Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
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Yes, people will vote for Trump because they feel sorry for Biden having to be president at his age and because they get second hand embarrassment. Most people know very little about politics and don't follow it at all. In part because they feel powerless, don't understand it, and it only affects their own well-being negatively. There's people that vote that don't know about 98% of the stuff we would talk about here.
Biden not running in 2014 is understandable. But age is age. He is too old. Being president is a young man's game. Especially today. You are the cheerleader in charge. Your job is literally to travel around and meet people and shake hands and make people feel like the president is behind what they are doing. The US president has some executive powers. But it is really limited compared to some European countries. There, the cabinet led by the prime minister literally set policy and write laws. And parliament acts as a rubber stamp and check power. In the US, congress puts forwards bills and financial plans. And the president then signs them into law.
Trump was president for 4 years, literally did almost nothing, and if the pandemic hadn't happened, it wouldn't have affected the government at all.
A US president should be 45 to 55. Above 65 is too old. You are past your retirement age. It is quite insane that we let normal people with office jobs retire at age 65, because they are too old. But that the US president, who has their entire working day scheduled months ahead, travels around all the time, and works 7 days a week, can do that job past age 65. Sure, some people can. So you can have some older presidents who do less work and travel, when they are vital at a higher age, Biden has been vital for his age. But he is also 81. Biden might literally have memories of World War 2. That's insane.
It sucks that Biden had so many unfortunate things happen in his life. But age passes on. Being US president is not a privilege. If you can't or don't want to run in 2014, that's fine. But Biden should have known that afterwards, you are way too old. Probably too old to be the cheerleader in charge. Definitely to old to win a presidential campaign on tv in a post-truth world. It sucks for Biden that the death of his son made it so that he couldn't run for president when it was his last chance. It is not about being compassionate or not.
Young talent should have been knocking so hard on the door in 2019 that in the primaries, Biden wouldn't even have thought about running. US politics has an age problem. Pelosi, Feinstein, McConnel, Grassley, these people are insanely old. Like 10 to 15 years older than basically the death age of everyone in my family. Why didn't these people not retire and hand the touch to their 20 year younger talent that they helped grow during their 30 or 40 year careers? Where did all their staffers end up going? They literally ate and cannibalize their juniors so they wouldn't lose their own seats to their younger talent It is a huge problem.
Now I think there is zero problem with some world crisis and Biden being almost senile and slow. As long as he doesn't have real dementia. He can make the same decision a younger Biden could have made. It just doesn't make sense to have a president that old.
On June 30 2024 06:36 xM(Z wrote: why your dems are fucking Biden so hard?. i get that your progressives(socialists/communists) hate him, but still ... it seems fucked, it looks like dems main concern is aesthetics.
Because the “let’s not state the obvious because it will make Biden look bad” is the entire reason they are in this predicament in the first place.
but for any democrat in touch with reality, there was an 81% chance Biden would lose 81% of the debate, before it even started. the campaign narrative, from the start, should've been "good, wise, old grandpa", rather than "strong, powerful leader".
i've read the other replays too(communists gonna hate, they seem unable to get over the Bernie fiasco) and i don't see an answer. it's like, form the beginning, all the dems stuck their heads into the sand then hoped and prayed Trump would lose more(due to lawsuits, his lies, his character ...etc), forgetting they'd have to actually prop up someone for the next 4 years. and now, still with their heads in the sand, they're abandoning ship because ... aesthetic obligations disguised as ethic/moral reasons?. fucking hell, there's no plausible deniability to be had here; you(dems) all new.
I'm over Bernie personally
Out of curiosity, why are you over Bernie?
DPB's right that they aren't going to replace Biden unless they have to due to him just falling off a cliff medically. Why DPB and other Democrats/Biden supporters think the next 4 months will be so much better for Biden than the last 8 months I can't say though.
I never said that the next 4 months will be "so much better for Biden than the last 8 months". In fact, what I've been consistently saying is that the election will most likely come down to a coinflip. Spring polling (for whatever that's worth) agreed with me, and if summer/fall polling end up showing a post-debate dip for Biden that eventually starts to rebalance in 1-3 months, then it'll continue to be a coinflip. If the debate never happened, then staying the course of a coinflip would have also been a reasonable prediction. At no point had I suggested that Biden is going to start doing "so much better" in the polls.
For what it's worth, even if Biden is replaced, I think it'll still be a coinflip between the new candidate and Trump. Maybe the new candidate will have 55-45 odds instead of the reverse, but running an event like this only one time means that neither side can be super confident, even if it's 60-40 or 65-35 in favor of a candidate.
Bernie was a compromise to start with. The potential of him being the nominee/president was enough to keep a sliver of electoralism alive for me (back in 2016).
"Coinflip" (~50:50 and down by ~1-2% nationally) sounds a lot better than it is when you realize Biden was a 9:1 favorite with a 8.5% lead (4:1 with a 9%+ lead at this point in the race) going into an election he won by the skin of his teeth against the same guy in 2020 while citizens were dying by the hundreds or thousands per day from an ongoing pandemic Trump had clearly mismanaged.
Mind you this is up against a 2x impeached, 34x felony convicted, insurrectionist (who wasn't any of those things at this point last time, though he had been impeached once)
Biden/Democrats are in so much more trouble than you/his supporters/Democrats are prepared/willing to accept. This hubris could cost Dems the most important election of their lives and it's clear to anyone that isn't obsequiously supporting Biden imo.
Maybe I'll end up being wrong about my coinflip prediction - maybe in September and October, we'll see the polls tilted 70-30 or worse, in favor of Trump. Maybe things spiral out of control over the next few months. And if that happens, I'll have no problem saying that my prediction was wrong. But let's at least agree that my coinflip prediction is not the same as your claim that I "think the next 4 months will be so much better for Biden than the last 8 months", okay? I didn't say that, and I don't believe that.
With Biden's terrible debate performance, his chances of winning are surely worse now than they were a week ago. I said that I expect Biden to dip in the polls, and that I wonder if he'll recover from it; I'd hardly call that "hubris".
That's the fun of giving probabilities for presidential elections, as long as you give something a chance, you can't really be wrong.
One issue I'm trying to point out in that post is that it took a 8%+ lead in polls for Biden to squeak by Trump by thousands of votes. Biden consistently polling a couple points behind Trump is much worse than you/Democrats/Biden supporters are grasping. If the next 4 (3 before voting starts) months don't go much better than the last, then Biden is toast.
The reason it's ~50:50 on 538 isn't the gap in the polls, it's the distance from the election (and the "fundamentals" favoring Biden). If Biden was polling like this in November it wouldn't be 50:50. To actually be 50:50, Biden has to do a lot better in polling than he is now and has been for 8 months.
So if you think it's going to be a 50:50 election you also believe that the next 4 months will be significantly better for Biden than the last 8 whether you say it explicitly or not.
The popular vote poll is irrelevant. That isn't how the US elects a president. I don't know why people keep bringing up national approval polls. Biden could be up 10 percentage points in the polls but still lose the electoral college in reality.
On July 01 2024 01:18 KwarK wrote: Are you so cynical and partisan that you cannot imagine that Biden was in any way impacted by his son’s terminal cancer diagnosis and death?
I hate Trump but if, like Biden, he lost his wife, daughter, and son then I wouldn’t question him needing some time off. He’s a narcissistic racist misogynistic asshole, not a robot.
I don't know where you got your "conventional wisdom" except for the weird benefit of the doubt you give dem politicians. The actual "conventional wisdom" based on reporting after the fact was the factors I described. I agree losing a child would be quite a good reason, this generally thought to be one reason Coolidge didn't run again. But based on mainstream reporting and I think Biden's own announcement that wasn't really.
And my comment also refered to the other guy who said Biden didn't want to run in 2020 which is just lol.
On July 01 2024 01:14 Introvert wrote: And DBP, thr polls have been remarkably consistent all year. There's also less reason to think they will change because these are the two most well-known candidates in modern American history. They both have records people are evaluating, maybe with rose-tinted glasses but still. It's not like there's a magical date where polls become extra predictive, it's summer anyways and nothing has changed significantly in polling for 9 months.
My prediction has been that the election will end up being a coinflip, which would indeed be "remarkably consistent" with how the polls have shaped up so far, so there's a good chance that you and I end up being right! You seem to dismiss the idea that there may be any volatility between now and November though, such as Biden taking a dip due to his poor debate performance. I'm impressed by your confidence - that Biden's chances won't be affected and that he remains at basically a 50/50 chance with Trump - but I think it's more likely that we'll see at least a little movement in the polls (negative for Biden), especially over the next few weeks. Maybe his polling numbers will recover after that though. We'll have to see what happens in July and August, and then Biden's team will potentially need to deal with another problem around September (second debate), which could also lead to more volatility. But maybe you're correct that Biden's polling will end up being immune to negatives; that would certainly help to balance out the massive number of negative consequences that haven't affected Trump's polling!
GH has tried explaining this but Biden isn't tied, he's behind. He has to win the popular vote by probably 2 points to be about tied. His electoral disadvantage means he is an underdog, and has been no better than a coinflip since last year, even at his best. What's funny is that for most of the last few decades thr poll leader on Jan 1 won the election. By now the pattern is even stronger, and it's strikingly consistent. Both these guys are old, maybe something happens to Trump! But you have to factor in that Biden might be doing even worse on election day.
On July 01 2024 02:23 Conaing wrote: The popular vote poll is irrelevant. That isn't how the US elects a president. I don't know why people keep bringing up national approval polls. Biden could be up 10 percentage points in the polls but still lose the electoral college in reality.
That's part of my point. Biden's actually polling worse in the swing states he needs for the electoral college than he is nationally. Biden's behind Trump in AZ, NV and even further behind the Dem senators running in those states. He's also behind in MI, PA, and GA. In WI where he's tied, he's still ~7% behind where he was polling in WI in 2020. Being ahead by ~7% in WI polls in 2020 just before the election lead to Biden winning by just ~20k votes.
Being tied or worse than that everywhere bodes far worse than Biden supporters can grasp yet.
Biden will win Michigan and Pennsylvania. He might lose Wisconsin and Nevada. Trump may win Georgia and Arizona. Trump needs to flip 3 of them to win. Which is never going to happen, unless something really strange happens to the economy. Or some terrorist attack. People already can know that Biden is old. It doesn't matter if he is literally senile because he is president right now. Something really bad needs to happen that is blamed successfully on Biden being senile. More people will find out that Trump is a criminal and wants to end democracy, though. Independents are not going to like Project 2025. The potential for Biden to win harder than in 2020 is there, but then he needs to win debates. Which is can't do.
