote work, etc, etc) our politicians have just about done everything in their power to increase the price of the things that actually matter: housing, healthcare, childcare, and education.
A Democrat party that could actually deliver on these things (rather than exacerbate the problems as they have done) would fare far better electorally. No need to put in place unpopular, destructive tariffs.
> happy with many of the fruits of globalization
i.e. things from overseas
> increase the price of the things that actually matter: housing, healthcare, childcare, and education.
i.e. things that have large skilled labor inputs within the US and can't be exported, plus housing which half the population doesn't want to be cheaper. This is just "Baumol cost disease". The major component of healthcare, childcare, and education is the wages of other Americans.
Let's not kid ourselves that the election was a fair comparison of economic policies.
The economy was doing fine apart from a transitory inflation spike especially in eggs. Meanwhile the US is now involved in a pointless trade war with Canada before even getting to the budget; people are going to have an economic disaster that dwarfs the price of eggs, because they got invested in identity politics of the right-wing.
I predict the Trump term will be an economic disaster on the numbers, but this will have no effect on people's stuck belief that Republicans are better than Democrats at economic management.
> ...and pulled back on the one attack line which was working: that Republicans are "weird".
Isn't the Democrat brand supposed to be that weird is encouraged? When did they start being against weird people?
Yes, but different kinds of weird. There's dem's "be yourself" kinda weird that supports queer people's right to exist, and there's the GOP "passes laws that require genital inspections of children in the bathroom" kinda weird that Tim Walz was calling out.
[flagged]
I don't know why #0 is even one of your examples: the only reason I have to think "trans?" (with the question mark in my thought) is the flag in the background, because without that flag, they look like half of the elderly women I've met over the years.
Uh huh. And then #0 starts talking and you're still similarly confused, I'm sure.
Confused?
The fact you show a picture with no name and I had to figure out who they were from the URL slug and multiple google searches because they're not the most famous person with those name fragments was more confusing.
Having finally found a video, not even the Admiral's American accent causes confusion. Only surprise I've got there is that all the trans women I know in person have had voice coaching.
And what's wrong with those images?
The second pictured person stole women's luggage and took their clothing from the luggage, while working for the President.
Nothing, you're right. It's JD Vance who's weird, not the man wearing dresses that he steals from airplane luggage.
Two people can be weird for different reasons.
Me, I can see why the label "weird" would apply to Brinton therefore the Democrats would have a hard time using that word to attack Republicans… except, of course, for the fact that Brinton was fired in 2022.
And if you're going to bring up arrests, then you have to wonder about the mind of a man who frames his own arrest warrant mug shot, on charges of election interference, on the wall just outside the Oval Office: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mug_shot_of_Donald_Trump#/medi...
asking that question with a straight face is exactly why the dems lost
>What did voters have to see in Harris' team for that to happen? They're clearly doing something wrong.
Perhaps there is clearly something wrong with the voters to opt for a
> racist, homophobic, sexist, rapist, felonic avatar of Hitler
Riiiight....
https://youtu.be/eVddGSTjEd0?t=51
Or maybe the explanation is that everybody behaved "responsibly" but they never got the changes they wanted, and chances for anything different looked more and more bleak. Why do you treat this like a single event? It is not. Lots of prior experiences fed into this.
For example, as bad as this is for us (I'm German, but I lived many years in the US once), for Europe I think it is good what is happening. Now we are forced to move and mature. Crisis are not always bad. The personalities involved this time make it especially hard to look at the whole thing calmly. I admit I have a harder time seeing what the US may get out of this except for the shakeup as a general chance. However, too much is concentrated on the personalities, and, like you did, on blaming everybody. How about Democrats look what they did wrong? I mean, other than reverting to "we didn't think the voters would be so stupid", in which case I have little hope for them to get anything positive out of this.
Democrats’ mistake was putting up a woman in a leadership popularity contest, even after the previous woman lost to the same
> racist, homophobic, sexist, rapist, felonic avatar of Hitler
And a black woman at that, to further reduce Democrats’ chances.
I’m basing this on the anecdotal evidence from many people who I spoke to, who have zero problem telling me a woman cannot be a leader. Including my own non white immigrant grandmother, who grew up without rights.
Many people don’t like to see people of a perceived lower socioeconomic status pass them up. It makes themselves feel inferior.
I'll counter your anecdotal experience with my own. I can count on one hand the number of people I know well who voted against Harris because of her gender or color. And I live in the rural south. The simple truth is that Harris failed to make a compelling case to enough of the nation in enough of the right states to win. The reasons for that failure are going to be complex and varied depending on area. Any attempt to pin it on a single trait or activity is going to be somewhat wrong. This is way too nuanced a topic for "She lost because she was a black woman" to be at all useful.
> I can count on one hand the number of people I know well who voted against Harris because of her gender or color.
You can count on one hand the number of people you know well who are willing to admit they voted against Harris because of her gender or color. This is a critical distinction.
I know a lot of people well enough that they know they don't have to be afraid to admit such things to me. This is not a critical distinction because assuming you know what people think is a great way to completely misunderstand them.
As someone who spent 30 years living in the rural south, I can state this with the confidence of personal experience: some people will not reveal their worst opinions until they are extremely sure in the safety of doing so. In some cases, they'll only reveal those opinions to someone else who has repeatedly shared the same opinions with them.
So unless you're giving big racist or misogynist vibes in how you communicate with them, the racists and misogynists you know "well" may be keeping their opinions to themselves.
The Democratic white male candidate (Biden) was polling so much worse than Harris that he was removed from candidacy.
Harris was part of the Biden administration, she was the 2IC of the Biden administration, she endorsed the policies of the Biden administration and the only official difference between her and Biden was that she was a different race & gender and polled much better than he did. Although unofficially she looked mentally sharper than Biden.
It is difficult to say it was race and gender when the approved candidate of the appropriate race and gender was clearly unelectable. At least Harris was a close call, Biden had lost before the race started. If the Biden administration had been popular and had some achievements to run on then she'd probably have won.
Why is it so hard to accept that hundreds of millions of Americans are racist, sexist, dumb fucks who don't know what's in their own best interests? They elected a crazy, raging megalomaniac over two sensible women. Twice. "How about Democrats look what they did wrong?" Well, maybe the obvious explanation is the best? They ran with women. So the solution is to only field male candidates in the future? You can see why that doesn't work for a "liberal" (< 100% right-wing) political party.
I always get a chuckle out of this. Both parties are full of NPCs who have mostly lost the ability to reason themselves out of anything partisan. This becomes even more apparent when you see each side hurl the same insults at each other, trying to rationalize the state of the world through ad hominem attacks.
It's depressing not to fit into either side, to be honest. I'm both a racist, sexist homophobe, and a libtard, depending on which echo chamber I am engaging in.
No, they ran with "horrible" women. Had they not screwed Tulsi Gabbard over and pretty much pushed her out of the party, I would have loved to have voted for Democrat woman.
Gabbard is a Republican.
She used to be a Democrat.
Shes weird. There’s something just very insincere about her. I’m not sure if Russia really bought her off or not, but she definitely has some wacky opinions
Suggesting that she was "bought off" by Russia without even the slightest bit of evidence is pure idiocy. Attacking people as being foreign agents for not fully falling in line with the orthodoxy is really what I consider to be "weird" and straight-up un-American.
She was a Democrat until 2022.
Trump got ~77M votes, not hundreds of millions.
Sexism was probably a small part of why Democrats lost, but much more important reasons were the economy, alienating their base with their Israel policy, moving to the right on immigration instead of permissive policies which are popular with their base and strategically important for future demographics, and focusing most of their attention on highly divisive culture war issues that effect a vanishingly small portion of the population.
Why is it so hard to accept that Harris was _that bad_ of a candidate? Democrat voters didn't want her in the 2020 primaries (not a single delegate won) and she was basically invisible during the entire Biden campaign until the massive pre-election astroturf campaign that tried to revamp her image.
You don't get it. I agree with you. She is a woman and thus "that bad" of a presidential candidate. But to argue that it somehow was rational for the Americans to reelect Trump over her is to engage in some seriously dangerous mental gymnastics.
A quip (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_L%C3%B6sung) from a more innocent era comes to mind-
> Would it not in that case / Be simpler for the government / To dissolve the people / And elect another?
Principal Skinner "am I so out of touch" meme
Bertolt Brecht "dissolving the people and electing another" quote
Well sure, but if that is the attitude they're not going to bother hiring good pollsters. Pollsters are going to do what, come back and explain that the Devil himself is outpolling your campaign. Now what? They were already catastrophising as hard as they could and the entire English speaking world knows how the US Dems feel about Trump. A majority (although admittedly a slim one) of voters just don't believe them.
Good pollsters would have been a waste of money in that environment and I'm sure the Harris campaign was judiciously watching their budget.
What's surprising to me is how many ex government employees they're able to find who voted for Trump and just didn't think they would get downsized because they're actually doing what they're supposed to be doing. I think it's interesting that Trump consistently gets the benefit of the doubt even in cases where the people he puts in positions of power pretty clearly intended to demoralize people by firing them.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-wh...
> If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
This quote doesn’t apply just to white men, or even just men.
> Hitler
Please keep using the same tired comparisons. It helps a lot.
That is interesting. Presenting public poll results is not really about poll results, but about shaping opinion. The struggle with the media in general is between reporting on the reality that they see vs the reality they want to create. It's an infantile make-belief: "If I put my gloves on, it will start snowing". But, take a large outfit like WP or NYT and it could sort of work that way, too!
