There was actually some news recently that these polls might actually be wrong here: apparently there's a large amount of people lying that they're Hispanic/young in online polls. This was discovered both because: 1. The "20% of youth are Holocaust deniers!" Poll that made the waves wasn't reproducible and 2. There's some BIG inconsistencies being found in many polls too, like some polls somehow managing to have a cohort of Hispanics that are 20% nuclear submarine engineers.
Basically, we might have a vicious cycle making polls wildly inaccurate here: youth (and Hispanics?) are harder to poll -> pollsters value the data more vs other demographics-> people lie to obtain the rewards being offered to get this data -> youth/Hispanics become harder to poll.
Polls usually can handle some "lizard man's constant", but everything falls apart if there's significant lying.
I think the problem is that a lot of political discourse is super constrained, most of these polls are “do you like trump or like Biden” there’s no option to express the opinion of “I hate both of them but one slightly more”. Of course that’s going to create weird results! If they have to twist the answers to get there displeasure across and scare the DNC in to taking them seriously, that’s what they have to do.
I think there is possibly a dissonance being created by how lobby money influences the thinking of campaigns. Say voters care about reducing fossil fuel dependency, say they care about ending support for Israel, say voters care about ending for profit health insurance, say voters care about breaking up corporate oligopolies, these are all toxic pills to many donors. Campaigns don’t feel they can endorse or condemn these things, so they refuse to even engage with the topics. These incredibly important political issues are just... removed from official political discourse, thus such things are kept out of the polls or reduced to anemic platitudes, so people can’t accurately express what they care about.
Younger voters are pissed at the democratic establishment and there is no statistical data based way for them to measure why. So the democratic establishment is left flailing in the dark, boxing with ghosts because they’ve blinded them selves to issues that pit their continents against donors. WHICH ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUES FOR MOST YOUNGE VOTERS.
I don't know how the polling would catch them, but the idea that people under 30 are more progressive socially or economically is probably a huge simplification. I only have anecdotal information, but what is see is they are spilt, and largely along gender lines, with both sides taking the idea of a breakdown of government as we know it almost as a moot point.
I recently saw a poll of current 18 year olds that showed the women are very democrat leaning, while the men are very right leaning, though not as extreme as the female lean was. Young people are leaning left more than ever, but primarily due to the women
Biden CANNOT win without Michigan and Wisconsin, two states that Clinton infamously neglected to campaign in and lost. Getting them, with this equation, puts Biden EXACTLY at 270.
Are you a campaign manager or a pundit getting paid to talk about politics? There's honestly no reason at all for the average person to care about polls this far out
If your goal here is to not be surprised, I hate to tell you polls have margins of error that mean surprises are inevitable. Also, many polls are not infrequently found to be outside their SE when the actual results come in.
There are some circumstances you may want to make certain preparations based on the possibility that one candidate or the other may win, and polling trends can help you determine what sort of plans and preparation you should be making.
One example that comes to my mind is that prior to Trump getting elected, my wife was concerned that a trump presidency could lead to Republicans killing Roe V Wade and/or making it more difficult to access birth control, and so she opted to get a longer-lasting IUD prior to the election.
The popularity polls, yes. She also won the popular vote by a significant margin.
Trump won some battleground states by slim margins, mostly because Clinton did a terrible job of deciding where to campaign. Also a lot of sketchy voter suppression tactics made those battleground state wins questionable.
They did, but she was doing her own analysis of the polls and had some concerns that made her think the race was going to be much closer than the polls suggested.
You shouldn't just blindly take the polls at face value, you also need to be thinking critically about them, theres a lot of ways to misrepresent data, a lot of issues that can crop up due to how the polls are conducted, etc. and when she took all of that into account, the polls suggested to her that it was going to be a much closer race than most of the media coverage was saying.
She was still a little surprised that Trump actually won, but it wasn't totally out of left field.