The issue is that Trump flips 1 or 2 of them, loses the vote, but steals the electoral college. Like Bush did vs Gore. SCOTUS will definitely side with Trump in a close election and put their thumb on the scale. And Trump will take any risk and do whatever is needed, because if he doesn't become president he is going to jail anyway. So he has literally nothing to lose.
On July 01 2024 01:14 Introvert wrote: And DBP, thr polls have been remarkably consistent all year. There's also less reason to think they will change because these are the two most well-known candidates in modern American history. They both have records people are evaluating, maybe with rose-tinted glasses but still. It's not like there's a magical date where polls become extra predictive, it's summer anyways and nothing has changed significantly in polling for 9 months.
My prediction has been that the election will end up being a coinflip, which would indeed be "remarkably consistent" with how the polls have shaped up so far, so there's a good chance that you and I end up being right! You seem to dismiss the idea that there may be any volatility between now and November though, such as Biden taking a dip due to his poor debate performance. I'm impressed by your confidence - that Biden's chances won't be affected and that he remains at basically a 50/50 chance with Trump - but I think it's more likely that we'll see at least a little movement in the polls (negative for Biden), especially over the next few weeks. Maybe his polling numbers will recover after that though. We'll have to see what happens in July and August, and then Biden's team will potentially need to deal with another problem around September (second debate), which could also lead to more volatility. But maybe you're correct that Biden's polling will end up being immune to negatives; that would certainly help to balance out the massive number of negative consequences that haven't affected Trump's polling!
GH has tried explaining this but Biden isn't tied, he's behind.
As of last week (before the debate), Biden was a negligible amount behind Trump. It was basically 50/50.
He has to win the popular vote by probably 2 points to be about tied.
That's false. Biden could lose the overall popular vote and still win the election. What matters is the outcome of a few key swing states. Whether he wins 70% or 51% of California is irrelevant for the election results, even though the former beefs up his overall popular vote.
On June 30 2024 06:36 xM(Z wrote: why your dems are fucking Biden so hard?. i get that your progressives(socialists/communists) hate him, but still ... it seems fucked, it looks like dems main concern is aesthetics.
Because the “let’s not state the obvious because it will make Biden look bad” is the entire reason they are in this predicament in the first place.
but for any democrat in touch with reality, there was an 81% chance Biden would lose 81% of the debate, before it even started. the campaign narrative, from the start, should've been "good, wise, old grandpa", rather than "strong, powerful leader".
i've read the other replays too(communists gonna hate, they seem unable to get over the Bernie fiasco) and i don't see an answer. it's like, form the beginning, all the dems stuck their heads into the sand then hoped and prayed Trump would lose more(due to lawsuits, his lies, his character ...etc), forgetting they'd have to actually prop up someone for the next 4 years. and now, still with their heads in the sand, they're abandoning ship because ... aesthetic obligations disguised as ethic/moral reasons?. fucking hell, there's no plausible deniability to be had here; you(dems) all new.
I'm over Bernie personally
Out of curiosity, why are you over Bernie?
DPB's right that they aren't going to replace Biden unless they have to due to him just falling off a cliff medically. Why DPB and other Democrats/Biden supporters think the next 4 months will be so much better for Biden than the last 8 months I can't say though.
I never said that the next 4 months will be "so much better for Biden than the last 8 months". In fact, what I've been consistently saying is that the election will most likely come down to a coinflip. Spring polling (for whatever that's worth) agreed with me, and if summer/fall polling end up showing a post-debate dip for Biden that eventually starts to rebalance in 1-3 months, then it'll continue to be a coinflip. If the debate never happened, then staying the course of a coinflip would have also been a reasonable prediction. At no point had I suggested that Biden is going to start doing "so much better" in the polls.
For what it's worth, even if Biden is replaced, I think it'll still be a coinflip between the new candidate and Trump. Maybe the new candidate will have 55-45 odds instead of the reverse, but running an event like this only one time means that neither side can be super confident, even if it's 60-40 or 65-35 in favor of a candidate.
Bernie was a compromise to start with. The potential of him being the nominee/president was enough to keep a sliver of electoralism alive for me (back in 2016).
"Coinflip" (~50:50 and down by ~1-2% nationally) sounds a lot better than it is when you realize Biden was a 9:1 favorite with a 8.5% lead (4:1 with a 9%+ lead at this point in the race) going into an election he won by the skin of his teeth against the same guy in 2020 while citizens were dying by the hundreds or thousands per day from an ongoing pandemic Trump had clearly mismanaged.
Mind you this is up against a 2x impeached, 34x felony convicted, insurrectionist (who wasn't any of those things at this point last time, though he had been impeached once)
Biden/Democrats are in so much more trouble than you/his supporters/Democrats are prepared/willing to accept. This hubris could cost Dems the most important election of their lives and it's clear to anyone that isn't obsequiously supporting Biden imo.
Maybe I'll end up being wrong about my coinflip prediction - maybe in September and October, we'll see the polls tilted 70-30 or worse, in favor of Trump. Maybe things spiral out of control over the next few months. And if that happens, I'll have no problem saying that my prediction was wrong. But let's at least agree that my coinflip prediction is not the same as your claim that I "think the next 4 months will be so much better for Biden than the last 8 months", okay? I didn't say that, and I don't believe that.
With Biden's terrible debate performance, his chances of winning are surely worse now than they were a week ago. I said that I expect Biden to dip in the polls, and that I wonder if he'll recover from it; I'd hardly call that "hubris".
That's the fun of giving probabilities for presidential elections, as long as you give something a chance, you can't really be wrong.
We're presumably using the polls to inform the probabilities. For example, it would be inconsistent, based on the data, if someone said the current chance of Biden winning is 30% if the data says it's 50%.
One issue I'm trying to point out in that post is that it took a 8%+ lead in polls for Biden to squeak by Trump by thousands of votes. Biden consistently polling a couple points behind Trump is much worse than you/Democrats/Biden supporters are grasping. If the next 4 (3 before voting starts) months don't go much better than the last, then Biden is toast.
You're drawing a causal relationship that is unfounded. It's true that Biden was leading Trump by 8% in November 2020, and it's true that Biden just barely won the election, but it's incorrect to say that a polling lead of 8% is required for him to win again (especially in a different election).
The reason it's ~50:50 on 538 isn't the gap in the polls, it's the distance from the election (and the "fundamentals" favoring Biden).
The reason it's 50/50 is because a lot of people were asked who they'd vote for, and about half said Biden and about half said Trump (particularly for the key swing states they were polled in), or some other polling structure where 50% of the potential scenarios ended in a Biden victory. That's it. 50/50 now means 50/50 now. It doesn't guarantee 50/50 in November, it doesn't guarantee 40/60 in November, and it doesn't guarantee anything else based on "the distance from the election". This is the problem with using early polling to extrapolate too far, rather than seeing a poll as a snapshot of a specific moment in time.
If you think people will gradually change their minds away from Biden, over the next few months, due to reasons like his poor debate performance, then that's fine, but those changes will still appear in the polls. For all the stock you've been putting into the polling data over the past few months, you're very quick to assert that those numbers really mean completely different numbers.
If Biden was polling like this in November it wouldn't be 50:50. To actually be 50:50, Biden has to do a lot better in polling than he is now and has been for 8 months.
If about half the people polled in November said they'd vote for Biden, and half said they've vote for Trump (particularly for the key swing states they were polled in)... or, more specifically, if 50% of the potential scenarios ended in a Biden victory... then the polls would say roughly 50/50.
So if you think it's going to be a 50:50 election you also believe that the next 4 months will be significantly better for Biden than the last 8 whether you say it explicitly or not.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on what I believe. lol.
On July 01 2024 02:47 Conaing wrote: Biden will win Michigan and Pennsylvania. He might lose Wisconsin and Nevada. Trump may win Georgia and Arizona. Trump needs to flip 3 of them to win. Which is never going to happen, unless something really strange happens to the economy. Or some terrorist attack. People already can know that Biden is old. It doesn't matter if he is literally senile because he is president right now. More people will find out that Trump is a criminal and wants to end democracy, though. Independents are not going to like Project 2025. The potential for Biden to win harder than in 202 is there, but then he needs to win debates. Which is can't do.
The issue is that Trump flips 1 or 2 of them, loses the vote, but steals the electoral college. Like Bush did vs Gore. SCOTUS will definitely side with Trump in a close election and put their thumb on the scale. And Trump will take any risk and do whatever is needed, because if he doesn't become president he is going to jail anyway. So he has literally nothing to lose.
I don't share your hubris on MI and PA, your skepticism on GA and AZ, or belief that people don't already know Trump is a criminal that wants to be a day 1 dictator.
"It doesn't matter if he's literally senile, because he is president right now" isn't the winning message Dems and their supporters think it is in those swing states with those swing/low propensity voters.
I do agree that even winning might not be enough to stop Trump though. One problem being that if he does "steal the electoral college" Democrats will fall in line, become enforcers for his fascistic agenda and further entrench it in a vain effort to try to avoid being among its first targets.
On July 01 2024 01:14 Introvert wrote: And DBP, thr polls have been remarkably consistent all year. There's also less reason to think they will change because these are the two most well-known candidates in modern American history. They both have records people are evaluating, maybe with rose-tinted glasses but still. It's not like there's a magical date where polls become extra predictive, it's summer anyways and nothing has changed significantly in polling for 9 months.
My prediction has been that the election will end up being a coinflip, which would indeed be "remarkably consistent" with how the polls have shaped up so far, so there's a good chance that you and I end up being right! You seem to dismiss the idea that there may be any volatility between now and November though, such as Biden taking a dip due to his poor debate performance. I'm impressed by your confidence - that Biden's chances won't be affected and that he remains at basically a 50/50 chance with Trump - but I think it's more likely that we'll see at least a little movement in the polls (negative for Biden), especially over the next few weeks. Maybe his polling numbers will recover after that though. We'll have to see what happens in July and August, and then Biden's team will potentially need to deal with another problem around September (second debate), which could also lead to more volatility. But maybe you're correct that Biden's polling will end up being immune to negatives; that would certainly help to balance out the massive number of negative consequences that haven't affected Trump's polling!
GH has tried explaining this but Biden isn't tied, he's behind.
As of last week (before the debate), Biden was a negligible amount behind Trump. It was basically 50/50.
