this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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I don't want to discount the findings too harshly, because I believe that democrats have a ton of issues with their voters in general and can only go on promising everything but delivering nothing for so long before people wisen up, but I do want to just gently remind everyone how accurate polling was in the 2016 and 2020 election cycles and its general decline among the population as a way to understand how people vote. Polling groups have not adapted to the times and frequently demand far too much out of a population which is overburdened and simply not interested in engaging with pollsters through archaic mediums and conventional means of identifying who is eligible to be polled are not applicable to a modern populace.
Political polling has also always carried the inherent bias of more opinionated people being more willing to participate. This doesn't matter in, say, health studies, but it sure does with politics.
You might get a range of opinions, but it's heavily biased toward people who have a stronger urge to share their opinion. That may not always be a matter of huge significance in every single issue, but it definitely is when you're talking about enthusiastic support for a candidate known for having a particularly loudly opinionated base versus begrudging support for a candidate whose base isn't super happy with him.
Polls are going to show that Trump has more support in that context regardless of the truth if it's anywhere remotely close to the level of support for Biden.
Because the reality of polling is that most of the pool of calls you're getting your sample from are no answers, hung up during intro, endless voicemail, or straight up refusals. Completes make up a tiny portion of phone surveys.
Polling has become a mess, mainly because we can no longer rely on landlines for generating unbiased samples. Most attempts at fixing this issue, such as online polling, have their own massive biases. So it's incredibly difficult to figure out what's real and what's not. And no, doing a hundred bad polls or increasing the sample size won't fix it. Bias in the data can only be fixed by figuring out a way of creating truly fair samples.
Did you read the article? It looks at voting data.
Very cherry-picked voting data. Rural Texas and New York after a huge scandal are very underwhelming examples.
That's a fair point and it should be taken into account. But at the same time, this is Nate Silver. He's essentially the pre-eminent expert on polling, polling errors, and best practices in that regard. And what's more; when you imagine the different potential political factions amongst the African American community (a practice Dems try not to do); it's not hard to see why 2016 to today could have soured them significantly. Some examples from my family, friends, and extended family:
It's really not at all surprising that the current Dem ticket isn't going to win black voters at 90% clips.
i would not call Silver this anymore; he's an increasingly partisan libertarian with weird hangups and a stick up his ass about things he wishes he understood (like COVID-19), and it's almost assuredly part of why he's out of a job at 538. he's also increasingly being lapped by people like G. Elliott Morris and an armada of Twitter-based election analysts and prognosticators. at the bare minimum he's absolutely not the only guy in town on this, and some of the people i just described like Adam Carlson actively dispute he's even using the data in this article correctly because they're the ones who made it. he's also being challenged on his points here by professors like Matt Blackwell, specific polls of Black voters and data about minority youth voters. in general: the case is not nearly as clear-cut as he makes it seem and deferring to him on this would be a bad case in which to do it, because he's probably wrong.
Only time will tell, but I remember when the same sort of claims were made about him calling the 2016 race a toss up. Although it does look like I have some links to read.
Silver was correctly giving better odds of Trump winning than basically any other prognosticator in 2016, but i think even he would agree with the point that past success is not strictly indicative of future results. that he got 2016 correct does not mean his analysis today will hold up well (and indeed there are a few reasons to think he is a worse, more partisan, more rigid-in-approach-and-analysis prognosticator now than he was in 2016, some of which i touched on here).
circumstances have also changed, in any case: polling is struggling to methodologically keep up and capture representative samples in a way they simply wasn't true in 2016. we saw subsample results like what we're seeing now in a few 2022 state-level polls and they were wrong then, and additionally no elections have yet convincingly or reliably demonstrated the kinds of shifts being implied currently. even discounting special elections, it seems very clear for example that Republicans did not get 20% of the black vote in Virginia in 2023 based on their House of Delegates results. by far the most compelling argument i've seen that accepts current polling data at face and not as error is the argument by Nate Cohn that Democratic weakness is among non-voters--but that obviously invites the question of: why should we assume these people will vote in 2024?
Almost delivery? Total rug pull?
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/02/21/fact-sheet-president-biden-cancels-student-debt-for-more-than-150000-student-loan-borrowers-ahead-of-schedule/
Biden's biggest problems are:
-he is old (which, yeah, obviously), and the media (both sides) does nothing but talk about how Biden is old. - but starting with the State of the Union, he is showing that he is mentally still there, and plenty capable of holding office.