There's plenty of reason to care. It's a sign Biden's campaign is not yet effective, and Trump is. While most incumbents don't really step up the campaigning until closer to the election, it gives an idea of the ground they need to make up.
It's also worth considering the Trump has been and continues to be great at campaigning. You can not like the guy, but his ability to get large crowds excited at multiple events per day can't be ignored.
There's likely going to be something that really swings the election still, but hoping a random event helps your party is poor strategy. In Trump's case it's unlikely a poor comment is going to hurt him, like the deplorables or binders full of women comments. Hoping for a conviction to change things is an OK backup plan, not plan A.
And also, this was news to me, but apparently they're for the most part still doing polls by calling people on the phone from a random number. I cannot possibly imagine that that's true but that's what the article says.
They're like micro optimizing for individual per cents, and then doing something which will eliminate 80% of Gen Z from their polling, and when you ask them about it they apparently say "¯_(ツ)_/¯ IDK we do phone"
Yep. For the last half a dozen elections, the polls have overestimated Republican strength, and underestimated Democratic strength. I think it's in large part because the pollsters still haven't managed to figure out how to poll people who simply will not answer unknown numbers.
Polls were really bad in 2016, but the seem to have largely corrected that. 2018 polling just before the election was accurate. 2020 was projected as close and it was, there were a few problem states, but nothing like 2016. 2022 was again very accurate.
Polling around the presidential election or maybe just Trump is less accurate, but it's been getting better since 2016.
Not quite. Polls underestimated Democratic support in 2018, 2019's special elections, 2021's special elections, the 2022 midterms, and last year's elections. It's been remarkably consistent how far off they've been.
Do I prefer that to the other way around, as happened in 2016? Sure. But they've clearly over-corrected, and are having significant trouble getting back on track due to the difficulty of polling young people.
Unless the Electoral College magically goes away, this will be a rough election for a majority of Americans. Lots of long-standing issues are coming to a head with the realization that we've already been fascist for a while.
They let like 2 Nazis on, taking the viewpoint basically (1) it's in the spirit of the 1st amendment to allow even reprehensible speech (2) guys it's like 2 of them and the number of people reading and being convinced by them is likely to be 0
And the entirety of the knee-jerk fediverse politics community saw an opportunity to take a pointless stand on something, and in their eyes shone the promise of being able to make some smug self-important postings about how something good is actually really problematic and you're just not enlightened enough if you don't agree
And now Substack is literally Hitler even though it was doing a whole bunch of great things, outside of the 2 Nazis
(Edit: In all seriousness, I know you already know this, but the problem with the "3 people at the table" analogy is that, A, there are 500,000 people involved, not 3, and if you aren't talking to the people at the table, or hearing from them, but merely existing on the same electronic computer without any interaction unless you decide to pursue same, which obviously most people won't do because they're fucking Nazis, then the risk of becoming suddenly a Nazi because they are next to you on the hard drive is in most cases pretty slight.)
Its had some "nazi bar" issues, i.e "we dont like nazis, but its cool if they come to our bar with their nazi friends and spend their nazi money here. If more Nazis show up, the more the merrier!"
They back tracked from the above a ways after outrage, but it's soured people on the platform.
Except it's not a bar, it's a web site where you only interact with people you have affirmatively decided to interact with.
It's like if there is a Nazi living in your apartment building, and specifically forbidden by the laws of physics from doing anything physical to anyone or making any statement or posting any literature to anyone who hasn't decided they want to hear from them. The risk of everyone in the apartment building deciding to become a Nazi in that situation is small.
I actually agreed with their viewpoint, and the fact that they had to backtrack after a noisy section of the community blew up at them, and that noisy section of the community decided that they were still bad people even though they'd backtracked, and now are "soured," is to me much more of an indictment of that section of the community than it is of Substack.
I think you and I are just not gonna see eye to eye on this.