He has to win the popular vote by probably 2 points to be about tied.
That's false. Biden could lose the overall popular vote and still win the election. What matters is the outcome of a few key swing states. Whether he wins 70% or 51% of California is irrelevant for the election results, even though the former beefs up his overall popular vote.
On June 30 2024 06:36 xM(Z wrote: why your dems are fucking Biden so hard?. i get that your progressives(socialists/communists) hate him, but still ... it seems fucked, it looks like dems main concern is aesthetics.
Because the “let’s not state the obvious because it will make Biden look bad” is the entire reason they are in this predicament in the first place.
but for any democrat in touch with reality, there was an 81% chance Biden would lose 81% of the debate, before it even started. the campaign narrative, from the start, should've been "good, wise, old grandpa", rather than "strong, powerful leader".
i've read the other replays too(communists gonna hate, they seem unable to get over the Bernie fiasco) and i don't see an answer. it's like, form the beginning, all the dems stuck their heads into the sand then hoped and prayed Trump would lose more(due to lawsuits, his lies, his character ...etc), forgetting they'd have to actually prop up someone for the next 4 years. and now, still with their heads in the sand, they're abandoning ship because ... aesthetic obligations disguised as ethic/moral reasons?. fucking hell, there's no plausible deniability to be had here; you(dems) all new.
I'm over Bernie personally
Out of curiosity, why are you over Bernie?
DPB's right that they aren't going to replace Biden unless they have to due to him just falling off a cliff medically. Why DPB and other Democrats/Biden supporters think the next 4 months will be so much better for Biden than the last 8 months I can't say though.
I never said that the next 4 months will be "so much better for Biden than the last 8 months". In fact, what I've been consistently saying is that the election will most likely come down to a coinflip. Spring polling (for whatever that's worth) agreed with me, and if summer/fall polling end up showing a post-debate dip for Biden that eventually starts to rebalance in 1-3 months, then it'll continue to be a coinflip. If the debate never happened, then staying the course of a coinflip would have also been a reasonable prediction. At no point had I suggested that Biden is going to start doing "so much better" in the polls.
For what it's worth, even if Biden is replaced, I think it'll still be a coinflip between the new candidate and Trump. Maybe the new candidate will have 55-45 odds instead of the reverse, but running an event like this only one time means that neither side can be super confident, even if it's 60-40 or 65-35 in favor of a candidate.
Bernie was a compromise to start with. The potential of him being the nominee/president was enough to keep a sliver of electoralism alive for me (back in 2016).
"Coinflip" (~50:50 and down by ~1-2% nationally) sounds a lot better than it is when you realize Biden was a 9:1 favorite with a 8.5% lead (4:1 with a 9%+ lead at this point in the race) going into an election he won by the skin of his teeth against the same guy in 2020 while citizens were dying by the hundreds or thousands per day from an ongoing pandemic Trump had clearly mismanaged.
Mind you this is up against a 2x impeached, 34x felony convicted, insurrectionist (who wasn't any of those things at this point last time, though he had been impeached once)
Biden/Democrats are in so much more trouble than you/his supporters/Democrats are prepared/willing to accept. This hubris could cost Dems the most important election of their lives and it's clear to anyone that isn't obsequiously supporting Biden imo.
Maybe I'll end up being wrong about my coinflip prediction - maybe in September and October, we'll see the polls tilted 70-30 or worse, in favor of Trump. Maybe things spiral out of control over the next few months. And if that happens, I'll have no problem saying that my prediction was wrong. But let's at least agree that my coinflip prediction is not the same as your claim that I "think the next 4 months will be so much better for Biden than the last 8 months", okay? I didn't say that, and I don't believe that.
With Biden's terrible debate performance, his chances of winning are surely worse now than they were a week ago. I said that I expect Biden to dip in the polls, and that I wonder if he'll recover from it; I'd hardly call that "hubris".
That's the fun of giving probabilities for presidential elections, as long as you give something a chance, you can't really be wrong.
We're presumably using the polls to inform the probabilities. For example, it would be inconsistent, based on the data, if someone said the current chance of Biden winning is 30% if the data says it's 50%.
One issue I'm trying to point out in that post is that it took a 8%+ lead in polls for Biden to squeak by Trump by thousands of votes. Biden consistently polling a couple points behind Trump is much worse than you/Democrats/Biden supporters are grasping. If the next 4 (3 before voting starts) months don't go much better than the last, then Biden is toast.
You're drawing a causal relationship that is unfounded. It's true that Biden was leading Trump by 8% in November 2020, and it's true that Biden just barely won the election, but it's incorrect to say that a polling lead of 8% is required for him to win again (especially in a different election).
The reason it's ~50:50 on 538 isn't the gap in the polls, it's the distance from the election (and the "fundamentals" favoring Biden).
The reason it's 50/50 is because a lot of people were asked who they'd vote for, and about half said Biden and about half said Trump (particularly for the key swing states they were polled in). That's it. 50/50 now means 50/50 now. It doesn't guarantee 50/50 in November, it doesn't guarantee 40/60 in November, and it doesn't guarantee anything else based on "the distance from the election". This is the problem with using early polling to extrapolate too far, rather than seeing a poll as a snapshot of a specific moment in time.
If you think people will gradually change their minds away from Biden, over the next few months, due to reasons like his poor debate performance, then that's fine, but those changes will still appear in the polls. For all the stock you've been putting into the polling data over the past few months, you're very quick to assert that those numbers really mean completely different numbers.
If Biden was polling like this in November it wouldn't be 50:50. To actually be 50:50, Biden has to do a lot better in polling than he is now and has been for 8 months.
If about half the people polled in November said they'd vote for Biden, and half said they've vote for Trump (particularly for the key swing states they were polled in), then the polls would say roughly 50/50.
So if you think it's going to be a 50:50 election you also believe that the next 4 months will be significantly better for Biden than the last 8 whether you say it explicitly or not.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on what I believe. lol.
"inconsistent" isn't wrong.
I'm not saying he needs an 8% lead, I'm saying he needs better than to be losing as he has been for 8 months.
You're just misunderstanding how 538 is reaching its "50:50" probability.
When we have few polls or when it's early in the campaign, our model's predictions are mostly based on the fundamentals — with their standard deviation usually around 6 points or so. But when it's Election Day in a state with a lot of polls, our uncertainty about public opinion is a lot smaller, so we will put a lot more weight on the polling data (and subsequently, our polling averages that feed into the model) when generating our final prediction.
So 50:50 in the polls doesn't equate to a 50:50 chance. It only does now because "the fundamentals" in the model are more heavily weighted against polling and favor Biden. But those fundamentals are only going to become less weighted and if Biden's polling doesn't pick up (better than it has for 8 months) to counteract it, his odds will drop significantly even if his polling is marginally better.
Of course it isn't the winning message. But this election won't be won with the voters. Biden doesn't have it in him to crush Trump on tv. Which is needed to get a bigger win than 2020. This presidency is decided after Biden wins at the ballot box. Likely by SCOTUS together with some new scheme Trump comes up with. And if SCOTUS does steal it, there will need to be a protest so big, the SCOTUS needs to turn back their decision. Which is not at all in the cards right now. How many Americans went into the streets in 2000 to protest SCOTUS stealing the vote away from the voters and giving it to W Bush? Instead of trying to convince more voters to vote Biden, the focus should be on the courts and SCOTUS. Because they decide who is president in 2025. Not the American voter.
There is a reason why Trump starts talking about the vote being stolen from him long before the fact. If Trump started with that talking point AFTER the election, there's no way he got that many people to come to DC on Jan6. You need to have a plan ready right now. And you need to prepare the people for it right now. The Dem talking point is now that we should respect the courts. And if the courts decide in December 2024 that the ballot doesn't matter and that Trump should become president, how can you as the democrats then explain to your own base, or independents that voted for you, that the SCOTUS ruling shouldn't be followed? You can't.
Biden needs to come out and say he believes SCOTUS will try to steal his election away from it. Before the election happens. He is no choice. If he doesn't do this, he will be too late after the fact. The thing with stealing is, Trump already tried stealing. The fact that Trump refused to commit to not trying to steal it this time is irrelevant. And when one side tries to steal, the other side needs to steal it back. A fair result cannot happen. You can't have a fair election when Trump is in it. You just need to steal it harder. That's why Trump should have been disqualified from even running. That's why the founding fathers put that in the constitution. Either Trump will steal this election. Or Biden will. And there is no sign that Biden is willing to do that.
On July 01 2024 01:14 Introvert wrote: And DBP, thr polls have been remarkably consistent all year. There's also less reason to think they will change because these are the two most well-known candidates in modern American history. They both have records people are evaluating, maybe with rose-tinted glasses but still. It's not like there's a magical date where polls become extra predictive, it's summer anyways and nothing has changed significantly in polling for 9 months.
My prediction has been that the election will end up being a coinflip, which would indeed be "remarkably consistent" with how the polls have shaped up so far, so there's a good chance that you and I end up being right! You seem to dismiss the idea that there may be any volatility between now and November though, such as Biden taking a dip due to his poor debate performance. I'm impressed by your confidence - that Biden's chances won't be affected and that he remains at basically a 50/50 chance with Trump - but I think it's more likely that we'll see at least a little movement in the polls (negative for Biden), especially over the next few weeks. Maybe his polling numbers will recover after that though. We'll have to see what happens in July and August, and then Biden's team will potentially need to deal with another problem around September (second debate), which could also lead to more volatility. But maybe you're correct that Biden's polling will end up being immune to negatives; that would certainly help to balance out the massive number of negative consequences that haven't affected Trump's polling!
GH has tried explaining this but Biden isn't tied, he's behind.
As of last week (before the debate), Biden was a negligible amount behind Trump. It was basically 50/50.
He has to win the popular vote by probably 2 points to be about tied.
That's false. Biden could lose the overall popular vote and still win the election. What matters is the outcome of a few key swing states. Whether he wins 70% or 51% of California is irrelevant for the election results, even though the former beefs up his overall popular vote.
On July 01 2024 02:21 GreenHorizons wrote:
On June 30 2024 22:12 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
On June 30 2024 21:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
On June 30 2024 20:28 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
On June 30 2024 20:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
On June 30 2024 14:46 xM(Z wrote:
On June 30 2024 06:45 BlackJack wrote:
On June 30 2024 06:36 xM(Z wrote: why your dems are fucking Biden so hard?. i get that your progressives(socialists/communists) hate him, but still ... it seems fucked, it looks like dems main concern is aesthetics.