But, this also doesn't disagree with the original article that there was a large margin of uncertainty. In that case, a newspaper had a choice of mentioning the uncertainty and emphasizing it, or presenting the 3% in favor or their candidate. I think they went with the latter.
Also, when Bezos blocked WP from endorsing Harris, I always wondered if he had his own better polling results, and he was pretty sure Trump would win, or he just gambled. It's like there are these secret reliable set of poll results to which billionaires get access too, while the public gets the watered down version. Going by the article at hand, perhaps him or his team could better read the results and didn't drink the kool-aid.
Suppose you want to know whether it will rain on your wedding day. Without any forecast, there are two scenarios you need to prepare for: it will rain, or it won't.
A 50-50 forecast doesn't change anything. You still need to prepare for both scenarios. There's a sense in which it's "useless" even though it's a valid forecast.
Forecasts are most useful when they allow you to eliminate a possibility, so you don't need to prepare for it. This means even something like an 80% chance might be of limited use, if you still need to prepare for the 20% case.
(Gambling and investing are different, because you can accept losses and make up for them with repeated bets. You still need to be prepared for losses, but that's a matter of not betting too much compared to your bankroll.)
Even if the forecasters don't do anything wrong, for many people, presidential election forecasts are of limited use. Either they don't have anything they need to do to prepare, or they still have to prepare for either candidate to win.
50-50 forecasts can be massive depending on your priors. If someone (who I trusted) told me there was a 50-50 chance I would get shot tomorrow if I went outside, you couldn’t pay me enough to go leave the house.
Absolutely! It didn't work that way for recent presidential elections, though. The prior odds weren't always 50:50, but they were well within the range of "both sides could win" and didn't go outside that.
In the case of an election, a 50:50 forecast is a clear reminder to the wise of the importance of voting, no matter how certain the outcome might seem from the necessarily limited perspective of your acquaintances and your consumption of possibly (or likely) biased news media.
If a modern US election went far outside that that would just mean some fool was burning a huge amount of money and probably to no purpose as it would cause a response from donors on the other side who would like an outcome but also aren't going to throw money away.
It's less likely for the presidency, but for other offices, it's often the case that an incumbent has only token competition.
You have a choice to go out or not but the example of the wedding is a given obligation, so the apples-apples comparison would be "if you had to go outside, would a 50-50 chance of being shot change anything"
This is an interesting hypothetical, and I hope people with better understanding of statistics would weigh in.
But lets change the example a bit:
- There's a 10% chance of getting shot on any day you leave the house - You are able to get 5 days of food any time you leave the house - There's a 100% chance of starving if you go 8 days without leaving your house
How long can you avoid getting shot or starving?
Presumably if you don't want to go hungry at all, you have to leave the house every 5 days to get more food. After 50 days, the odds of you having been shot are pretty darn high.
Respectfully, how is this noteworthy or add to the discussion?
I guess I was trying to get the parent comment to reconsider their position on 50/50 being useful because they would never leave the house. But I guess it's still "more" useful than 90/10 even, in their example, the chance during one day isn't reflective of long term odds.
But an election (particularly presidential) is only once every 4 years. And it's not "50/50" or "90/10" every election - it's typically a different match up of options, and a slightly different mix of percentages.
But fair criticism, I didn't successfully make a good point with my attempt.
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Suppose it rains on 50% of days. One forecaster gives a 50% chance of rain every day. Another gives a 90% chance of rain/not rain and is "wrong" 10% of of time. Both stations are giving you accurate information from a probability perspective (when station A says a 50% chance, you know there's a 50% chance of rain tomorrow, when station B says 90%, you know there's a 90% chance of rain tomorrow) but the 50% chance station is less useful as the number is lower. They have effectively given up in the same way pollsters have given up.
This is the best response in thread, imo. Is there a term for this phenomenon?
It's statistical information arbitrage.
Let's say you go to the futures market:
Seller pays a contract-buyer $1 if it rains tomorrow. How much will seller charge for that contract?
Bookmaker using forecaster A will sell that contract for $0.51 every day, and earn a profit of $0.01/contract, on average.
Bookmaker using forecaster B and their clients will buy that contract on probably sunny says, and bankrupt Forecaster A.
Similar result if Bookmaker B sells contracts to Bookmaker A, at $0.11 on probably-sunny days, and $0.90 on probably-rainy days.
I don't think so, though I often find someone has thought of the same thing I have and given it a name. The root of the issue is a matter of language. Events don't have probabilities. You don't predict a 50% chance of rain, you predict rain with a 50% certainty. (There are a lot of internet brain teasers that exploit this subtle ideological difference.) The 50% is talking about how often you're correct, not how likely the rain is to happen. Probabilities don't really exist; it either rains or it doesn't.
Weddings are unusually locked in dates. Canceling a hotel a few days out is generally free and 50% odds of rain can easily be high enough to postpone a weekend trip. 10% odds however may be worth the gamble even if both possibilities exist.
With elections you need to take both a short term and long term perspective. True 50/50 odds mean doubling down at the last minute is likely more valuable vs saving that money for the next election. I think the pollsters got things wildly wrong with that estimate because their underlying assumptions where off, but that’s a different issue.
The utility of consulting weather forecasts prior to events like weddings lies in the non-trivial possibility that it will give you a clear indication of what will happen.
The problem is that there are two 50-50 odds definitions.
First one, is where you have no information about the event what so ever.
Second is where you have information, and it turns out that the outcome is still 50-50.
While the use of that information in planning (pricing things, betting, investing) is identical, they fundamentally represent 2 different sets of information.
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There's a pretty clear test of whether a pollster is about reporting or influencing: the partisanship of their errors. Neutral pollsters have differences with the results randomly distributed across parties. Propagandists have errors that favor their patrons. This essay leans on the magnitude of the errors, but that's less probative than their distribution.
Does any poll aggregator order by randomness of polling error?
This mixes up accuracy with precision and 538 had written at length about this.
There's a big difference between pollster bias correction vs rating.
There are many pollsters that are pretty consistently +2D/R but are reliably off from the final result in that direction. These polls are actually extremely valuable once you make the correction in your model. Meanwhile, polls that can be off from the final result by a large amount but average out to about correct should not be trusted. This is a yellow flag for herding
A pollster can have an A+ rating while having a very consistent bias in one direction or another. The rating is meant to capture consistency/honesty of methodology more than result
A fair scale does not favor the grocer.
In this case it does. What pollsters sell is their reputations
Except the methodology biases the response: phone-only vs. in-person for example.
This doesn't account for poll bias that biases both parties, of course. Not all polling is designed to wage parties against each other: some is designed to pit parties against populace.
Highly recommend this video by NNT about why prediction markets tend towards 50-50.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRvPF__du9w
Prediction markets are usually implemented as binary options. Like vanilla options, their price depends not just on the most likely outcome, but the whole distribution. When uncertainty increases (imagine squishing a mound of clay), you end up pushing lots of probability mass (clay) to the other side of the bet and the expectation of the payoff (used to make a price) tends towards 1/2.
You’re welcome to bet against my prediction market about whether the quarter I flip will land on mars.
Or on the two markets for “New pope by tomorrow” and “new pope by 2030”, I’m sure those should both be 50% yes.
My experience is that the vast majority of prediction markets do not tend towards 50/50 because reality isn’t 100% uncertain.
It's the same as bookies, right? They are often seen as predicting the odds of an event happening, but that's actually the odds they estimate so that the bets are roughly divided 50/50, to limit their exposure, which is pretty different and depends on their market. English bookies will always overrate the chance of England winning at football, because English people will disproportionately place a bet for their team to win.
I don't think it's that simple - if other people find out English bookies overrate England, then they make a profit by betting against. I'm not saying every market is perfectly efficient but it would be surprising if a major inefficiency lasted for a while. And if "enough" bets are placed the set odds will always be an unbiased estimate of the true odds.
Sports bookies have a significant informational advantage over the everyday gambler; they index massive amounts of historical data and have access to live data which is lower-latency than radio or television broadcasts. That helps make the market inefficient.
> When uncertainty increases (imagine squishing a mound of clay), you end up pushing lots of probability mass (clay) to the other side of the bet and the expectation of the payoff (used to make a price) tends towards 1/2.
This doesn't make any sense. If you think the chances of someone of getting elected is very high (eg. Putin getting re-elected), nobody will be buying shares in him losing. True, the shares of "putin loses" is dirt cheap, but that doesn't mean much if he has a high chance of getting elected.
> the shares of "putin loses" is dirt cheap, but that doesn't mean much if he has a high chance of getting elected
This absolutely happens when you can make bets across multiple markets. But it doesn’t lead to every market with two outcomes drifting towards 50/50.
The reason election markets in competitive democracies tend towards 50/50 is because the outcome really isn’t that predictable.
It matters a lot what the price is of "putin loses." If Putin does in fact lose 5% of the time, but the odds are 3%, you should bet on it. It may feel silly to do that in this instance but consider what happens if you regularly bet in prediction markets. Always betting on the "putin wins" outcome loses money in the long run.
Seems like there is a hidden function when 50-50 polls exist: 100% uncertainty with 100% certainty. This is the equivalent to having no data at all.
Maybe we should just start saying "This is the equivalent scenario/situation to having no data at all." instead of 50-50.