-The media just loves Trump. he gets views, so they won't stop talking about him. They don't give Trump the same kind of scrutiny they do any other politician.
-Biden has a Gaza problem - if Gaza wasn't an active issue, he'd probably be doing a lot better. He has spent so long ensuring Israel receives the support it needs to continue to exist in the middle east, and they have a place after the Holocaust, that he just can't adjust to the horrible crimes their government are committing. I understand he will never not supply their Iron Dome and other defensive measures, but that doesn't mean he cant restrict Israeli weapon sales to just that.
-he doesn't talk about his accomplishments in office, and the media doesn't cover it, so the general populace doesn't think he has done anything. He has done plenty - in the general election campaign, they are starting to advertise these things.
People still don't know that he continued backing Rail workers helped get them a deal, they just remember he kept the supply chain open.
Many student loans have been forgiven. He can't do forgiveness as broadly as he'd like, the GOP is fighting him on that, but he continues to fight for it and is getting more. My own mother is in her 60s and has another 10+ years on her student loan - but I am hopeful his student loan forgiveness will reach her - she has applied and right now it is just a waiting game (information over the past year has been very confusing regarding what to do and when).
I only ever hear the media talking about the negative aspects of Biden, so of course he is going to lose supporters. I just happen to follow political news more closely than the average person, so I am aware of the positive things he has done as well. Hopefully he gets the message out; Trump was awful, but he isn't losing support - people staying home and skipping this vote because Biden isn't ideal, is how we get Trump back in office.
Biden negotiated away his ability to suspend student loan payments to get a temporary budget passed. He didn't have to do that. He could have kept payments suspended until the forgiveness hit. He chose not to prioritize it.
We are talking about two very different things.
The reply I responded to was about student debt forgiveness. Forgiveness does not equal payment suspension.
Yes, his post was threaded a couple down from yours, but neither my post, nor the post I responded to mentioned payment suspension. Your reply should probably be up a post or two.
Trump and republicans of course want the people to pay every penny, plus interest of student debt. Biden kept loan payment suspensions up for years, which is far longer than I expected. Biden is getting debt forgiveness to the people, and a large number of them, and it is making a difference. I don't think anyone thought he would accomplish a fraction of what he has gotten done; I can only imagine what he can get done if people give the Dems a majority in the Senate and House.
With the republicans trying to shutdown the government for their political circus, Biden has done a good job of picking his battles, and making them look like fools. It's clear the current Republican party is incapable of governing.
That was OP both you and I have been commenting with. To be fair, OP used the phrase "loan relief", nevertheless "total rug pull" is clearly untrue and OP did not acknowledge it as hyperbole.
What OP ought to understand is that Biden didn't bargain it away to appease Mickey Mouse, he was appeasing Republicans who were holding the budget to ransom (yet again) as you pointed out.
Or maybe OP isn't discussing in good faith to start with? Maybe "this is what my friends say" is really just cover for an attempt to spread misinformation?
It's odd to me that the reasoning given here and in the article for this problem for the Democrats is that they aren't acting Republican enough and they are too leftist. It is so clear that the Democrats have managed to do very few of the things they say, and what they do accomplish is either just what Republicans would do, or hamstrung by the Republicans and media blitzed. That's why they lose ground. Becoming Republican will also lose them different ground. It doesn't feel like the data should need an explanation in the first paragraph like that, it skews the interpretation of what is pitched as objective.
I think all these economic and business interests are just desperate for the old Republican party back and are trying to sculpt the Democrats into it because they were close enough already. Probably successfully. It's pretty bleak all around.
Also I'm sorry I can't leave it, but are you saying that the BLM "cohort" prefer trump in there? I'm not going to say that anyone is enthusiastic about Biden, but Trump encouraged beat downs across the country and threatened to march the military on these folks. (Would have done it too if it weren't for the woke liberal adjenda of General Mark Milley).
For the most part the average Black voter doesn't identify as Liberal. And that makes sense when you think about it. The median Black voter is a rural or suburban 50+ year old who left the Republican Party because they endorsed the Southern Strategy, not because of conservative policy support. So being "more leftist" isn't really going to win more of the black vote. They're already winning the black vote that cares about "leftist" policies.
Added a highlight for the important part. The BLM cohort is not likely to vote for Trump this election. But they're also not likely to be energized to vote for Biden. And history shows us that unenthusiastic support leads to low turnout. And part of why they're so unenthusiastic is that the Dems ran the "Anti-BLM" ticket with Biden/Harris.