Because the “let’s not state the obvious because it will make Biden look bad” is the entire reason they are in this predicament in the first place.
but for any democrat in touch with reality, there was an 81% chance Biden would lose 81% of the debate, before it even started. the campaign narrative, from the start, should've been "good, wise, old grandpa", rather than "strong, powerful leader".
i've read the other replays too(communists gonna hate, they seem unable to get over the Bernie fiasco) and i don't see an answer. it's like, form the beginning, all the dems stuck their heads into the sand then hoped and prayed Trump would lose more(due to lawsuits, his lies, his character ...etc), forgetting they'd have to actually prop up someone for the next 4 years. and now, still with their heads in the sand, they're abandoning ship because ... aesthetic obligations disguised as ethic/moral reasons?. fucking hell, there's no plausible deniability to be had here; you(dems) all new.
I'm over Bernie personally
Out of curiosity, why are you over Bernie?
DPB's right that they aren't going to replace Biden unless they have to due to him just falling off a cliff medically. Why DPB and other Democrats/Biden supporters think the next 4 months will be so much better for Biden than the last 8 months I can't say though.
I never said that the next 4 months will be "so much better for Biden than the last 8 months". In fact, what I've been consistently saying is that the election will most likely come down to a coinflip. Spring polling (for whatever that's worth) agreed with me, and if summer/fall polling end up showing a post-debate dip for Biden that eventually starts to rebalance in 1-3 months, then it'll continue to be a coinflip. If the debate never happened, then staying the course of a coinflip would have also been a reasonable prediction. At no point had I suggested that Biden is going to start doing "so much better" in the polls.
For what it's worth, even if Biden is replaced, I think it'll still be a coinflip between the new candidate and Trump. Maybe the new candidate will have 55-45 odds instead of the reverse, but running an event like this only one time means that neither side can be super confident, even if it's 60-40 or 65-35 in favor of a candidate.
Bernie was a compromise to start with. The potential of him being the nominee/president was enough to keep a sliver of electoralism alive for me (back in 2016).
"Coinflip" (~50:50 and down by ~1-2% nationally) sounds a lot better than it is when you realize Biden was a 9:1 favorite with a 8.5% lead (4:1 with a 9%+ lead at this point in the race) going into an election he won by the skin of his teeth against the same guy in 2020 while citizens were dying by the hundreds or thousands per day from an ongoing pandemic Trump had clearly mismanaged.
Mind you this is up against a 2x impeached, 34x felony convicted, insurrectionist (who wasn't any of those things at this point last time, though he had been impeached once)
Biden/Democrats are in so much more trouble than you/his supporters/Democrats are prepared/willing to accept. This hubris could cost Dems the most important election of their lives and it's clear to anyone that isn't obsequiously supporting Biden imo.
Maybe I'll end up being wrong about my coinflip prediction - maybe in September and October, we'll see the polls tilted 70-30 or worse, in favor of Trump. Maybe things spiral out of control over the next few months. And if that happens, I'll have no problem saying that my prediction was wrong. But let's at least agree that my coinflip prediction is not the same as your claim that I "think the next 4 months will be so much better for Biden than the last 8 months", okay? I didn't say that, and I don't believe that.
With Biden's terrible debate performance, his chances of winning are surely worse now than they were a week ago. I said that I expect Biden to dip in the polls, and that I wonder if he'll recover from it; I'd hardly call that "hubris".
That's the fun of giving probabilities for presidential elections, as long as you give something a chance, you can't really be wrong.
We're presumably using the polls to inform the probabilities. For example, it would be inconsistent, based on the data, if someone said the current chance of Biden winning is 30% if the data says it's 50%.
One issue I'm trying to point out in that post is that it took a 8%+ lead in polls for Biden to squeak by Trump by thousands of votes. Biden consistently polling a couple points behind Trump is much worse than you/Democrats/Biden supporters are grasping. If the next 4 (3 before voting starts) months don't go much better than the last, then Biden is toast.
You're drawing a causal relationship that is unfounded. It's true that Biden was leading Trump by 8% in November 2020, and it's true that Biden just barely won the election, but it's incorrect to say that a polling lead of 8% is required for him to win again (especially in a different election).
The reason it's ~50:50 on 538 isn't the gap in the polls, it's the distance from the election (and the "fundamentals" favoring Biden).
The reason it's 50/50 is because a lot of people were asked who they'd vote for, and about half said Biden and about half said Trump (particularly for the key swing states they were polled in). That's it. 50/50 now means 50/50 now. It doesn't guarantee 50/50 in November, it doesn't guarantee 40/60 in November, and it doesn't guarantee anything else based on "the distance from the election". This is the problem with using early polling to extrapolate too far, rather than seeing a poll as a snapshot of a specific moment in time.
If you think people will gradually change their minds away from Biden, over the next few months, due to reasons like his poor debate performance, then that's fine, but those changes will still appear in the polls. For all the stock you've been putting into the polling data over the past few months, you're very quick to assert that those numbers really mean completely different numbers.
If Biden was polling like this in November it wouldn't be 50:50. To actually be 50:50, Biden has to do a lot better in polling than he is now and has been for 8 months.
If about half the people polled in November said they'd vote for Biden, and half said they've vote for Trump (particularly for the key swing states they were polled in), then the polls would say roughly 50/50.
So if you think it's going to be a 50:50 election you also believe that the next 4 months will be significantly better for Biden than the last 8 whether you say it explicitly or not.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on what I believe. lol.
"inconsistent" isn't wrong.
I'm not saying he needs an 8% lead, I'm saying he needs better than to be losing as he has been for 8 months.
You're just misunderstanding how 538 is reaching its "50:50" probability.
When we have few polls or when it's early in the campaign, our model's predictions are mostly based on the fundamentals — with their standard deviation usually around 6 points or so. But when it's Election Day in a state with a lot of polls, our uncertainty about public opinion is a lot smaller, so we will put a lot more weight on the polling data (and subsequently, our polling averages that feed into the model) when generating our final prediction.
So 50:50 in the polls doesn't equate to a 50:50 chance. It only does now because "the fundamentals" in the model are more heavily weighted against polling and favor Biden. But those fundamentals are only going to become less weighted and if Biden's polling doesn't pick up (better than it has for 8 months) to counteract it, his odds will drop significantly even if his polling is marginally better.
I understand that Biden's strong economic and political fundamentals have been helping him in 538's early polling stages (I believe I've said about 10 times over the past few months that early polling is not necessarily a strong predictor of November outcomes, which is why I've been cautioning you and others to not take them as gospel). Introvert was the one who said that the next few months won't have fluctuations because the past few months have been steady. I didn't say that, and I don't think that one can safely make that causal claim.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if there's some volatility along the way to November (especially due to the debate), but I still predict that the November results will end up being a coinflip. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe your prediction that Biden's polling numbers will consistently decline from now until November, as the weighing of fundamentals ease up in favor of other criteria, is correct. Maybe all three of us end up being wrong. We won't know until November, so I don't understand why you keep picking fights with me and others about these kinds of things.
On July 01 2024 01:14 Introvert wrote: And DBP, thr polls have been remarkably consistent all year. There's also less reason to think they will change because these are the two most well-known candidates in modern American history. They both have records people are evaluating, maybe with rose-tinted glasses but still. It's not like there's a magical date where polls become extra predictive, it's summer anyways and nothing has changed significantly in polling for 9 months.
My prediction has been that the election will end up being a coinflip, which would indeed be "remarkably consistent" with how the polls have shaped up so far, so there's a good chance that you and I end up being right! You seem to dismiss the idea that there may be any volatility between now and November though, such as Biden taking a dip due to his poor debate performance. I'm impressed by your confidence - that Biden's chances won't be affected and that he remains at basically a 50/50 chance with Trump - but I think it's more likely that we'll see at least a little movement in the polls (negative for Biden), especially over the next few weeks. Maybe his polling numbers will recover after that though. We'll have to see what happens in July and August, and then Biden's team will potentially need to deal with another problem around September (second debate), which could also lead to more volatility. But maybe you're correct that Biden's polling will end up being immune to negatives; that would certainly help to balance out the massive number of negative consequences that haven't affected Trump's polling!
GH has tried explaining this but Biden isn't tied, he's behind.
As of last week (before the debate), Biden was a negligible amount behind Trump. It was basically 50/50.
He has to win the popular vote by probably 2 points to be about tied.
That's false. Biden could lose the overall popular vote and still win the election. What matters is the outcome of a few key swing states. Whether he wins 70% or 51% of California is irrelevant for the election results, even though the former beefs up his overall popular vote.
On July 01 2024 02:21 GreenHorizons wrote:
On June 30 2024 22:12 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
On June 30 2024 21:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
On June 30 2024 20:28 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
On June 30 2024 20:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
On June 30 2024 14:46 xM(Z wrote:
On June 30 2024 06:45 BlackJack wrote: [quote]
Because the “let’s not state the obvious because it will make Biden look bad” is the entire reason they are in this predicament in the first place.
but for any democrat in touch with reality, there was an 81% chance Biden would lose 81% of the debate, before it even started. the campaign narrative, from the start, should've been "good, wise, old grandpa", rather than "strong, powerful leader".
i've read the other replays too(communists gonna hate, they seem unable to get over the Bernie fiasco) and i don't see an answer. it's like, form the beginning, all the dems stuck their heads into the sand then hoped and prayed Trump would lose more(due to lawsuits, his lies, his character ...etc), forgetting they'd have to actually prop up someone for the next 4 years. and now, still with their heads in the sand, they're abandoning ship because ... aesthetic obligations disguised as ethic/moral reasons?. fucking hell, there's no plausible deniability to be had here; you(dems) all new.
I'm over Bernie personally
Out of curiosity, why are you over Bernie?
DPB's right that they aren't going to replace Biden unless they have to due to him just falling off a cliff medically. Why DPB and other Democrats/Biden supporters think the next 4 months will be so much better for Biden than the last 8 months I can't say though.
I never said that the next 4 months will be "so much better for Biden than the last 8 months". In fact, what I've been consistently saying is that the election will most likely come down to a coinflip. Spring polling (for whatever that's worth) agreed with me, and if summer/fall polling end up showing a post-debate dip for Biden that eventually starts to rebalance in 1-3 months, then it'll continue to be a coinflip. If the debate never happened, then staying the course of a coinflip would have also been a reasonable prediction. At no point had I suggested that Biden is going to start doing "so much better" in the polls.