Lets says I have a coin. I have no data on it. I do not know if it will come up heads or tails or if it is a fair coin.
I throw the coin N number of times and determine the coin is fair. I still do not know which side the coin will come up.
But this isn't the same as having no data on the coin. I've determined the coin is fair by gathering data, which otherwise I would not know. Often this added piece of information is crucial to making good decisions and not at all equivalent to the first case.
For instance, I might want to bet you that the next 10 throws in a row will all be heads. If you know the coin is fair, this is a good bet - but without data on the coin, it could be a trap.
The goal of polls is not to determine if an election is or is not a fair election. The goal of polls is to predict the final outcome of the election.
You state the case of no knowledge vs knowing 50/50 probability are equivalent, but they are clearly not.
If you have no data but one side is actually heavily favored to win, you cannot determine how much you should bet on that probability even though there is an opportunity to make good sized bets. If neither side is favored to win, then you can still make good sized bets if the payout is not 1:1.
The Kelly Criterion formulates all this - the probability of win/loss does in fact matter, and if you don't "know" that, you cannot make a good bet. Knowing it is 50/50, you can bet on it.
50-50 event with no edge, the Kelly Criterion suggests not to bet. (ChatGPT)
And this is exactly why you should not rely on AI without fundamental understanding.
That would only be true if the payout odds are even. And in my comment I explicitly say not 1:1 payout. Go ahead and ask the AI for clarification, I’m sure it can explain it to you. On Wikipedia, the factor is “b” - ie 2:1 payout and you would bet on a 50/50 event.
The intuition should be incredibly obvious here. I have a fair coin and will pay you 200 dollars for heads and take 1 dollar for tails. You would flip that coin as many times as I let you.
Even in your reply to this - ChatGPT is telling you in one situation you should not bet because the expected gain is nothing, and the other you don't know what to do - which is not equivalent. But the edge it is talking about is the expected gain over the probability of the event with the payout odds. If there is no edge, you won't bet. But you can have an edge with 50/50 odds, and if so you would bet.
Fails to see any difference other than "N/A" and "unpredictable":
Having no data at all is better than having the wrong information.
If you were previously pretty sure one side would win you gain information from a study that says it's 50-50.
If you already though it was even then the new study is pointless.
I think the lack of signal from the electorate does represent an entropic state and is likely because available information channels are saturated with noise.
A close race, creates more excitement and more cash for the media.
If you get on a horses and your horse keep losing and losing ground, watching the race becomes quite boring. If the horses are neck on neck you will be captivated watching it till the very end.
The media has a strong incentive to sell the elections as close to keep more people seeing their ads and buying subscriptions.
The odds on Polymarket (and other betting markets) started diverging at the start of October; by the end of the month, the odds were 65/35 in favour of Trump.
At the time, many commentators were arguing that this was obvious market manipulation. It turned out that the trader who had supposedly manipulated the market had in fact commissioned private polls using an alternative methodology - rather than asking people how they would vote, it asked how they expected their neighbours to vote.
https://polymarket.com/event/presidential-election-winner-20...
https://www.ft.com/content/e8b2ff85-a4dd-40cd-a4c1-e3d706869...
https://www.ft.com/content/4b302ab8-7e40-4d1a-bbe6-3d46f6811...
Interesting. If you think about it, that's how the stock market works. It's not how much you think a stock is worth; it's really how much you think everyone else thinks the stock is worth.
Yes but unlike with stocks, you don't want to agree with them: if you think people overrate the chances of an event, you'd against it.
That is similar with stocks. I'd say the difference is that PolyMarket has an end date where everything gets resolved one way or another. Stocks can go on forever.
Oh you're right, it is basically the same, the undervalued stock is the one to buy. I guess I was thinking about another difference which is that the value of stocks seems more vibes-based and a really stupid product (from the investor's perspective) can sometimes become popular. In prediction markets the outcome is more concrete.
Was this a new development in polling?
No, it was fairly well known a decade or more ago as a very good way to remove bias for how low-effort it is. We were using a variation of it at work back then for an unrelated subject.
How much it's used in political polling I can't say.
It just seems so obvious-I would have been surprised if it was only discovered in the last election.
Can't wait to check the DraftKings odds on the presidential election before I head to the polls to see if it's worth bothering to vote./s
I always get annoyed when people look at election outcomes and say “the polls were wrong” when the most likely outcome didn’t happen. It’d be like saying there’s a 5/6 chance that a 6-sided dice will not roll a 4, rolling a 4, and then concluding that the initial proposed probability was wrong.
That's not how polls work though. A poll shows how a sample of people say they'll vote. An ideal poll would have the same proportions as the final popular vote count.
Thank you! Lordy it's crazy that this thread isn't distinguishing polls which are a measurement and the resulting prediction based on those polls.
If you polled 60%/40% yea/nay you wouldn't give the nays a 40% chance of winning. You need P(yeas > 50%) based on your observed measurement.
I came away from 2016 wondering if any of the electoral outcome stuff is worth doing given how much it gets misunderstood.
“They said Hillary had a 90% but Trump won! They’re idiots!”
No! They said Trump had a 10% chance and he won. It was a predicted outcome!
The problem is using statistical models at all for predicting the probability of one time events. (elections are every 4 years, but those future models will be different).
You can't validate such a model, and it's not useful since any upset victory was "accounted for" simply because its possibility was named.
It is a rational behavior to question a prediction if an event that was deemed to have low probability actually happened, I don’t like the implication that it is stupid to do so.
In fact, after thorough investigation, most polling agencies did identify significant factors that let to bias, and almost all major pollsters have adapted their methods in later elections as a result: education weighting, compensating for nonresponse bias, diversified polling channels beyond phone calls (online surveys, text messages, in-app polling), likely-voter modeling…
I don’t think any professional pollster will tell you that the prediction you mentioned was reasonably accurate in retrospect, regardless of affiliation.
I don’t attribute malice or incompetence, it’s clear that the game changed suddenly and new confounding factors became significant. People that would previously vote together diverged significantly, lots of politically inactive people became involved, people were afraid to be honest, and people that were harder to reach were voting much differently to those that were more accessible to pollsters. That will really mess with any sampling strategy that proved reliable for many years before.
538 had Trump at 30.7% the night before, FWIW: https://web.archive.org/web/20161107224336/https://projects....
If someone says there is an x% chance of an event happening, is there a value of x other than 0 & 100 where they can be wrong?
What is the value that someone can derive out of such predictions ?
If someone predicts something will happen with a 90% probability, then they should be wrong roughly 10% of the time. We can't determine that from a single event, but we could look at 10 events predicted by the same model. In the case of election forecasts, we would expect 1/10 elections predicted at 90% probability to have the wrong estimate. So we would expect the average person to see it at least once, and probably twice, in their lifetime.
But is your 10% chance of Trump winning model a better model than one that gave Trump a 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, or 90% chance of winning?
If you can't show that why should anyone listen to you?
There is the statisticians aphorism often attributed to George Box that "All models are wrong but some are useful". This goes against the core argument of this essay that pretty much says that "The models were mostly right, but not useful" which not a useful argument itself, even if its right
Predict 100 fair coin flips..
My result didn't match yours. The model isn't useful?
I think polling these days is all but useless just because a very small proportion of people actually respond to pollsters and it's next to impossible to statistically account for "what would the other 80% say if they did't tell the pollster to fuck off". There's no way to build a "representative sample" to account for that. People are way more likely to respond to a "friendly" pollster and if they don't know whether pollster is "friendly" (works for the organisation aligned with their party), they assume they are from the other camp. It's a mess.
But the surveys were pretty accurate this election. So I’m not sure why you say they are useless.
I don't know about the framing of "giving up." But I think anyone who's been following election models since the original 538 in 2008 has probably gotten the feeling that they have less alpha in them than they did back then. I think there's some obvious reasons for this that the forecasters would probably agree with.
The biggest one seems to be a case of Goodhart's Law, leading to herding. Pollsters care a lot now about what their rating is in forecasting models, so they're reluctant to publish outlier results, those outlier results are very valuable for the models but are likely to get a pollster punished in the ratings next cycle.
Lots of changes to polling methods have been made due to polls underestimating Trump. Polls have become like mini models unto themselves. Due to their inability to poll a representative slice of the population they try to correct by adjusting their results to compensate for the difference between who they've polled and the likely makeup of the electorate. This makes sense in theory, but of course introduces a whole bunch of new variables that need to be tuned correctly.
On top of all this is the fact that the process is very high stakes and emotional with pollsters and modellers alike bringing their own political biases and only being able to resist pressure from political factions so much.
The analogy I kept coming back to watching election models during this last cycle was that it looked like an ML model that didn't have the data it needed to make good predictions and so was making the safest prediction it could make given what it did have. Basically getting stuck in this local minima at 50-50 that was least likely to be off by a lot.
Even if polling had been exactly right, you wouldn't have been that confident in the outcome.
In my unsophisticated toy model, plugging in the exact actual result as the polling average (but not telling it how the actual vote went) spits out 66% R-34% D. Clearly one side favored, but hardly a guarantee. Because the result was close, and even highly accurate data in a close result yields an uncertain forecast.
Remember that asteroid a month ago? We knew what its position would be seven years in the future with a precision of a few hours. But because the position was very close to an impact, even that high precision was not enough to rule out an impact.