The one additional thing I'll say is, the Nazis on Substack were absolutely undetectable to anyone who didn't choose to interact with them, but a bunch of people absolutely freaked out about them, to the point that it did a bunch of damage to a platform that was absolutely a positive force for good, just because people would have had to share the platform with literally about 0.05% Nazis somewhere out of sight.
Contrast with that, Lemmy clearly has some level of infestation of shills masquerading as real people with political opinions, and they impact the discourse every day. Some of them, if I had to guess, I would guess are actively funded by people who are actively in league with Nazis. You know the ones. Although, that's pure speculation on my part with basically nothing at all behind it beyond guessing. The impact to the discourse is the only part I'm confident about.
I haven't seen any level of freakout about that. Just an occasional bleat of "yo it's not cool that this is happening," and then business as usual.
Being unaware is very different than knowingly accepting their company.
You
The one additional thing I’ll say is, the Nazis on Substack were absolutely undetectable to anyone who didn’t choose to interact with them, but a bunch of people absolutely freaked out about them, to the point that it did a bunch of damage to a platform that was absolutely a positive force for good, just because people would have had to share the platform with literally about 0.05% Nazis somewhere out of sight.
It's like you can't read and understand a simple sentence. Or you just like defending nazis, that could be it too.
My point is that the Nazis were not "in my company" on Substack. I didn't read them, I wouldn't even have known where to find them or how to interact with them without putting some effort into finding out. The fact that I knew they were there somewhere doesn't change that.
There's no call to get insulting with me about that or pretend that I'm saying it because there's something I can't understand. It's simply the truth. You have your viewpoint, which as best I understand it is that even using the same platform as an overt Nazi is unacceptable to you, which, okay, fine. But pretending I just can't understand something or I like Nazis is why we're disagreeing is just condescending and wrong.
Like I say, I think we're just not gonna see eye to eye on that aspect. Just repeating ourselves at each other probably isn't productive.
I actually agreed with their viewpoint, and the fact that they had to backtrack after a noisy section of the community blew up at them,
You agreed with them that it was cool to have nazis on their website, and disliked the fact that they capitulated to noisy people who didn't want nazis on their website.
You are defending nazis. That is what you are doing.
You are saying that people have the right to promote an ideology that promotes genocide.
Yes.
Why don't you see that defending an ideology based on hate is defending that viewpoint?
Defending someone's right to speak is not the same as defending their ideology or their viewpoint. This is a big part of the foundational principle of the United States. I realize Substack isn't the government, and the principles of informed self-government are a lot more complex than "just let everyone say whatever," but to me it's an important principle. It's the same reason the ACLU used to defend Nazis and the KKK and their right to have rallies.
It's a huge conversation honestly, and the Nazis are such an extreme example that people of good faith can disagree. In real-world space, I agree with you and I agree with the Nazi bar analogy. But in actually strictly-speech environment... Honestly? To cut to the chase, I think being exposed to viewpoints that are wrong is good for people. If every time you see speech that's evil, you freak the fuck out and demand that someone come and take it away because it can't be allowed, (a) you'll deprive others of the opportunity to see the wrong stuff and learn unpleasant truths about the evil that exists around them, and exercise their powers of judgement to determine it's evil for themselves (b) you'll get in that habit and start demanding that someone e.g. take Dave Chappelle away because you misunderstood a joke of his. That causes a lot more harm than the Nazis on Substack did.
That's my opinion. I'm actually trying not to get in an argument with you about it, because you clearly don't agree with me, and honestly you don't have to. I'm just laying out what I think.
The ACLU is wrong to defend nazi rallies because tolerating intolerance in the pursuit of tolerance is misguided and just leads to more intolerance. We don't need nazi rallies for people to be exposed to nazi ideology, we have the holocaust museum and other educational settings where people can learn about that without a bunch of hatemongers publicly displaying threats against other people.
Would you support someone's right to promote child sexual abuse, as long as it is words? What about direct threats to individuals? Are you cool with someone threatening your life as long as they just used words?