For what it's worth, even if Biden is replaced, I think it'll still be a coinflip between the new candidate and Trump. Maybe the new candidate will have 55-45 odds instead of the reverse, but running an event like this only one time means that neither side can be super confident, even if it's 60-40 or 65-35 in favor of a candidate.
Bernie was a compromise to start with. The potential of him being the nominee/president was enough to keep a sliver of electoralism alive for me (back in 2016).
"Coinflip" (~50:50 and down by ~1-2% nationally) sounds a lot better than it is when you realize Biden was a 9:1 favorite with a 8.5% lead (4:1 with a 9%+ lead at this point in the race) going into an election he won by the skin of his teeth against the same guy in 2020 while citizens were dying by the hundreds or thousands per day from an ongoing pandemic Trump had clearly mismanaged.
Mind you this is up against a 2x impeached, 34x felony convicted, insurrectionist (who wasn't any of those things at this point last time, though he had been impeached once)
Biden/Democrats are in so much more trouble than you/his supporters/Democrats are prepared/willing to accept. This hubris could cost Dems the most important election of their lives and it's clear to anyone that isn't obsequiously supporting Biden imo.
Maybe I'll end up being wrong about my coinflip prediction - maybe in September and October, we'll see the polls tilted 70-30 or worse, in favor of Trump. Maybe things spiral out of control over the next few months. And if that happens, I'll have no problem saying that my prediction was wrong. But let's at least agree that my coinflip prediction is not the same as your claim that I "think the next 4 months will be so much better for Biden than the last 8 months", okay? I didn't say that, and I don't believe that.
With Biden's terrible debate performance, his chances of winning are surely worse now than they were a week ago. I said that I expect Biden to dip in the polls, and that I wonder if he'll recover from it; I'd hardly call that "hubris".
That's the fun of giving probabilities for presidential elections, as long as you give something a chance, you can't really be wrong.
We're presumably using the polls to inform the probabilities. For example, it would be inconsistent, based on the data, if someone said the current chance of Biden winning is 30% if the data says it's 50%.
One issue I'm trying to point out in that post is that it took a 8%+ lead in polls for Biden to squeak by Trump by thousands of votes. Biden consistently polling a couple points behind Trump is much worse than you/Democrats/Biden supporters are grasping. If the next 4 (3 before voting starts) months don't go much better than the last, then Biden is toast.
You're drawing a causal relationship that is unfounded. It's true that Biden was leading Trump by 8% in November 2020, and it's true that Biden just barely won the election, but it's incorrect to say that a polling lead of 8% is required for him to win again (especially in a different election).
The reason it's ~50:50 on 538 isn't the gap in the polls, it's the distance from the election (and the "fundamentals" favoring Biden).
The reason it's 50/50 is because a lot of people were asked who they'd vote for, and about half said Biden and about half said Trump (particularly for the key swing states they were polled in). That's it. 50/50 now means 50/50 now. It doesn't guarantee 50/50 in November, it doesn't guarantee 40/60 in November, and it doesn't guarantee anything else based on "the distance from the election". This is the problem with using early polling to extrapolate too far, rather than seeing a poll as a snapshot of a specific moment in time.
If you think people will gradually change their minds away from Biden, over the next few months, due to reasons like his poor debate performance, then that's fine, but those changes will still appear in the polls. For all the stock you've been putting into the polling data over the past few months, you're very quick to assert that those numbers really mean completely different numbers.
If Biden was polling like this in November it wouldn't be 50:50. To actually be 50:50, Biden has to do a lot better in polling than he is now and has been for 8 months.
If about half the people polled in November said they'd vote for Biden, and half said they've vote for Trump (particularly for the key swing states they were polled in), then the polls would say roughly 50/50.
So if you think it's going to be a 50:50 election you also believe that the next 4 months will be significantly better for Biden than the last 8 whether you say it explicitly or not.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on what I believe. lol.
"inconsistent" isn't wrong.
I'm not saying he needs an 8% lead, I'm saying he needs better than to be losing as he has been for 8 months.
You're just misunderstanding how 538 is reaching its "50:50" probability.
When we have few polls or when it's early in the campaign, our model's predictions are mostly based on the fundamentals — with their standard deviation usually around 6 points or so. But when it's Election Day in a state with a lot of polls, our uncertainty about public opinion is a lot smaller, so we will put a lot more weight on the polling data (and subsequently, our polling averages that feed into the model) when generating our final prediction.
So 50:50 in the polls doesn't equate to a 50:50 chance. It only does now because "the fundamentals" in the model are more heavily weighted against polling and favor Biden. But those fundamentals are only going to become less weighted and if Biden's polling doesn't pick up (better than it has for 8 months) to counteract it, his odds will drop significantly even if his polling is marginally better.
I understand that Biden's strong economic and political fundamentals have been helping him in 538's early polling stages (I believe I've said about 10 times over the past few months that early polling is not necessarily a strong predictor of November outcomes, which is why I've been cautioning you and others to not take them as gospel). Introvert was the one who said that the next few months won't have fluctuations because the past few months have been steady. I didn't say that, and I don't think that one can safely make that causal claim.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if there's some volatility along the way to November (especially due to the debate), but I still predict that the November results will end up being a coinflip. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe your prediction that Biden's polling numbers will consistently decline from now until November, as the weighing of fundamentals ease up in favor of other criteria, is correct. Maybe all three of us end up being wrong. We won't know until November, so I don't understand why you keep picking fights with me and others about these kinds of things.
I'm not saying (or conditioning) it not being a coinflip on Biden's polling getting worse, I'm saying that 538 wouldn't consider it a coinflip even if Biden was polling marginally better than he was before his debate disaster as we get closer to the election. He has to get higher in the polls than he's been in 8 months just to keep it near 50:50.
Biden's just in much more trouble than you appreciate currently.
Also you/Democrats/Biden supporters are advocating for a guy you iirc (and most of his 2020 voters) believe is aiding and abetting genocide, and could kill your mom in cold blood right in front of you and still not lose your vote or advocacy. I find that catastrophically problematic on several fronts, not the least of which, what it says of the ostensible "democracy" you're trying to "save" with that deplorable position in the first place.
On July 01 2024 01:14 Introvert wrote: And DBP, thr polls have been remarkably consistent all year. There's also less reason to think they will change because these are the two most well-known candidates in modern American history. They both have records people are evaluating, maybe with rose-tinted glasses but still. It's not like there's a magical date where polls become extra predictive, it's summer anyways and nothing has changed significantly in polling for 9 months.
My prediction has been that the election will end up being a coinflip, which would indeed be "remarkably consistent" with how the polls have shaped up so far, so there's a good chance that you and I end up being right! You seem to dismiss the idea that there may be any volatility between now and November though, such as Biden taking a dip due to his poor debate performance. I'm impressed by your confidence - that Biden's chances won't be affected and that he remains at basically a 50/50 chance with Trump - but I think it's more likely that we'll see at least a little movement in the polls (negative for Biden), especially over the next few weeks. Maybe his polling numbers will recover after that though. We'll have to see what happens in July and August, and then Biden's team will potentially need to deal with another problem around September (second debate), which could also lead to more volatility. But maybe you're correct that Biden's polling will end up being immune to negatives; that would certainly help to balance out the massive number of negative consequences that haven't affected Trump's polling!
GH has tried explaining this but Biden isn't tied, he's behind.
As of last week (before the debate), Biden was a negligible amount behind Trump. It was basically 50/50.
He has to win the popular vote by probably 2 points to be about tied.
That's false. Biden could lose the overall popular vote and still win the election. What matters is the outcome of a few key swing states. Whether he wins 70% or 51% of California is irrelevant for the election results, even though the former beefs up his overall popular vote.
On July 01 2024 02:21 GreenHorizons wrote:
On June 30 2024 22:12 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
On June 30 2024 21:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
On June 30 2024 20:28 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
On June 30 2024 20:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
On June 30 2024 14:46 xM(Z wrote:
On June 30 2024 06:45 BlackJack wrote: [quote]
Because the “let’s not state the obvious because it will make Biden look bad” is the entire reason they are in this predicament in the first place.
but for any democrat in touch with reality, there was an 81% chance Biden would lose 81% of the debate, before it even started. the campaign narrative, from the start, should've been "good, wise, old grandpa", rather than "strong, powerful leader".
i've read the other replays too(communists gonna hate, they seem unable to get over the Bernie fiasco) and i don't see an answer. it's like, form the beginning, all the dems stuck their heads into the sand then hoped and prayed Trump would lose more(due to lawsuits, his lies, his character ...etc), forgetting they'd have to actually prop up someone for the next 4 years. and now, still with their heads in the sand, they're abandoning ship because ... aesthetic obligations disguised as ethic/moral reasons?. fucking hell, there's no plausible deniability to be had here; you(dems) all new.
I'm over Bernie personally
Out of curiosity, why are you over Bernie?
DPB's right that they aren't going to replace Biden unless they have to due to him just falling off a cliff medically. Why DPB and other Democrats/Biden supporters think the next 4 months will be so much better for Biden than the last 8 months I can't say though.
I never said that the next 4 months will be "so much better for Biden than the last 8 months". In fact, what I've been consistently saying is that the election will most likely come down to a coinflip. Spring polling (for whatever that's worth) agreed with me, and if summer/fall polling end up showing a post-debate dip for Biden that eventually starts to rebalance in 1-3 months, then it'll continue to be a coinflip. If the debate never happened, then staying the course of a coinflip would have also been a reasonable prediction. At no point had I suggested that Biden is going to start doing "so much better" in the polls.
For what it's worth, even if Biden is replaced, I think it'll still be a coinflip between the new candidate and Trump. Maybe the new candidate will have 55-45 odds instead of the reverse, but running an event like this only one time means that neither side can be super confident, even if it's 60-40 or 65-35 in favor of a candidate.
Bernie was a compromise to start with. The potential of him being the nominee/president was enough to keep a sliver of electoralism alive for me (back in 2016).
"Coinflip" (~50:50 and down by ~1-2% nationally) sounds a lot better than it is when you realize Biden was a 9:1 favorite with a 8.5% lead (4:1 with a 9%+ lead at this point in the race) going into an election he won by the skin of his teeth against the same guy in 2020 while citizens were dying by the hundreds or thousands per day from an ongoing pandemic Trump had clearly mismanaged.