> Due to their inability to poll a representative slice of the population they try to correct by adjusting their results to compensate for the difference between who they've polled and the likely makeup of the electorate.
This is where polling becomes race science.
> This makes sense in theory
It does not make sense in theory. It is a necessity for the profession, but all justifications for it are specious. Polls only get it right when everybody is getting it right. What they offer is false precision and justification for the current narratives.
It's similar to AI in that way. It's also similar to the mythical prediction markets that polls have been compared to lately, the "mythical" here meaning with no insiders involved. On issues where there are no real insiders, like close elections, the prediction markets are simply a lagging indicator of what pundits said in the paper this morning. That goofy Iowa poll swung them so hard that I thought Seltzer should have been investigated for whatever the prediction market equivalent to securities fraud is.
It might be more accurate in light of the OP to say that polls get it right when everybody is getting it right, and when everybody isn't sure what's going to happen, polling accuracy is around 50/50.
The best book to read about polling is The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading by Ian Rowland. It also tells you how to write defenses like this, which are part of the con.
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edit:
Section headings from "The Win-Win Game" from TFFBoCR, which teaches 10+1 ways how to make failures seem like successes:
> 1. Persist, wonder and let it linger.
> (Phase A: The psychic persists with the official statement and tries to encourage at least partial agreement. B: she acts puzzled, and invites the client to share the blame for the 'discrepancy.' C: she leaves the discrepancy unresolved, in case the client finds a match later on.)
> 2. I am right, but you have forgotten.
> 3. I am right but you do not know.
> 4. I am right but nobody knows.
> 5. I am right, but it's embarrassing.
> 6. I am wrong now, but I will be right soon.
> 7. I am wrong, but it doesn't matter.
> 8. I am wrong in fact, but right emotionally.
> 9. I am wrong in fact, but right within [the] system.
> 10. Wrong small print, right headline.
> [+1]. Accept, apologise, and move on.
> (In this way the psychic cuts her losses and moves on. She leaves the problem behind, where it will be quickly forgotten, and at the same time she comes across as extremely honest.)
Very much worth reading for entrepreneurs looking for investment or any other confidence men. Rowland even tried to brand it a few years ago in Cold Reading For Business as the "CRFB" system.
okay, now change "election prediction models" to "Climate models" and see if you feel like downvoting me merely for pointing out the (slight?) hypocrisy in "excusing" every other model we humans use for being "inaccurate" or "not having the full details" or the "whole slice of"...
when none of the models tend to agree... and the IPCC literature published however often they do it is hung upon the framework of models.
All models are wrong, but some are useful.
Climate modeling is way messier than the media portrays, yet even optimistic models show drastic change.
I'm not in the catastrophy camp, but it's worth preparing for climate change regardless of origin. It's good for humanity to be resilient to a hostile planet.
Yeah my view is a little trite but... "we cleaned the air and closed the ozone hole and reduced our dependency on oil from a small number of OPEC countries all for nothing?".
I support the climate change mitigation and adaptation moves that would be nice anyway (many of the most important ones) and would prefer alternatives to things like turning all the arable land into pinus radiata plantations to generate ETS credits or voluntarily paying "climate fines" to shadowy international organisations if we don't hit certain "targets".
That's a great of sidesteping the massive costs of doing all those things
There are massive costs of not doing those things – and, as far as I can tell, those costs are greater. Coal is expensive and irradiates the atmosphere. Oil drilling causes spills, fracking causes earthquakes, and oil dependency has been a major driver of war for the past century.
> Coal is expensive and irradiates the atmosphere. Oil drilling causes spills, fracking causes earthquakes, and oil dependency has been a major driver of war for the past century.
Fracking lowers emissions. As far as I've been able to tell, earthquakes aren't a major problem with it.
This is where the activists end up showing their true colors, and why many people have grown to distrust them over time. On the one hand, they claim Global Warming is going to bring us to the brink of human extinction unless we act rapidly. On the other, they're trying to stop things that will lower emissions if it doesn't follow their preferred course of action.
> Fracking lowers emmissions?
How? Burning fuel from fracking emits CO₂ into the atmosphere, just like any other fossil fuel. On top of that unburned methane is often released into the atmosphere, which is much more potent than CO₂ is a greenhouse gas.
> On the one hand, they claim Global Warming is going to bring us to the brink of human extinction unless we act rapidly.
Extinction is exaggerated (I'm not even sure who exactly claims that?), but we are indeed making our environment tougher and tougher to live in. There are already places that have become too hot to live in for parts of the year, to name just one thing.
Relevant news article regarding earthquakes: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-49471321
And I'm not sure how fracking lowers emissions? It results in large quantities of methane being emitted: methane is a very potent greenhouse gas (which eventually decays to carbon dioxide, also a greenhouse gas albeit a less potent one). Seems like fracking increases emissions, to me – not that I'm an expert.
Jevons Paradox tells us that embracing fracking to reduce coal emissions isn't enough, because any gains in lowering emissions will be offset by people burning more oil. There's a lot of underserved demand for energy, so gradual increases in efficiency (or, in this case, per-watt emissions) do not actually reduce total consumption.
Unless your plan to reduce emissions by embracing fracking comes with laws to restrict consumption - like, the kind of laws you'd have the villain in an Ayn Rand novel pass - then all you will do is increase emissions.
Of course, deliberately enforcing energy poverty is a bad idea and most[0] environmentalists aren't in favor of it. The reason why activists push renewables so hard is because the externalities on those are way better. i.e. pollution will not 'catch up' on solar and wind nearly as quickly, if at all, because solar panels don't emit anything when you're harvesting energy with them.
Also, solar is really, really cheap. It's pretty hard to argue against an energy source that gives you energy too cheap to meter, even if it's only during the day.
[0] i.e. the ones that aren't outright enviro-fascists. Though, if you were an enviro-fascist, your best bet would be to just do nothing and embrace fossil fuel accelerationism.
Also the best model (current reality) is showing climate change!
A++ would upvote again
Hyperaccurate voter profiling and predictions is a tool of oppression in democracy.
It highlights precise means for the rich to use targeted propaganda to maximum effect for wedge issues and electioneering to serve their ends, both in forming the winning coalition, and it neutering the opposition.
I’m gonna take this opportunity to clarify a comment I wrote earlier this week: Sure, polling may be difficult to interpret when uncertainty is high and margins are small, but there are many elections every year that are easily predictable blowouts, but which are often not portrayed that way depending on your information diet.
Like, I can’t count the number of times someone will show me an awesome political ad for an awesome person who’s going up against an awful politician I hate, and there’ll be all this hope and the person showing me the ad will be thinking this person has a chance of winning. And then I’ll look at the polling and realize they’re down by 20 points in a state Trump carried by 30 and the error bars are only 3 points in each direction.
So even if polling close races can get messy, polling overall provides an extremely powerful antidote to a lot of propaganda and echo-chamber thinking.
Nate Silver also had an article saying that the most likely scenario would be a blowout. There was a 25% chance that Trump would win all 7 battleground state, a 15% chance Harris would win all 7. No other permutation of the 7 states was anywhere close.
True, but the word "blowout" in this case is just a crazy side-effect of our weird electoral college system.
Everyone knows that in all the swing states (except Arizona), the final vote margin was just a few percent, and that was well within the MOE for all the "50-50" polling in each of those states.
No one seriously believes that any President has had a blowout election since maybe Obama in 2008 or Bush in 2004, but the media sure loves the word "blowout".
So basically, if you ignore how the entire system works then it wasn't a blowout lol. I'm guessing the media was taking into account that we indeed use an electoral college system so that is all that matters.
I think "blowout" to some (most? vast majority?) without more context implies that the voting citizens strongly preferred a candidate. So people pushback against the clickbait word being used to drive engagement.
The only score that matters is the one used to call the game, because that’s the only score anyone is trying to win. We simply don’t know what would have happened under a different set of rules.
The “ground game” is extremely expensive: https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4934604-kamala-harris-g.... Especially for republicans, whose voters are spread out over rural areas. In post-election interviews, Trump campaign strategists revealed that to save money they largely eschewed a traditional ground game in favor of target outreach to low propensity voters. Even then, Trump received a lot of criticism on the right for doing a handful of rallies in California and New York.
As it is, both campaigns focused most of their resources on the seven swing states, and Trump swept all of them. Had the election been close you would’ve expected by sheer chance each candidate to get some of the swing states, but that didn’t happen.
Certainaly there are no rules for what is a blowout or a mandate... But we can look back and see Reagan won all but one state, and say yeah, that was a blow out, and Reagan had a mandate.
IMHO, if you don't win in any of your opponent's stronghold states, it's not much of a blowout. Yes, it was a win and any win gets you the whole four years, so it doesn't really matter what you want to call it, but it's yet another gaslighting IMHO.
To be clear, I don’t think it was a blowout or a landslide or anything like that. I’m just saying it’s not as close as the PV would make it seem. Harris’s campaign said their internal polling never showed her ahead, and the result was consistent with that.
In particular, he wiped out two decades of immigration-driven leftward shift in the electorate, which was how Biden was able to win traditionally red states like Arizona and Georgia. Trump won Nevada, which is now under 45% white, by more than Bush did in 2000, when it was 65% white. He lost New Jersey by less than six points, doing better now that the state is only 55% white than Bush did in 2004 when it was 70% white. He won Texas by a similar margin to Bush in 88 and Florida by more than Reagan did in 1980.
