US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2809

On October 30 2020 15:42 Sr18 wrote:
Doesn't high inflation decrease wealth inequality, rather than increase it?

On October 30 2020 16:50 Dromar wrote:


By my understanding, certain types of investment vehicles resist losing value due to inflation.

People who aren't well off enough to have these types of investments have no defense against inflation, and their asset value atrophies as a result.

On October 30 2020 19:07 Biff The Understudy wrote:
The way I see it, one of the big question is why the polls underestimated Trump in 16 and are those reasons relevant this cycle. If it's because of low voter turnout, he is kind of toast.

The report notes that, while the national polls generally came pretty close to the actual nationwide popular vote (which Clinton won by 2.1 percentage points over Trump), the performance of polls at the state level – where presidential elections actually are decided – was a lot spottier. What reasons did you find for that?

We found evidence for multiple potential causes. One factor that I think affected everybody who was polling in the battleground states, is the legitimate late change in voter preference in the last week before Election Day. The data on this has its limitations, but the best source is the National Election Pool’s exit poll, which has a question about when voters made up their minds about who to vote for in the presidential race. That showed several roughly 20-point swings in favor of Trump among voters making their mind up in the final week. You didn’t really see that nationally, but in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and even Florida, you saw what looks like dramatic movement.

That’s sort of a good news/bad news finding for pollsters. The good news is, if you interviewed people at a certain point in time and they changed their mind several days later, the poll wouldn’t have detected that. That’s not a flaw in the poll, other than perhaps with the field period in which the pollster decided to do the data collection. But there’s fundamentally nothing that was necessarily off if what was generating most of the error was just honest-to-goodness changes of opinion.

What else did you find at the state level?

Another interesting finding had to do with poll respondents’ level of education. A number of studies have shown that in general, people with higher levels of formal education are more likely to take surveys – it’s a very robust finding. Places like Pew Research Center and others have known that for years, and we address that with our statistical weighting – that is, we ask people what their education level is and align our survey data so that it matches the U.S. population on education. And I think a lot of us assumed that was common practice in the industry – that roughly speaking, everybody was doing it. And that’s not what we found. At the state level, more often than not, the polls were not being adjusted for education.

Now in some elections, such as in 2012, that wouldn’t matter, because the very low educated and the very highly educated voted roughly the same way. But 2016 was drastically different – you had a quite strong linear relationship between education and presidential vote. And that meant that if you had too many college graduates in your poll, which virtually all of us do, and you didn’t weight appropriately, you were almost certainly going to overestimate support for Clinton.

On October 30 2020 22:50 BisuDagger wrote:
For those of you democrats hoping for a massive blue wave election and 4 years of have your cake and eat it too, what are you hoping to get out of the next term? What would make you say "Solid 4 years Biden. Well done!"? It's the answer to this question that honestly scares me the most as a fiscal conservative.

For me:
All I care about is economic stability, covid recovery, and staying out of international conflicts for the next four years. I'm worried that a blue wave will just like "hey we got this opportunity, let's push as many left agendas as possible." I get that it's an opportunity to accomplish an agenda, but I think regardless of party, it's a spit in the face to pass a bunch of things that don't have partisan support. I have huge problems with republicans trying to push agendas that sub 50% of America might support too.