Mind you this is up against a 2x impeached, 34x felony convicted, insurrectionist (who wasn't any of those things at this point last time, though he had been impeached once)
Biden/Democrats are in so much more trouble than you/his supporters/Democrats are prepared/willing to accept. This hubris could cost Dems the most important election of their lives and it's clear to anyone that isn't obsequiously supporting Biden imo.
Maybe I'll end up being wrong about my coinflip prediction - maybe in September and October, we'll see the polls tilted 70-30 or worse, in favor of Trump. Maybe things spiral out of control over the next few months. And if that happens, I'll have no problem saying that my prediction was wrong. But let's at least agree that my coinflip prediction is not the same as your claim that I "think the next 4 months will be so much better for Biden than the last 8 months", okay? I didn't say that, and I don't believe that.
With Biden's terrible debate performance, his chances of winning are surely worse now than they were a week ago. I said that I expect Biden to dip in the polls, and that I wonder if he'll recover from it; I'd hardly call that "hubris".
That's the fun of giving probabilities for presidential elections, as long as you give something a chance, you can't really be wrong.
We're presumably using the polls to inform the probabilities. For example, it would be inconsistent, based on the data, if someone said the current chance of Biden winning is 30% if the data says it's 50%.
One issue I'm trying to point out in that post is that it took a 8%+ lead in polls for Biden to squeak by Trump by thousands of votes. Biden consistently polling a couple points behind Trump is much worse than you/Democrats/Biden supporters are grasping. If the next 4 (3 before voting starts) months don't go much better than the last, then Biden is toast.
You're drawing a causal relationship that is unfounded. It's true that Biden was leading Trump by 8% in November 2020, and it's true that Biden just barely won the election, but it's incorrect to say that a polling lead of 8% is required for him to win again (especially in a different election).
The reason it's ~50:50 on 538 isn't the gap in the polls, it's the distance from the election (and the "fundamentals" favoring Biden).
The reason it's 50/50 is because a lot of people were asked who they'd vote for, and about half said Biden and about half said Trump (particularly for the key swing states they were polled in). That's it. 50/50 now means 50/50 now. It doesn't guarantee 50/50 in November, it doesn't guarantee 40/60 in November, and it doesn't guarantee anything else based on "the distance from the election". This is the problem with using early polling to extrapolate too far, rather than seeing a poll as a snapshot of a specific moment in time.
If you think people will gradually change their minds away from Biden, over the next few months, due to reasons like his poor debate performance, then that's fine, but those changes will still appear in the polls. For all the stock you've been putting into the polling data over the past few months, you're very quick to assert that those numbers really mean completely different numbers.
If Biden was polling like this in November it wouldn't be 50:50. To actually be 50:50, Biden has to do a lot better in polling than he is now and has been for 8 months.
If about half the people polled in November said they'd vote for Biden, and half said they've vote for Trump (particularly for the key swing states they were polled in), then the polls would say roughly 50/50.
So if you think it's going to be a 50:50 election you also believe that the next 4 months will be significantly better for Biden than the last 8 whether you say it explicitly or not.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on what I believe. lol.
"inconsistent" isn't wrong.
I'm not saying he needs an 8% lead, I'm saying he needs better than to be losing as he has been for 8 months.
You're just misunderstanding how 538 is reaching its "50:50" probability.
When we have few polls or when it's early in the campaign, our model's predictions are mostly based on the fundamentals — with their standard deviation usually around 6 points or so. But when it's Election Day in a state with a lot of polls, our uncertainty about public opinion is a lot smaller, so we will put a lot more weight on the polling data (and subsequently, our polling averages that feed into the model) when generating our final prediction.
So 50:50 in the polls doesn't equate to a 50:50 chance. It only does now because "the fundamentals" in the model are more heavily weighted against polling and favor Biden. But those fundamentals are only going to become less weighted and if Biden's polling doesn't pick up (better than it has for 8 months) to counteract it, his odds will drop significantly even if his polling is marginally better.
I understand that Biden's strong economic and political fundamentals have been helping him in 538's early polling stages (I believe I've said about 10 times over the past few months that early polling is not necessarily a strong predictor of November outcomes, which is why I've been cautioning you and others to not take them as gospel). Introvert was the one who said that the next few months won't have fluctuations because the past few months have been steady. I didn't say that, and I don't think that one can safely make that causal claim.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if there's some volatility along the way to November (especially due to the debate), but I still predict that the November results will end up being a coinflip. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe your prediction that Biden's polling numbers will consistently decline from now until November, as the weighing of fundamentals ease up in favor of other criteria, is correct. Maybe all three of us end up being wrong. We won't know until November, so I don't understand why you keep picking fights with me and others about these kinds of things.
The thing about all this is that you are the one hoping, against any evidence currently avaliable, that things are going to grt better for Biden when there's a good chance they get even worse instead. I'm looking at the history of how these things work. BTW, 538 is the only (or one of the only) model(s) that has Biden as good as a coinflip. Your assertion that things solidify later is true, but you asking it to do far too much work. Polls even now are generally predictive.
As to your point about the swing states... for all your focus on polling and models I'm surprised you don't know or understand the electoral college disadvantage dems have had and been complaining about for years. If Biden is even nationally he is almost certainly DOWN in the swing states, and indeed state level polling shows this. For decades the swing states vote right of the nation as a whole, and moreover states with similar demographics in the same region are correlated. If black turnout is down and rural turnout is better for Trump in WI it almost certainly is also true in MI, for example. The "Biden only has to win the swing states" is a problem for Biden, not a thing in his favor.
I don't know what will happen, but for months now you have been trying to pretend that he's in better shape, or that the state of the race is more ambigious than it actually is. Again, people can't handle that dems are actually losing.
I'll state the obvious, Biden was awful at the debate. His performance was certainly worse than I expected. Right wingers may say that his decline was obvious, but they also predicted that sort of performance during the State of the Union and they were completely shocked and had to come up with a new narrative (must have been on drugs) after that one. Hard to have a victory lap when you were so wrong about him just a few months ago.
I actually thought the format of the debate was fine. Is the debate between the two candidates or is it between the moderators and the candidates? I want it to be between the two candidates. If the moderators step in every time Trump lies, then it's a debate between him and the moderators. That would have been better for Biden, but I'm not looking to stack the deck in Biden's favor. I want each candidate to prove their meddle. A good debater would have handled Trumps lies and beaten him with them.
Whoever prepared Biden for the debate did an absolute shit job. Biden shit the bed in the opening statement. He sounded extremely nervous and rushed like he was giving an 8th grade book report. His handlers clearly wanted him to memorize an opening statement and squeeze it all in. That's stupid. Getting into memorized details is stupid. Go big picture. Stay big picture. Don't get bogged down. The preparation was an absolute failure.
Having said all that, I'm still voting Biden. He could have walked out, shit his pants, and then shuffled off and I'd still vote for him over Trump. It's almost comical that there are still undecided voters out there. You already had 4 years of Trump and nearly 4 years of Biden. Do you really care how they handle a debate stage? The only reason to possibly be undecided is if you're waiting to November to see how the economy/country is doing then. If good, Biden, if bad, Trump. I don't really think this debate has any meaning.
Biden has proven that he can run a country with his team. Trump has proven that he can't. It's really that simple.
All the panic among the Democrats right now is stupid. People want Biden to step aside so who can run? Generic Democrat? Great. I'll take generic Democrat. However, once you put an actual name on generic Democrat, you've got problems. The democrats held a primary and generic Democrat Dean Phillips got 3.2% of the vote, Biden 87%. Other than Williamson (almost 3%) or Jason Palmer, all the other potential candidates are shown to be cowards.
The right wing media machine will destroy any candidate with enough time to let their message sink in. People wanting Newsom would be crazy as he'd absolutely get destroyed by right wing media. We'll be bombarded nonstop with talking points about how Newsom wants to turn America into a woke socialist hellhole like California. He'd lose Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and the presidency. Kamala Harris? Another crazy Californian, except she doesn't even have any charisma. They both could do a better job in a debate than Biden, but neither could win the general election after the right wing smears go full throttle.
That's Biden's advantage. For years now, the right wing has been screeching about how he's a socialist that will destroy our country. It doesn't land on Biden. He had years in congress as a moderate to prove otherwise. Now he has 4 years as president to prove otherwise. Now they can only say that he's too old (or too vigorous and must be on drugs).
Honestly, if the Democrats wanted to run anyone else right now, it should be Jill Biden. It may be a Nancy and Ronald Reagan situation anyways, might as well make it official.
On July 01 2024 01:14 Introvert wrote: And DBP, thr polls have been remarkably consistent all year. There's also less reason to think they will change because these are the two most well-known candidates in modern American history. They both have records people are evaluating, maybe with rose-tinted glasses but still. It's not like there's a magical date where polls become extra predictive, it's summer anyways and nothing has changed significantly in polling for 9 months.
My prediction has been that the election will end up being a coinflip, which would indeed be "remarkably consistent" with how the polls have shaped up so far, so there's a good chance that you and I end up being right! You seem to dismiss the idea that there may be any volatility between now and November though, such as Biden taking a dip due to his poor debate performance. I'm impressed by your confidence - that Biden's chances won't be affected and that he remains at basically a 50/50 chance with Trump - but I think it's more likely that we'll see at least a little movement in the polls (negative for Biden), especially over the next few weeks. Maybe his polling numbers will recover after that though. We'll have to see what happens in July and August, and then Biden's team will potentially need to deal with another problem around September (second debate), which could also lead to more volatility. But maybe you're correct that Biden's polling will end up being immune to negatives; that would certainly help to balance out the massive number of negative consequences that haven't affected Trump's polling!
GH has tried explaining this but Biden isn't tied, he's behind.
As of last week (before the debate), Biden was a negligible amount behind Trump. It was basically 50/50.
He has to win the popular vote by probably 2 points to be about tied.
That's false. Biden could lose the overall popular vote and still win the election. What matters is the outcome of a few key swing states. Whether he wins 70% or 51% of California is irrelevant for the election results, even though the former beefs up his overall popular vote.
On July 01 2024 02:21 GreenHorizons wrote:
On June 30 2024 22:12 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
On June 30 2024 21:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
On June 30 2024 20:28 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
On June 30 2024 20:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
On June 30 2024 14:46 xM(Z wrote: [quote] but for any democrat in touch with reality, there was an 81% chance Biden would lose 81% of the debate, before it even started. the campaign narrative, from the start, should've been "good, wise, old grandpa", rather than "strong, powerful leader".
i've read the other replays too(communists gonna hate, they seem unable to get over the Bernie fiasco) and i don't see an answer. it's like, form the beginning, all the dems stuck their heads into the sand then hoped and prayed Trump would lose more(due to lawsuits, his lies, his character ...etc), forgetting they'd have to actually prop up someone for the next 4 years. and now, still with their heads in the sand, they're abandoning ship because ... aesthetic obligations disguised as ethic/moral reasons?. fucking hell, there's no plausible deniability to be had here; you(dems) all new.