When 0.1% of the total voters can swing the vote from being 60 for red to being 60 for blue, polling is obviously going to be pretty tricky to predict.
no, he means a blowout is entirely dependent on the few people that are in the states that count. Therefore your MoE is higher because your population size is significantly lower.
You can pretty much ignore every non-swing state and the result of polls would be the same.
How the specific electoral system works is irrelevant. In our case, our electoral system is designed to make most voters' votes not actually matter, so I really don't care about it one bit when talking about who had more or less support in the country as a whole. Trump only got 1.5% more votes than Harris did. That's not a blowout.
Even if you insist on going by electoral votes, 58% to 42% isn't a blowout either.
If they're not completely independent variables, that should be the expected outcome (e.g., they all trend the same direction).
And if they're not that close, they're not battleground.
They are where the campaign money and attention is going, what about battleground implies independence? Whoever wins them will win the election.
Trump won the popular vote by 1.5%. That's the 8th closest election in all of US history.
Maybe he meant an EC blowout. But that's easier to predict. Most polling had almost all the swing states as extremely close. The outcome was likely to swing in the same direction across all swing states so an EC blowout is likely
Why does it matter? If the system was different the whole campaign would have changed. Only the votes that matter actually matter. The rest is just speculation and you really have no idea what would happen to the popular vote if that’s what was important. He won!
Also the idea that people's votes don't count because they are in a "safe seat" is bananas. Of course it counts: they count it, and it goes towards the final result. It is like saying that the only purchase to really bankrupt you is the last one you made. No, of course not, it is the aggregate. The straw did not actually break the camel's back, and seven states do not decide the election. 271 electoral votes do! All 271+ of them.
I think it's a bit more complicated than you make it sound. I live in California, so of course all my state's electoral votes went to Harris. I could have not bothered to vote, but the problem is that if everyone like me were to think the same way, those electoral votes could go to someone else.
So yes, in a literal, technical sense, my vote counted. But in reality, my vote had little to do with the outcome, whereas the votes of someone in Pennsylvania or Arizona had everything to do with the outcome. Those seven states absolutely did decide the election.
I do think that tallying the overall popular vote is a useful metric, even if the election's outcome doesn't depend on it, so I guess in that sense my vote "counted" as well.
So how many seats is a vote worth in Iowa vs California? Is it the same? If Elections would be done via tokens and you had 10 and another person gets 60 to vote, would you say that is unfair?
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Using the popular vote in a system where the popular vote means nothing seems a bit odd. Why not use the candidate's hand sizes instead? It's just as arbitrary.
It's helpful in the same way opinion or approval polls are helpful.
It also shows potential for how things could've otherwise gone.
If you wanna use the electoral college, be my guest. But know that making that data is useful is MUCH more difficult. In theory a candidate could win every single state by 0.01% and lose a state by 99%. They would win in a blowout in the EC but in the popular vote they actually lost. And you would get a highly skewed and unhelpful representation of the actual election results
The popular vote result in the US is neither an opinion poll or approval poll. If it was, it would have been helpful, but it's not, because the popular vote would be very different if US election outcomes were determined by the popular vote as opposed to the current system.
> If you wanna use the electoral college, be my guest.
It's part of the constitution of the US, not my personal preference.
No, that's not just as arbitrary. Please don't make bad-faith arguments.
The popular vote count is a measure of the level of support for the candidate.
The electoral vote count is, unfortunately, how we determine who gets the office, and that's literally it. It just tells us who did better at influencing voters in a handful of states that actually matter in the idiotic electoral college system, putting the result of the election into the hands of a small minority of voters. That says nothing about the overall support a candidate has.
In the end, Trump had the support of 1.5% more actual voters than Harris did. It wasn't a blowout, he has no mandate. And we really have no idea what would have happened if our system was based on the popular vote. If candidates had to campaign in every state, to get every voter out that they can to support them, the final results would probably not look the same as what we go.
>putting the result of the election into the hands of a small minority of voters
Are you referring to the final 538 electors who actually make the final vote? Most of them are bound to vote based on who their state voted for. Aside from some rare exceptions (like that WA elector that voted for Chief Spotted Eagle in 2016 as some sort of weird protest).
Or are you trying to claim that only swing voters in swing states are responsible for the outcome of the election? Because that's a fallacy I've seen a lot of people make recently that I'm just going to start calling "the tiebreaker fallacy". If you have a panel of 101 voters where 50 people vote one way, 50 vote the other way, and one person is the tiebreaker, you can not make the claim that only the tiebreaker's vote counts. All 101 voters were part of the process. At any time, any of the other 100 voters could have changed their votes and the outcome would have changed.
> At any time, any of the other 100 voters could have changed their votes and the outcome would have changed.
This is where your analogy is getting tripped up. The EV outcome for the vast majority of states is certain. California's EVs were never going to go to Trump in any possible reality. Louisiana's EVs were never going to go for Harris. These states cannot "change their votes."
If the makeup of the 50-50 split voters in your scenario is fixed and known with certainty ahead of the election, then it really is the case that only that 101st vote matters and the other 100 people have to live with that 1 person's vote.
This is how the EC works. The EV outcomes for most states are fixed and known ahead of time. The only votes that matter for the presidential election are those in the ~7 or so states that we call "swing states," because the outcome of the election in the other ~43 states is known with certainty ahead of time.
Note: I'm using "fixed" here to mean "unchangeable," not something like "rigged".
>The EV outcome for the vast majority of states is known ahead of time.
There's a world of difference between being predicatively partisan and not being able to vote at all.
>only that 101st vote matters and the other 100 people have to live with that 1 person's vote
No, its actually that 50 people have to live with 51 people's votes. That one person is not voting alone. Your post is the perfect example of the tiebreaker fallacy.
This seems like a distinction without a difference. It is still the case that the only people influencing the election outcome are the voters in the swing states. The outcome will always be "40% + swing-states" versus "40% + other-swing-states." If you're in one of those 40%s, your vote does not matter to the result, because your state's result is already determined. This is unlike your analogy, which supposes that no votes are fixed.
> California's EVs were never going to go to Trump in any possible reality.
California was reliably Republican in the 80s, so no, you can't really say that for certain.
All states shifted to the right in this election. Illinois for example has been reliably Democrat, but if it shifts as much in the next election as it did in this past one, it would become a swing state.
He absolutely has a mandate. You don't have to have a "blowout" to have a mandate. He has several mandates actually.
> The popular vote count is a measure of the level of support for the candidate.
This would only be true if the popular vote result would be entirely unchanged if the election system was changed to be based on popular vote. And the popular vote would almost definitely have been different if the election results were based on popular vote, so it's then not a measure of the level of support for the candidate.
> The electoral vote count is, unfortunately, how we determine who gets the office
Why is it unfortunate?
> That says nothing about the overall support a candidate has.
Can you cite any evidence that the popular vote is a better indication of the candidate's popular support than the electoral college?
> In the end, Trump had the support of 1.5% more actual voters than Harris did.
Again this would only be true if the popular vote would be unaffected if the election was based on popular vote, which is a false assumption.
> he has no mandate.
Please cite.
> And we really have no idea what would have happened if our system was based on the popular vote.
This seems to contradict everything else you wrote as your reasoning is only valid if you work under the assumption that the popular vote would not have changed at all if the system was based on the popular vote.
As I recall none of the big polls the mainstream media was pushing projected Trump to win. They even refused to call the election until the wee hours of the morning, when the results were pretty clear. Just like in 2016, the polls were intended to deceive people into thinking there was no hope for an alternative candidate.
Major decisions desks (AP, Edison, and Fox News; plus a recent newcomer called DDHQ) have made about 3 incorrect calls in their entire history (they were house races, not senate or presidential calls). An incorrect call is a HUGE deal and they have an extremely high bar for certainty. Even for Obama, who's wins were basically a landslide compared to the past 3 elections, calls weren't made until around midnight. Historically it's even common for presidential candidates to concede even before decision desks have made an official call (another norm Trump has challenged).
Anyways Decision Desks are a very different topic than pollsters and have no overlap.
I don't know what "mainstream media" you were consuming but as a bettor, I definitely didn't get the sense that the race was locked in. All major polls had Biden trailing Trump. Harris got a big boost but that only pushed her to being neck and neck with Trump. We can check the Wayback Machine to verify your claim
* NYTimes frontpage the day before the election says "turnout is a focus in a closely divided race" https://web.archive.org/web/20241105011526/https://www.nytim...
* Vox frontpage says "5 reasons Harris could win and 4 reasons Trump could" and "Should it really be this hard to beat Trump?" https://web.archive.org/web/20241106000611/https://www.vox.c...
* CNN frontpage does not include any particular characterization of chances https://web.archive.org/web/20241105000156/https://edition.c...
A cursory look at other "mainstream" media sources will easily verify that the race was clearly represented as a very close tossup.
> complains about mainstream media
> has no idea what mainstream media says because only source of information is unreliable fringe news sources
many such cases
I get information from everywhere. Don't project your ignorance of alternatives on me.
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> Just like in 2016, the polls were intended to deceive people into thinking there was no hope for an alternative candidate.
And who, in your opinion, executed this coordinated deception, and to what end?
The Democrat-leaning media is obviously the culprit I'm talking about, and they do it to try to win. While there is some Republican-leaning media, approximately 80% of the media leans toward Democrats.
That's just not true. Even the New York Times had Trump projected to win on election day '24, before any state had finished polling.
