politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
oh man I remember how hilary was going to win by such a large margin in those polls.
Harris doesn't suck though. People actually like her.
kamala harris isn't hillary, though. I heard a recording of myself from like 2005 and a someone was saying "yeah hillary clinton can unite people" and I said "..against her" and I barely cared about politics back then.
the gop has made inroads on the young white dude demographic, largely because of incels. Its more of a tossup for that reason and the electoral college (which lets all agree needs some kind of proportional rank choice fix, or to be dropped entirely for popular vote)
Turnout is typically very poor amongst young people. It will be interesting to see how much young people vote, and the gender breakdown. Because if turnout is consistent across gender, then any of those gains will be wiped out by young women leaning strongly progressive (or at least, liberal).
Does no one remember Jame Comey, Director of the FBI, coming out just before the election and saying they were reopening the investigation regarding her email server?
The polls were right, at the time.
Except Professor Alan Licthman predicted Hillary would lose then and has predicted a Kamala Harris win. He actually uses a scientific method for his predictions.
I saw an interview with him and he gives off quack vibes to me. 🤷🏼♀️
I mean if we understand he is a quack but he's somewhat good at reading vibes... I would guess he's just accurately reading the vibes, which means very little.
Many of the keys are subject to arbitrary interpretation; Nate Silver criticized his process and arguably has a better probability model with more consistent accuracy across thousands of races somewhere around 90%. Key 2 was given to Biden despite the writing on the wall that 2/3 of Democrats wanted a contest both before and after the primaries. Key 3 Incumbency these days is more of a liability with both candidates distancing themselves. Key 9 Scandals have lost a lot of meaning in the Trump era.
Should be noted that he gave a full-throated endorsement of Hillary Clinton... only to predict she'd lose. The thing is, he had originally referenced in two different publications ahead of that prediction that she would specifically lose the popular vote. She didn't. He then changed his model.
Also I'm not a fan of this guy because he belittled with insults those who called for Biden to step down... Despite not giving a prediction on Biden at the time.
They aren't as arbitrary as they seem, it's just that the media don't go into the full detail.
For example, key 2 is actually "The candidate is nominated on the first ballot and wins at least two-thirds of the delegate votes", which is clearly true
Furthermore, the entire point of this method is that it ignores opinion polls. So it makes no difference whether the public actually wanted a primary contest or not. Likewise, it doesn't matter whether scandals have "lost meaning".
His entire methodology is contingent on history repeating itself. But we know we live in times of historical firsts that defy extrapolation.
With key 2 it's less about the definition and more about the allotted weight of importance. Like, imagine if the DNC simply said that "we are unilaterally awarding all delegate votes to Biden and skipping a Primaries voting process for our Democratic voters." Yes, the key would still be True, but would that mean jack shit? Not really. And again, Incumbency is more a liability when the incumbent President's approval rating matches Jimmy Carter. His Charisma keys are another example of subjective interpretation and which itself is clearly reflective of opinion polls.
For all our sake, I hope he's right. But his prediction is just as if not more useless than the aggregation of A+ polls in moments of time that can actually adapt to changing circumstances, including things like impactful scandals, military success / failures, and social unrest.
At the end of the day Perception is Reality; even if the economy is doing well in short and long-term on paper, we again unfortunately live in unprecedented times where that is not being felt by the actual people who are, you know, going to the ballot box.
Any prediction is based on history. Even pollsters believe the history of polling results before an election can predict how people will actually vote on election day.
What people usually don't realize about the "keys" is that they aren't advocating some political position, like "incumbency is good". It is more like a retrospective clinical study, where you look at a bunch of factors (smoking, exercise, TV watching, eye color) and see which ones best predict some outcome of interest (lifespan). If smoking has an association with lifespan and eye color doesn't, then smoking is a predictor and eye color isn't.
It doesn't matter if people don't understand why smoking would affect lifespan. It doesn't matter if people think eye color should be more predictive than smoking. It doesn't matter if people think cigarettes today are not the same as they used to be, so smoking should no longer be a predictor for lifespan. Predictors are predictors until they actually fail to predict.
Polls use scientific methods too, that doesn't mean they aren't wildly incorrect from time to time.