I'm over Bernie personally
Out of curiosity, why are you over Bernie?
DPB's right that they aren't going to replace Biden unless they have to due to him just falling off a cliff medically. Why DPB and other Democrats/Biden supporters think the next 4 months will be so much better for Biden than the last 8 months I can't say though.
I never said that the next 4 months will be "so much better for Biden than the last 8 months". In fact, what I've been consistently saying is that the election will most likely come down to a coinflip. Spring polling (for whatever that's worth) agreed with me, and if summer/fall polling end up showing a post-debate dip for Biden that eventually starts to rebalance in 1-3 months, then it'll continue to be a coinflip. If the debate never happened, then staying the course of a coinflip would have also been a reasonable prediction. At no point had I suggested that Biden is going to start doing "so much better" in the polls.
For what it's worth, even if Biden is replaced, I think it'll still be a coinflip between the new candidate and Trump. Maybe the new candidate will have 55-45 odds instead of the reverse, but running an event like this only one time means that neither side can be super confident, even if it's 60-40 or 65-35 in favor of a candidate.
Bernie was a compromise to start with. The potential of him being the nominee/president was enough to keep a sliver of electoralism alive for me (back in 2016).
"Coinflip" (~50:50 and down by ~1-2% nationally) sounds a lot better than it is when you realize Biden was a 9:1 favorite with a 8.5% lead (4:1 with a 9%+ lead at this point in the race) going into an election he won by the skin of his teeth against the same guy in 2020 while citizens were dying by the hundreds or thousands per day from an ongoing pandemic Trump had clearly mismanaged.
Mind you this is up against a 2x impeached, 34x felony convicted, insurrectionist (who wasn't any of those things at this point last time, though he had been impeached once)
Biden/Democrats are in so much more trouble than you/his supporters/Democrats are prepared/willing to accept. This hubris could cost Dems the most important election of their lives and it's clear to anyone that isn't obsequiously supporting Biden imo.
Maybe I'll end up being wrong about my coinflip prediction - maybe in September and October, we'll see the polls tilted 70-30 or worse, in favor of Trump. Maybe things spiral out of control over the next few months. And if that happens, I'll have no problem saying that my prediction was wrong. But let's at least agree that my coinflip prediction is not the same as your claim that I "think the next 4 months will be so much better for Biden than the last 8 months", okay? I didn't say that, and I don't believe that.
With Biden's terrible debate performance, his chances of winning are surely worse now than they were a week ago. I said that I expect Biden to dip in the polls, and that I wonder if he'll recover from it; I'd hardly call that "hubris".
That's the fun of giving probabilities for presidential elections, as long as you give something a chance, you can't really be wrong.
We're presumably using the polls to inform the probabilities. For example, it would be inconsistent, based on the data, if someone said the current chance of Biden winning is 30% if the data says it's 50%.
One issue I'm trying to point out in that post is that it took a 8%+ lead in polls for Biden to squeak by Trump by thousands of votes. Biden consistently polling a couple points behind Trump is much worse than you/Democrats/Biden supporters are grasping. If the next 4 (3 before voting starts) months don't go much better than the last, then Biden is toast.
You're drawing a causal relationship that is unfounded. It's true that Biden was leading Trump by 8% in November 2020, and it's true that Biden just barely won the election, but it's incorrect to say that a polling lead of 8% is required for him to win again (especially in a different election).
The reason it's ~50:50 on 538 isn't the gap in the polls, it's the distance from the election (and the "fundamentals" favoring Biden).
The reason it's 50/50 is because a lot of people were asked who they'd vote for, and about half said Biden and about half said Trump (particularly for the key swing states they were polled in). That's it. 50/50 now means 50/50 now. It doesn't guarantee 50/50 in November, it doesn't guarantee 40/60 in November, and it doesn't guarantee anything else based on "the distance from the election". This is the problem with using early polling to extrapolate too far, rather than seeing a poll as a snapshot of a specific moment in time.
If you think people will gradually change their minds away from Biden, over the next few months, due to reasons like his poor debate performance, then that's fine, but those changes will still appear in the polls. For all the stock you've been putting into the polling data over the past few months, you're very quick to assert that those numbers really mean completely different numbers.
If Biden was polling like this in November it wouldn't be 50:50. To actually be 50:50, Biden has to do a lot better in polling than he is now and has been for 8 months.
If about half the people polled in November said they'd vote for Biden, and half said they've vote for Trump (particularly for the key swing states they were polled in), then the polls would say roughly 50/50.
So if you think it's going to be a 50:50 election you also believe that the next 4 months will be significantly better for Biden than the last 8 whether you say it explicitly or not.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on what I believe. lol.
"inconsistent" isn't wrong.
I'm not saying he needs an 8% lead, I'm saying he needs better than to be losing as he has been for 8 months.
You're just misunderstanding how 538 is reaching its "50:50" probability.
When we have few polls or when it's early in the campaign, our model's predictions are mostly based on the fundamentals — with their standard deviation usually around 6 points or so. But when it's Election Day in a state with a lot of polls, our uncertainty about public opinion is a lot smaller, so we will put a lot more weight on the polling data (and subsequently, our polling averages that feed into the model) when generating our final prediction.
So 50:50 in the polls doesn't equate to a 50:50 chance. It only does now because "the fundamentals" in the model are more heavily weighted against polling and favor Biden. But those fundamentals are only going to become less weighted and if Biden's polling doesn't pick up (better than it has for 8 months) to counteract it, his odds will drop significantly even if his polling is marginally better.
I understand that Biden's strong economic and political fundamentals have been helping him in 538's early polling stages (I believe I've said about 10 times over the past few months that early polling is not necessarily a strong predictor of November outcomes, which is why I've been cautioning you and others to not take them as gospel). Introvert was the one who said that the next few months won't have fluctuations because the past few months have been steady. I didn't say that, and I don't think that one can safely make that causal claim.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if there's some volatility along the way to November (especially due to the debate), but I still predict that the November results will end up being a coinflip. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe your prediction that Biden's polling numbers will consistently decline from now until November, as the weighing of fundamentals ease up in favor of other criteria, is correct. Maybe all three of us end up being wrong. We won't know until November, so I don't understand why you keep picking fights with me and others about these kinds of things.
I'm not saying (or conditioning) it not being a coinflip on Biden's polling getting worse, I'm saying that 538 wouldn't consider it a coinflip even if Biden was polling marginally better than he was before his debate disaster as we get closer to the election. He has to get higher in the polls than he's been in 8 months just to keep it near 50:50.
Biden's just in much more trouble than you appreciate currently.
Also you/Democrats/Biden supporters are advocating for a guy you iirc (and most of his 2020 voters) believe is aiding and abetting genocide, and could kill your mom in cold blood right in front of you and still not lose your vote or advocacy. I find that catastrophically problematic on several fronts, not the least of which, what it says of the ostensible "democracy" you're trying to "save" with that deplorable position in the first place.
You and I (and many others) have talked about this topic at great length. You disagree with our positions and explanations and rationalizations and justifications, and that's fine. I don't think I have anything else of substance to add to that particular conversation.
On July 01 2024 01:14 Introvert wrote: And DBP, thr polls have been remarkably consistent all year. There's also less reason to think they will change because these are the two most well-known candidates in modern American history. They both have records people are evaluating, maybe with rose-tinted glasses but still. It's not like there's a magical date where polls become extra predictive, it's summer anyways and nothing has changed significantly in polling for 9 months.
My prediction has been that the election will end up being a coinflip, which would indeed be "remarkably consistent" with how the polls have shaped up so far, so there's a good chance that you and I end up being right! You seem to dismiss the idea that there may be any volatility between now and November though, such as Biden taking a dip due to his poor debate performance. I'm impressed by your confidence - that Biden's chances won't be affected and that he remains at basically a 50/50 chance with Trump - but I think it's more likely that we'll see at least a little movement in the polls (negative for Biden), especially over the next few weeks. Maybe his polling numbers will recover after that though. We'll have to see what happens in July and August, and then Biden's team will potentially need to deal with another problem around September (second debate), which could also lead to more volatility. But maybe you're correct that Biden's polling will end up being immune to negatives; that would certainly help to balance out the massive number of negative consequences that haven't affected Trump's polling!
GH has tried explaining this but Biden isn't tied, he's behind.
As of last week (before the debate), Biden was a negligible amount behind Trump. It was basically 50/50.
He has to win the popular vote by probably 2 points to be about tied.
That's false. Biden could lose the overall popular vote and still win the election. What matters is the outcome of a few key swing states. Whether he wins 70% or 51% of California is irrelevant for the election results, even though the former beefs up his overall popular vote.
On July 01 2024 02:21 GreenHorizons wrote:
On June 30 2024 22:12 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
On June 30 2024 21:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
On June 30 2024 20:28 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
On June 30 2024 20:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
On June 30 2024 14:46 xM(Z wrote: [quote] but for any democrat in touch with reality, there was an 81% chance Biden would lose 81% of the debate, before it even started. the campaign narrative, from the start, should've been "good, wise, old grandpa", rather than "strong, powerful leader".
i've read the other replays too(communists gonna hate, they seem unable to get over the Bernie fiasco) and i don't see an answer. it's like, form the beginning, all the dems stuck their heads into the sand then hoped and prayed Trump would lose more(due to lawsuits, his lies, his character ...etc), forgetting they'd have to actually prop up someone for the next 4 years. and now, still with their heads in the sand, they're abandoning ship because ... aesthetic obligations disguised as ethic/moral reasons?. fucking hell, there's no plausible deniability to be had here; you(dems) all new.
I'm over Bernie personally
Out of curiosity, why are you over Bernie?
DPB's right that they aren't going to replace Biden unless they have to due to him just falling off a cliff medically. Why DPB and other Democrats/Biden supporters think the next 4 months will be so much better for Biden than the last 8 months I can't say though.