> Trump won the popular vote by 1.5%. That's the 8th closest election in all of US history.
You're kind of glossing over the fact that a Republican hasn't won the popular vote since 1988 and the prevailing wisdom was that the EC was the _only_ thing giving Republican candidates a fighting chance in presidential elections (so much so that every election we hear much wailing and gnashing of teeth that the EC system should replaced by popular vote, and in fact there is an "electoral vote compact" that several states have entered into that pledges to give all electoral votes to the popular vote winner as a way to nullify the EC). For Trump, with his MANY issues, to win the _popular vote_ by 1.5% is monumental, and I guarantee you not a single model predicted that in any way whatsoever.
You put a Nikki Haley up there and she would've won the popular vote by 5-10%, easily. Which would be astounding numbers for a Republican candidate in this day and age.
> You're kind of glossing over the fact that a Republican hasn't won the popular vote since 1988
George W. Bush won the popular vote in 2004. There are several other factual errors in your comment that are ruinous for your conclusions.
My bad, you’re right. So instead of happening in 1/9 elections before this last one it’s 2/9. A dramatic difference indeed. What else is incorrect?
It is insufficient to make a prediction like 50-50 in a US election unless you also can explain turnout. Anyone can throw out numbers like "51-49" or "55-45" but how did you get to those numbers? How are different demographics voting? How is there turnout changing? I've seen people laud their own accuracy in 2020 while being off by about 30 million in predicted turnout.
The way different demographics vote in US elections doesn't change much from election to election. What does change is turnout and turnout is a function of many things: enthusiasm for the candidate, voter suppression, ease of access to voting and so on.
2020 was unprecedented because of the pandemic. We greatly expanded early voting and mail-in ballots, which greatly increased participation.
A perfect example of this is Arizona. In 2020, Native Americans were crucial to flipping the state to Biden. Arizona state lawmakers responded to this by essentially punishing them and making it way more difficult to vote. Voter ID requirements, birth certificates and even having a physical address are all impediments to people who were born on and/or reside on reservations. There were fewer voting places and voting options. A rural voting place might randomly close early too after being an hours long drive.
Some looked at this and said Native Americans in Arizona swung hard to Trump. No, they were simply largely prevented from voting such that the only Native Americans who could reliably vote were more affluent and thus more likely to be Trump voters.
My point is: what polling model captured this prior to the 2024 election? I guarantee you it's none.
What really happened in 2024 was:
1. Biden voters swung to the couch in the millions;
2. Trump basically didn't lose white women, despite the abortion issue; and
3. Trump activated a previously low-propensity voter demographic: angry, young, terminally online white males, basically the Andrew Tate and 4chan crowd.
Any model has a difficulty with low-propensity demographics. Did any model capture this? I think it only started to become apparent with early voting exit polls.
I don't think the 2024 polls were particularly accurate. I do think they threw their hands up and simply converged to 50-50. Small differences in turnout predictions for different demographics can massively impact the result.
In fact it is the result of much effort to keep the people as perfectly divided as possible.
I think it's fascinating that the colorized maps of each voting precinct are always almost perfect population maps where high-population centers are blue and low-population areas are red.
My pet conspiracy theory is that the monetary influence in US politics is a deciding factor in keeping it close to 50/50 as this allows for the biggest footballification of politics and thus allows politicans/donors to extract the most from people who vote against their interest just to see the other side lose.
The only thing I am unsure about is whether this needs coordination (a conspiracy) or is just a systemic dynamic that emerges from the rules of the system.
Per Occam's Razor, it's usually the systemic dynamic
The whole question of using probability here is philosophically fraught. If you are saying "this has a probability of 50%" then you're saying "this will happen half of the time if you repeat the test". I don't think Harris would win 5 times if you ran that election 10 more times. From that regard, the 50% guess is quite inaccurate, and does just seem to be the pollsters "giving up" in the sense that they're pretty clueless and so ended up going with an even split. This is speculation on my part, but I think that election was decided in Trump's favor pretty decisively long before the publishing date of the last 50/50 poll.
Edit: to elucidate, suppose it rains on 50% of days. One forecaster gives a 50% chance of rain every day. Another gives a 90% chance of rain/not rain and is "wrong" 10% of of time. Both stations are giving you accurate information from a probability perspective (when station A says a 50% chance, you know there's a 50% chance of rain tomorrow, when station B says 90%, you know there's a 90% chance of rain tomorrow) but the 50% chance station is less useful as the number is lower. They have effectively given up in the same way pollsters have given up; they're saying there is no information that could give them a higher probability. The reason a single event can have many different probabilities is because probability is about repeated events. Both stations are predictions accurately reflect the distribution of rain/not rain days.
I guess the article says that election polling in the US given the current landscape, or rather the landscape during the past election, is useless.
Today Biden is up 2%, please remember that the polls have a +-3% uncertainty built in, so we have nothing to report
>Trump and Harris are both a normal polling error away from a blowout
If this is the conclusion from all the data gathering and analysis then what's even the point? If the conclusion is: it could be a blowout either way, we have no idea. Seems like a waste of a lot of time and resources, for what gain exactly?
It seems to be a matter of indifference to many that a persistent societal division of fifty-fifty is symptomatic of a profound societal schism. This is because such a division, in any configuration, maximizes the number of those who are discontented. As it is written, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." To my mind, this matter is of far greater significance than any secondary, tangible processes that may be occurring in consequence.
Furthermore, the mechanisms that ensure the mathematical expectation of electoral outcomes to hover around a fifty-fifty split — a phenomenon observable in many nations — are fundamentally economic in nature. Both factions commit resources to the electoral contest to secure a mere one percent advantage, as such is the foundational principle of democracy: a majority of fifty-one percent prevails.
Thus, economic factors — for an electoral campaign is, in essence, a contest of capital—having, in effect, subverted the very system of democratic elections, inevitably lead to the decay of nations that religiously adhere to the mathematics of a single percentage point as the sole criterion of legitimacy. In optimizing for democratic representation, social stability and equilibrium have been forfeited.
It is akin to the psychological paradox: "I am correct, and all acknowledge it, yet why do I not experience contentment?" It is because one has optimized for correctness — or in the context of elections, for fairness and representativeness — rather than for overall well-being. Such is the predicament inherent in the pursuit of a mere fifty-one percent majority.
> as such is the foundational principle of democracy: a majority of fifty-one percent prevails.
There are other ways of doing voting and organizing a democracy that are less prone to this winner take all dynamic. The foundational principle of democracy is consent of the governed. The details of how that's achieved can vary widely.
One is to do the vote differently, such as with ranked choice voting where voters are free to choose the candidate they actually want without "wasting" their vote.
Another is parliamentary style systems with proportional representation, which allow more than just two parties to have a voice and require the parties to form coalitions to govern.
Lastly, you can vote on actual policy proposals instead of just on politicians and parties. It's not either-or -- it's possible to have a system with both representatives and direct voting on major points of contention.
That is indeed the case. Perhaps I should have clarified that my comments are directed at the current political system of the United States. The purpose of my message was to highlight that there is a certain opposing force at play, one that is shifting the working system – specifically, the US electoral system – towards a range of diminished effectiveness. Essentially, the rules are being manipulated in such a way that while they may technically function, the fundamental objectives are still being undermined. These objectives, as outlined in the US Constitution, are to ensure domestic tranquility and promote the general welfare. It is necessary to address this systemic vulnerability, as this issue is becoming increasingly relevant in many places.
I disagree. I think the US system with 2 parties is superior to the systems in many other nations where there are multiple parties. The problem with multiple parties is that it is difficult to form a governing coalition. In the US the problem of coalition building simply does not exits (I wonder how many people in the US are even aware of the concept). Basically, the coalition building is done ahead of the elections, by various interest groups aligning themselves with one of the two parties. This alignment is voluntary and dynamic, so the shape of the two parties continuously changes. The debate seems quite polarized and this is indeed a problem. But I think it stems more from the way people's exposure to information has changed with the advent of the internet and social media, and less from how the US organizes its electoral process.
Without nitpicking the typical coalition details here, I want to consider a more general point. It's somewhat self evidently not a great thing for countries to be swapping systems back and forth dramatically based on margins of a few percent. It's unstable and will inevitably lead to a systemic collapse as the shifts grow greater and greater over time. It's rocking a boat back and forth.
I would go one step further and say that executive power should be dramatically reigned in, and that laws should take an 80% consensus to pass. And laws also have to be renewed every 'x' years with a similarly large consensus, perhaps with a method similar to constitutional amendment to allow for permanent laws. Under such a system you'd absolutely have to collaborate to ever do anything. And I think this would be a very good thing.
Such a system would also completely do away with divide and conquer as a political strategy, which again is also a very good thing - as that's likely one of the biggest causes of instability in the Western world today.
> you'd absolutely have to collaborate to ever do anything
You could also refuse to collaborate to do everything. This would result in an anarchist system where power/money has the ability to do whatever they want without regulatory oversight and the public are unable to vote to give themselves any rights they can't take by force.
I think that's assuming the status quo of horrible divides. In the past many social bills passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. For instance the Pure Food and Drug Act [1], which would lead to the FDA, was passed in 1906 by a 90%+ margin in both the House and Senate. I mean who's going to oppose outlawing mislabeled products? In a country that hasn't been trained to hate 'the other side', basically nobody.