We don't need nazi rallies for people to be exposed to nazi ideology, we have the holocaust museum and other educational settings where people can learn about that without a bunch of hatemongers publicly displaying threats against other people.
My kids aren't going to be doing any sex or drugs and alcohol, I kept them in a very strict environment and gave them all the information and kept them away from anything threatening. I'm sure once they go to college they'll be set on a perfectly good road because I was sure to keep them that way and give them all the education they needed.
Oh wait what is happening
Would you support someone's right to promote child sexual abuse, as long as it is words? What about direct threats to individuals? Are you cool with someone threatening your life as long as they just used words?
Probably not, in all three cases. The Nazi example is already an extreme borderline case, since they are basically advocating for crimes, but there's a little bit of a political speech aspect to it and sometimes some vagueness to the overtly violent aspects. To me it pushes it just over the line to where I think yes it should be allowed. To me your examples are well over the line into just being crimes. In some cases Nazi speech is explicitly criminal, in which case, sure, prosecute them for threats of violence or seditious conspiracy or whatever criminal speech, but not just for using the wrong symbology.
Let me ask you this: It sounds like your goal in this is to "win." Like we have to talk, and you have to educate me on how your viewpoint is right, or prove to me or an audience that your way is the right way and mine is wrong. Do I have that right?
Kids already learn about nazis, drugs, and sex in school. Maybe you don't see that as a middle ground between nazi rallies and the holocaust museum, but it really is.
So you wouldn't support someone promoting the things that nazis did, but you do support nazis being able to share their ideology that lead to those things.
You know nazi rallies are threats against groups of people, right?
Let me ask this: Someone might believe that Israel's right to defend itself extends to bombing hospitals and blocking food aid so people starve to death. Someone else might say hey what you're describing fits the literal definition of genocide. Both of those ideologies, in my opinion, should be allowed on Substack, even though one of them is openly advocating for the murder of the innocent. Would you disagree with allowing both of them?
I disagree with allowing someone to promote murder. They can discuss whether or not something is murder all day. But when they cross into saying the murder is a good thing and they want it to happen they have crossed a line.
And if they're not? If they're simply saying that they support Israel's actions, without trying to deny the objective reality of what that means but instead just deflecting into excuses about how what they're doing is justified without going into specifics?
What about someone who starts a Nazi blog but doesn't use the words "murder" or "genocide," but deflects into excuses about how what they're proposing is justified, without going into specifics?
I mean, you can answer or not. I think the point that I was making was already pretty clear; like I say I'm not really trying to argue back and forth with you. I think what I think was already articulated in plenty of detail, and I think I understand where you're coming from. I'm only responding with this back and forth because you seem like you want to continue the interaction.
Edit: Actually, maybe my point isn't completely clear. What I'm saying is not anything in particular about Gaza; it is that the rules you're proposing for who should be allowed to say their viewpoint are not anywhere near as cut-and-dried as they seem. To plenty of people in the world, the current Israel government is more evil than the literal Nazis. Why do you get to say Nazis aren't allowed, because they're evil (which, they are), but they're not allowed to say pro-Israel viewpoints aren't allowed, because the current Israeli government is evil (which, it is)? In most cases, with some exceptions, it's better to just let people talk and if they're wrong or evil then their listeners can decide that for themselves without you needing to be the gatekeeper to decide it for them. In my opinion. IDK why I'm repeating myself; you clearly don't agree with me on it, which, again, that is fine.
What about someone who starts a Nazi blog but doesn’t use the words “murder” or “genocide,” but deflects into excuses about how what they’re proposing is justified, without going into specifics?
Nazi ideology is that white people are superior and everyone else should die. That is their core belief system and not saying the parts out loud doesn't mean they aren't there. They attempted a genocide of Jewish people, minorities, and all kinds of people until they lost the second world war. There is no reason for anyone to claim the label of nazi without supporting those things because there isn't anything else to being a nazi than white supremacy and violence.