But in modern times a typical social experiment (of which there are a zillion on YouTube) is to describe some policy passed by a President/party but swap the names to 'the other side.' People's response to the policy will invariably sharply shift. People aren't even thinking about what they think is a good idea anymore, but seeing everything through a hyper-partisan lens. That's obviously not conducive to bipartisan acts, pretty much ever.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Food_and_Drug_Act
The median voter theorem does some work to dampen the rocking.
> and that laws should take an 80% consensus to pass.
I think this is trying to solve the wrong problem. If our concern was that the second the new party gets that 51% margin they suddenly start passing a ton of laws, that would help reign it in. But that's not really what is happening. Congress has become profoundly unproductive in the last few decades. As an example, the last time Congress passed a budget on time, which is the bare minimum of functioning, was in the 1990s. By basically any metric, Congress is becoming less and less capable of passing laws. Requiring 80% consensus would make that even harder. And requiring laws to be reviewed every X years would greatly increase the responsibilities of Congress to keep the government functioning.
It's more about the equilibrium and motivations that this system creates. When everything is decided on a 1% majority, there's no real need to cooperate on anything. If you don't have power now, you probably will in a few years and then you can do whatever you want. So you can just focus on getting reelected in the mean time and vote no on everything until then. This, btw, is exactly what happens - Congress spends most of their time in office simply working on their next election. Term limits would seriously help here.
What you mention about budgets is a good example of this. Neither side wants to cooperate on anything at all. So in the House you get things like one side votes 100% yes, the other side 100% no. And then it gets passed to the Senate. The reason budgets freeze up in the Senate is the filibuster where you need a 60% majority to pass. So suddenly there's actually some cooperation required which is when both sides tend to start working together, a little, to add this or remove that.
But with an 80% consensus required, you need to start the cooperation immediately in the House because you can't just roughshod your fantasy budget through on a 1% margin. And none of this is going to change in 4 years, or 40. If you want to get things done, you need to start viewing 'the other side' as just other people working towards what they see as a desirable direction for the country, instead of an opposing team to be conquered and strawmanned into the worst evil since Hitler.
The party that actively attempts to destroy a government by blocking all bills, then point to the underfunded, broken system and say "government does work, you should sell all of that to a billionaire" would LOVE your idea.
The problem with two parties is everything is left or right. Coalition building can be hard but the work bridges ideas/approaches which pull more people together.
Two party systems end up governing from their extreme positions while trying to pull 1% over.
> Two party systems end up governing from their extreme positions while trying to pull 1% over.
Why must it be so? If one party was non-extreme, would it not be better at pulling the 1% over? (In fact, there are a lot more than 1% who don't bother to vote because neither party speaks to them.)
It seems to me that the thing that pushes parties in the US to the extremes is the primary system.
The problem is not in getting the 1% at the end but it si the primary system.
But that is true in all two party states.
The people who take part and organise the party will not be in the centre undecideds they will be those who are off centre. To become the leader you need to get the votes from the party workers, these will tend away from the centre so you get more extreme leaders.
With the two party system the coalitions are made behind closed doors in the party.
>To become the leader you need to get the votes from the party workers
That can't be the whole story because Trump never bothered to win over party workers when he won in 2016.
OK I was thinking about the UK party system where party members vote.
In the US it is just the registered voters that need to be won over.
> Why must it be so? If one party was non-extreme, would it not be better at pulling the 1% over? (In fact, there are a lot more than 1% who don't bother to vote because neither party speaks to them.)
Primary elections are the problem. The moderates who would win bigly in the real election are rapidly washed out during the primary season.
It’s the primary system and, ActBlue/WinRed, the ideological composition of party apparatchiks, and diversity.
All the more reason why we shouldn't vote for parties and politicians but rather vote on specific individual decisions/topics/choices.
It's 2025, we should be able to have more granular control over the direction our governments take, and not have to rely on some nebulous "party" or politicians grouping that forces us to deal with compromises. And not only compromises, but all the deal-making and trading that the groups make with eachother.
Representative democracy is not a technical challenge, it's a human challenge. If reigned in, electing representatives to act on your behalf is a far better system because being even close to informed on the topics and nuance and long-term thinking it takes to govern is a full time job that most people simply are not equipped - in terms of time and expertise - to handle. And we don't even have guaranteed holiday time to research and vote once every year, let alone every few days as this would require.
Sucks that they keep electing lunatics. But do you really think the party who ran almost entirely on hurting others wouldn't independently vote for hurting others? Or that the 100,000,000 people who didn't vote to stop it would suddenly vote? Or that people wouldn't look toward leaders and form parties so they can quickly get a feel of the room based on like minds?
Politicians being corrupt is, at the end of the day, mostly the fault of the people. They refuse to hold them accountable. I mean, they elected a convicted felon - a convicted rapist - an impeached president - a known con man and womanizer - who works with dictators and mafias and tried to overthrow America. And they're still cheering on every insane idea.
> All the more reason why we shouldn't vote for parties and politicians but rather vote on specific individual decisions/topics/choices.
This sounds nice but if people can't even vote for favorable outcomes now, how can we expect them to make informed decisions on dozens of matters of public policy?
The solution usually proposed in systems like Liquid Democracy, is in the form of an online platform where issues to be voted on are presented alongside all the different opinions and perspectives relevant to that decision. Education needs to go hand-in-hand with empowerment.
Having all the information available is but one part of the challenge. It has never been easier to get educated on all sides of every issue we face, yet...
The problem still remains that we can't expect individuals (let alone millions of them) to be able to appropriately weigh in on things that require more than 5 minute reading on an online platform. One cannot gain an expert understanding, nor an appreciation of the nuances that come with that, in that situation.
I think this is some sort of fallacy that (us) intellectuals easily fall into. Education and understanding of a topic for the most part does not sway peoples' opinion. And democracy shouldn't be about that, because then it becomes a game of "who can convince the most people" and "who can indoctrinate the most", rather than simply being the will of the people that they naturally form as part of existing as individuals and interacting with the world around them.
I'm confused. Are you suggesting that people can/should be able to make decisions about individual policy decisions - as I took your GP comment to mean - or are you saying that that's antithetical to democracy...?
Yes - I 100% think we should allow all voters to be able to vote on individual policy decisions.
But democracy shouldn't be about giving them that choice only if they are educated and informed on the topic, that is antithetical to democracy. Their choice matters whether they are informed on it or not, that's their choice - period. Of course, it would be good to give them all the info we can on the topic and we should strive to do our best to help them be informed. And if that's the case, and we agree democracy is about the will of the people, not their "expertise" and "knowledge" on a topic, then there is absolutely no reason why we should deny the possibility of more direct-democracy type decision making.
I don't think anybody was suggesting it as some kind hard requirement - that would indeed probably be dangerous. I am still confused by your comment though
> Education and understanding of a topic for the most part does not sway peoples' opinion. And democracy shouldn't be about that, because then it becomes a game of "who can convince the most people" and "who can indoctrinate the most", rather than simply being the will of the people that they naturally form as part of existing as individuals and interacting with the world around them.
It sounds like you're saying understanding of a topic should come second to how citizens "feel" about it. There's no denying that's how it is much of the time, but should it be?
People, as part of existing as part of the world, naturally form hatred or distrust of various groups of people based on their personal interactions. How is it healthier for society to act on those feelings, vs electing people and building institutions that act based on reason and good faith?
I'm not sure how to parse/take your comment. Are you saying people are too uninformed to make decisions on public policy?
Look, if that's the case, and that's how we want government to be run, then let's just come out with it. Let's not pretend that people have a choice. But until that day comes, democracy means will of the people and in this modern technological age that translates to people being enabled to choose what they want.
We've lost the "excuse" to use coordination, tallying and "time to count votes" as a means to push representative-type democracy, and the sooner we get there the better the world will be. Because right now we have this schism, and it's tearing societies apart.
You suggested we should stop voting for parties/politicians and instead vote based on individual policies. I suggest that's not a great idea, since to make informed decisions on such things requires more expert understanding than an individual has. This is not, I think, a crazy position - it is why we elect politicians at all.
It’s well documented how harmful the two party system is and I don’t find this even close to convincing me it’s not the biggest problem with the US, as far as our system of government. Many of our other problems stem from it.
That persistent societal division of fifty-fifty is emblematic of a failed political system. There's never just two sides to any real-life issue, but having only two parties forces everything to be viewed through that binary lens. This damage runs much deeper than just politics, everything in society has to be all-or-nothing: it's always good vs evil, you're with us or against us, you're successful or an utter failure, you're either rich or poor, etc.
How can you say this with the current state of US politics? It's clearly inferior leading to such poor outcomes.
People act as if it's a fluke, as if "if we could get back to how things were just before all this, things would stay better!". No, we don't want to drive off the cliff, but we do want back to that time we barged full speed past all the "road closed ahead" signs.
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The U.S. did have a brief flirtation with what other countries call "failure to form a governing coalition" in 2023. It was a bit less embarrassing than elsewhere because (for somewhat related reasons) our legislature is historically weak right now, but it did happen.
I think we'll see more of this, now that the parties are so ideologically separate from each other. With such a narrow majority, any tiny intraparty fracture has the potential to break a coalition.
These problems could be prevented by a ranked choice vote (your vote transfers to your next candidate when your favorite is eliminated) to determine the executive, and your first choice used to determine legislative seats proportionally. This would often mean that the winning party is governing without majority in the parliament (or equivalent), but I actually see that as a good thing. I mean, what happened to Checks and Balances?
Coalition building is not a problem, but it is still very difficult to govern in the US. In order to enact meaningful legislation aside from a budget, you need a majority of the House of Representatives, 60 Senators (in practice, because of the filibuster), the President, and the Supreme Court to all align.
It's not all or nothing. Within EU nations, you will find many systems that sit within a spectrum between a rigid 2 party system like the US, and a full blown multi-party coalition type government broken down into specific levels, like Belgium.
By that logic a one party system is the most superior system, since by definition everyone is on the same page.
We got Trump in part because people felt unable to fully express their opinion - they felt it was either the status quo person or the anti status quo person, with no nuance in between.
And there are still divisions - the freedom caucus, the progressive "squad", the swing politicians. Those politicians should be in parties that reflect them rather than Frankenstein's monsters of parties.
Coalitions are made to enable things like voting on government budgets before funding runs out .... But that problem does not seem solved in the US
Thats why no laws should be possible to pass without a 2/3 vote. 50% + 1 vote will always lead to a weak mandate and an accusation of tyranny. Let them haggle and if it's not worth passing at 2/3 of a vote it's not worth passing at all.
> Furthermore, the mechanisms that ensure the mathematical expectation of electoral outcomes to hover around a fifty-fifty split — a phenomenon observable in many nations — are fundamentally economic in nature.
What? No they are not.
This is 100% created by the FPTP voting system. It is the single cause that leads to this, everywhere where it's used. FPTP means that if your party cannot hoover up a base that gets 50%+1 of the votes, you change your platform until it can. The stable equilibrium is two parties at very nearly 50% split. Then both parties have to cater to their 50%, can ignore the other 50%, and do not benefit from co-operation across party lines.
This equilibrium is not visible in democratic countries that use some kind of proportional representation. In such systems, parties tend to be smaller, and necessarily have to co-operate to form government.
Moreover, I'm thinking that modern information tools (Internet, polls, tracking, etc). have lead to better and more accurate forecasting, which in turn allowed the parties to apply ever narrower targeting at hyper-focused groups and minimize wasted effort past getting the majority needed to win elections. Basically as there is less and less noise the battles get closer and closer to the theoretical equilibrium point.
And this is bad because it causes huge shifts based on the whims of what, fractions of a percent of the population?
The mechanisms are economic in nature if you assume the context of a first past the post electoral system.
It's worth repeating that FPTP maximizes the number of those who are discontented: Parties lose all incentives to appeal to more than 50%+1, so the remaining 49.9% are left high and dry. This implies that a proportional representation system will be more stable, because a higher percentage of the voters will be represented.
Yes, this, exactly. I was going to write the same thing. FPTP produces this result.
In the US, the combination of FPTP voting and campaign finance rules lead to congress being fundamentally broken.
> Both factions commit resources to the electoral contest to secure a mere one percent advantage
That only makes sense if the factions are interchangeable for their members, i.e. if it's the same to them whether they win as part of one faction or the other, as long as they're on the winning side in the end.
And I'm pretty sure that's not true for most regular people.
It may be true for large corporations and wealthy individuals, though.
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Can you explain what you mean about "democracy in place until recently"?
more cope from the “experts”
Rambling about why a 50-50 forecast on a blowout election is "fine" and actually, like, totally cool and actually you're the dumb one for thinking it isn't, holds no water in my book. Election forecasters are not scientists discovering the nature of the universe, where it might be ok to say "yeah there's nothing to discover here" / "we don't know what we don't know". They're businesspeople selling a product. If AWS says "well, actually, hosting servers is just really really hard and its totally normal that 10% of your requests are failing!" they'd go out of business, full stop. No one is going to buy your product.
Trump did not win by a little bit. They missed something about the 2016 election, and it is wild that they missed it again EIGHT years later. Don't let them hide behind the veil of "we said it was 50-50!"
> blowout
Trump won 49.8% of the popular vote, compared to Harris's 48.2%, giving him a margin of 1.6% (approximately 2.3 million votes).
This margin ranks as one of the smallest in modern history, smaller than Joe Biden's 4.45% margin in 2020 and smaller even than George W. Bush's narrow win in 2004 (2.46%).
Trump won 312 Electoral College votes to Harris's 226, marking a margin of 86 votes.
This is larger than his 2016 victory (304-227) and Biden's 2020 win (306-232), but it does not approach historical landslides like Reagan's 1984 victory (525-13) or Lyndon B. Johnson's in 1964 (486-52).
Trump's popular vote margin is the fifth smallest since 1960, ie #12 in the last 17 largest, #13 by vote % margin.
> Trump did not win by a little bit.
Yeah, he did.
0. https://infogram.com/untitled-1hnq41on3mjwp23
1. https://infogram.com/untitled-1h0n25oz3rxjz4p
The President is not elected by popular vote, and I should hope that the polling probabilities take that into account.
312 to 226 (58%/42%) was the final electoral college count. Do you know what the Polymarket odds for the race were at 11:30pm on November 4th, the day before election day? 59.8% Trump, 40.2% Harris. Yes, actually, seriously, go look them up, they didn't just correctly predict the winner, the odds themselves were within an incredibly accurate margin for the actual electoral vote share. The Robinhood election market odds were similarly placed. The Harris campaign said recently that they basically knew they were going to lose very early on. This information was out there, everyone knew it, except the "professional pollsters" who are now begging/pleading that their 50-50 models aren't worth giving up on.
You don't need to white knight the pollsters. They're selling a defective product. The marketplace for their product will punish them in 2026 and 2028 far more than any of our comments on HackerNews will.
It was who he won that mattered. Democrats are using 1.5% to justify a "we didn't do that badly" attitude and yes, they did do badly. Trump won demographics he had no reasonable right to win and He took all of the swing States. He won the popular vote that no Republican has been able to do since 2004.His Electoral College win was resounding. That and the Republicans winning the House and Senate. The Democrats really really need to rethink things.
Again, Reagan's 1984 victory (525-13) and Lyndon B. Johnson's in 1964 (486-52) were electorally "resounding," not Trump's margin of 84.
Tell me you don't know the difference between bias and variance. The longest article/comment wins.
For each of the 2024 7 swing states, the winner was <1% ahead on average, so what good are these polls if the results are going to be within their margin of error?
They need to either find a more accurate way, or... give up!
What they're good for is telling you that things are close. A tied poll or a 50-50 model can tell you that if your beliefs think it's 99% to go one way, you're probably overconfident, and should be more prepared for it to go the other way.
I cared about the result, because it was going to decide whether I settled down in the US or whether I wanted to find a different place to live. And because I paid attention to those polls, I knew that what happened was not particularly unlikely. I prepared early.
A lot of people I know thought it couldn't happen. They ignored the evidence in front of them, because it was distasteful to them (just as it was to me). And they were caught flat-footed in a way that I wasn't.
That's not the benefit of hindsight: I brought receipts. You can see the 5,000 equally-likely outcomes I had at the start of the night (and how they evolved as I added the vote coming in) here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11nn9y9fusd-6LQKCof3_... .
We had a pretty weird year in general. Harris did bad across most safe states but seemed to do much better than her average in swing states (not enough to win them, but much better than she did in non-competitive states)
Many election models rely heavily on historical correlation. States like OH and IN might vote quite differently but their swings tend to be in the same direction.
The weirdness this year (possibly caused by the Harris campaign having a particularly strong ground game in swing states) definitely challenged a lot of baked in assumptions of forecasts.
The changes in the polls over time are useful and the campaigns often change based on the changes in the polling.
At the end of the day it was a 312 vs. 226 in the Electoral College. Seems a bit odd that this is supposed to be impossible to be predicted with any useful amount of certaintly. But perhaps that says more about the nature of the Electoral College than it says about pollsters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_reform_the_United_S...
Almost every major model had this outcome as very likely.
There was an inordinate amount of very close swing states in 2024. Whichever way the swing was gonna be was likely to apply across the board.
If you're going by popular vote, then this was actually the 8th closest election in all of US history.
Not that I'm claiming this for this particular discussion, but a lot of people in favor of what is happening in the USA want to justify what's going on by claiming this was some sort of overwhelming political sweep in this country instead of being a close race at all levels (roughly handful of votes in House and Senate to achieve parity). Who would have picked a Arab American protest vote as major factor in swing states in 2024 when asked in 2020?
It's beyond the Arab American vote. It's also the youth vote
When the George Floyd uprising happened, it was the largest civil rights protest in human history. Over 70 nations held demonstrations. Where I was, the Students for Justice and Peace in Palestine organized most of the protests. Black-Palestinian solidarity has an extremely long history. So does Irish-Palestinian and Palestinian-Native American solidarity. They've been engaged in building a worldwide network of solidarity with oppressed people for decades now. Almost every George Floyd protest included chants about freeing Palestine and it's shocking how little coverage this got
I think people continue to radically underestimate how much youth, Black, and other minorities will continue to follow the lead of Palestinian organizers. And the Democratic party needs to take it seriously if they want to win again
But they can’t take it seriously. Going against Israel is an election loser in just about every district, and definitely at the level of the Senate in the presidency. The Lobby is just way too powerful
They have to claim it was hard to predict, because they deliberately led people to believe that the establishment-favored candidate was going to win. They knew better the whole time but hoped to help their candidate by making the situation look hopeless for the true popular choice.