I never said that the next 4 months will be "so much better for Biden than the last 8 months". In fact, what I've been consistently saying is that the election will most likely come down to a coinflip. Spring polling (for whatever that's worth) agreed with me, and if summer/fall polling end up showing a post-debate dip for Biden that eventually starts to rebalance in 1-3 months, then it'll continue to be a coinflip. If the debate never happened, then staying the course of a coinflip would have also been a reasonable prediction. At no point had I suggested that Biden is going to start doing "so much better" in the polls.
For what it's worth, even if Biden is replaced, I think it'll still be a coinflip between the new candidate and Trump. Maybe the new candidate will have 55-45 odds instead of the reverse, but running an event like this only one time means that neither side can be super confident, even if it's 60-40 or 65-35 in favor of a candidate.
Bernie was a compromise to start with. The potential of him being the nominee/president was enough to keep a sliver of electoralism alive for me (back in 2016).
"Coinflip" (~50:50 and down by ~1-2% nationally) sounds a lot better than it is when you realize Biden was a 9:1 favorite with a 8.5% lead (4:1 with a 9%+ lead at this point in the race) going into an election he won by the skin of his teeth against the same guy in 2020 while citizens were dying by the hundreds or thousands per day from an ongoing pandemic Trump had clearly mismanaged.
Mind you this is up against a 2x impeached, 34x felony convicted, insurrectionist (who wasn't any of those things at this point last time, though he had been impeached once)
Biden/Democrats are in so much more trouble than you/his supporters/Democrats are prepared/willing to accept. This hubris could cost Dems the most important election of their lives and it's clear to anyone that isn't obsequiously supporting Biden imo.
Maybe I'll end up being wrong about my coinflip prediction - maybe in September and October, we'll see the polls tilted 70-30 or worse, in favor of Trump. Maybe things spiral out of control over the next few months. And if that happens, I'll have no problem saying that my prediction was wrong. But let's at least agree that my coinflip prediction is not the same as your claim that I "think the next 4 months will be so much better for Biden than the last 8 months", okay? I didn't say that, and I don't believe that.
With Biden's terrible debate performance, his chances of winning are surely worse now than they were a week ago. I said that I expect Biden to dip in the polls, and that I wonder if he'll recover from it; I'd hardly call that "hubris".
That's the fun of giving probabilities for presidential elections, as long as you give something a chance, you can't really be wrong.
We're presumably using the polls to inform the probabilities. For example, it would be inconsistent, based on the data, if someone said the current chance of Biden winning is 30% if the data says it's 50%.
One issue I'm trying to point out in that post is that it took a 8%+ lead in polls for Biden to squeak by Trump by thousands of votes. Biden consistently polling a couple points behind Trump is much worse than you/Democrats/Biden supporters are grasping. If the next 4 (3 before voting starts) months don't go much better than the last, then Biden is toast.
You're drawing a causal relationship that is unfounded. It's true that Biden was leading Trump by 8% in November 2020, and it's true that Biden just barely won the election, but it's incorrect to say that a polling lead of 8% is required for him to win again (especially in a different election).
The reason it's ~50:50 on 538 isn't the gap in the polls, it's the distance from the election (and the "fundamentals" favoring Biden).
The reason it's 50/50 is because a lot of people were asked who they'd vote for, and about half said Biden and about half said Trump (particularly for the key swing states they were polled in). That's it. 50/50 now means 50/50 now. It doesn't guarantee 50/50 in November, it doesn't guarantee 40/60 in November, and it doesn't guarantee anything else based on "the distance from the election". This is the problem with using early polling to extrapolate too far, rather than seeing a poll as a snapshot of a specific moment in time.
If you think people will gradually change their minds away from Biden, over the next few months, due to reasons like his poor debate performance, then that's fine, but those changes will still appear in the polls. For all the stock you've been putting into the polling data over the past few months, you're very quick to assert that those numbers really mean completely different numbers.
If Biden was polling like this in November it wouldn't be 50:50. To actually be 50:50, Biden has to do a lot better in polling than he is now and has been for 8 months.
If about half the people polled in November said they'd vote for Biden, and half said they've vote for Trump (particularly for the key swing states they were polled in), then the polls would say roughly 50/50.
So if you think it's going to be a 50:50 election you also believe that the next 4 months will be significantly better for Biden than the last 8 whether you say it explicitly or not.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on what I believe. lol.
"inconsistent" isn't wrong.
I'm not saying he needs an 8% lead, I'm saying he needs better than to be losing as he has been for 8 months.
You're just misunderstanding how 538 is reaching its "50:50" probability.
When we have few polls or when it's early in the campaign, our model's predictions are mostly based on the fundamentals — with their standard deviation usually around 6 points or so. But when it's Election Day in a state with a lot of polls, our uncertainty about public opinion is a lot smaller, so we will put a lot more weight on the polling data (and subsequently, our polling averages that feed into the model) when generating our final prediction.
So 50:50 in the polls doesn't equate to a 50:50 chance. It only does now because "the fundamentals" in the model are more heavily weighted against polling and favor Biden. But those fundamentals are only going to become less weighted and if Biden's polling doesn't pick up (better than it has for 8 months) to counteract it, his odds will drop significantly even if his polling is marginally better.
I understand that Biden's strong economic and political fundamentals have been helping him in 538's early polling stages (I believe I've said about 10 times over the past few months that early polling is not necessarily a strong predictor of November outcomes, which is why I've been cautioning you and others to not take them as gospel). Introvert was the one who said that the next few months won't have fluctuations because the past few months have been steady. I didn't say that, and I don't think that one can safely make that causal claim.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if there's some volatility along the way to November (especially due to the debate), but I still predict that the November results will end up being a coinflip. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe your prediction that Biden's polling numbers will consistently decline from now until November, as the weighing of fundamentals ease up in favor of other criteria, is correct. Maybe all three of us end up being wrong. We won't know until November, so I don't understand why you keep picking fights with me and others about these kinds of things.
The thing about all this is that you are the one hoping, against any evidence currently avaliable, that things are going to grt better for Biden when there's a good chance they get even worse instead. I'm looking at the history of how these things work. BTW, 538 is the only (or one of the only) model(s) that has Biden as good as a coinflip. Your assertion that things solidify later is true, but you asking it to do far too much work. Polls even now are generally predictive.
As to your point about the swing states... for all your focus on polling and models I'm surprised you don't know or understand the electoral college disadvantage dems have had and been complaining about for years. If Biden is even nationally he is almost certainly DOWN in the swing states, and indeed state level polling shows this. For decades the swing states vote right of the nation as a whole, and moreover states with similar demographics in the same region are correlated. If black turnout is down and rural turnout is better for Trump in WI it almost certainly is also true in MI, for example. The "Biden only has to win the swing states" is a problem for Biden, not a thing in his favor.
I don't know what will happen, but for months now you have been trying to pretend that he's in better shape, or that the state of the race is more ambigious than it actually is. Again, people can't handle that dems are actually losing.
I know that Democrats tend to win the popular vote, even if they lose the election. If the polling has him as 50/50 even chance to win the election, then that's talking about the electoral college, not the popular vote. The polls run scenarios for winning the election and individual state outcomes. If a poll announced something like "we asked a million American voters and 500,000 said they'll vote for Biden", that wouldn't be helpful at all without knowing where each of those 1 million voters live, but that's not what's happening here.
@RenSC2 If you platform Trump, then it is your responsibility to fact check him. You can't say that you can't do that because it is a debate.
Honestly. How can you even say this. What do you want? A debate where both sides just yell "you are lying." and "No, you are lying". On top of that, the format made any attempt to even fact check the other side impossible. You can put the world champ real time fact checker on the other stage vs Trump. And he can't do much because their microphone is muted.
This is 100% on CNN. Saying anything else is completely normalizing Trump. Trump is not normal. If you are not willing to fact check Trump because you don't want the moderator to debate Trump, then just say you can't do the debate because Trump is unmoderatable and it would be irresponsible to have him lie on your news channel. It is as simple as that.
Trump actually wants to be fact checked. Even fact checking Trump wouldn't have worked because a CNN vs Trump debate would be bad for Biden. That's why Trump shouldn't even be in this race. You can't suddenly begin to fact check Trump. You should have done that starting in 2016. And every American voter should have Trump's lies, plus almost 10 years of fact checking already burned into their memories, before a 2024 Trump vs Biden debate even starts.
You could even have Biden debate RFK (who is actually at 10% in popular vote poll, which is crazy). And then Trump can do his lying spree alone on Fox News or OneAmericanNews. And if you think that's unfair to the voters. Guess what. Trump shouldn't morally have been on the ballot in 2016. And Trump shouldn't legally have been on the ballot in 2024. You, CNN, already made this unfair to the voter. Because they don't know wtf is true anyone because of post-Truth politics.
BTW people here don't seem to care what I say. This is a good political commentator, mostly on Russia, analysing the debate. Way better than any of the cookie cutter 'The rest is politics' or David Pacman or Destiny or Meidas Touch or The Bullwark stuff:
On July 01 2024 01:14 Introvert wrote: And DBP, thr polls have been remarkably consistent all year. There's also less reason to think they will change because these are the two most well-known candidates in modern American history. They both have records people are evaluating, maybe with rose-tinted glasses but still. It's not like there's a magical date where polls become extra predictive, it's summer anyways and nothing has changed significantly in polling for 9 months.
My prediction has been that the election will end up being a coinflip, which would indeed be "remarkably consistent" with how the polls have shaped up so far, so there's a good chance that you and I end up being right! You seem to dismiss the idea that there may be any volatility between now and November though, such as Biden taking a dip due to his poor debate performance. I'm impressed by your confidence - that Biden's chances won't be affected and that he remains at basically a 50/50 chance with Trump - but I think it's more likely that we'll see at least a little movement in the polls (negative for Biden), especially over the next few weeks. Maybe his polling numbers will recover after that though. We'll have to see what happens in July and August, and then Biden's team will potentially need to deal with another problem around September (second debate), which could also lead to more volatility. But maybe you're correct that Biden's polling will end up being immune to negatives; that would certainly help to balance out the massive number of negative consequences that haven't affected Trump's polling!
GH has tried explaining this but Biden isn't tied, he's behind.
As of last week (before the debate), Biden was a negligible amount behind Trump. It was basically 50/50.
He has to win the popular vote by probably 2 points to be about tied.
That's false. Biden could lose the overall popular vote and still win the election. What matters is the outcome of a few key swing states. Whether he wins 70% or 51% of California is irrelevant for the election results, even though the former beefs up his overall popular vote.
On July 01 2024 02:21 GreenHorizons wrote:
On June 30 2024 22:12 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
On June 30 2024 21:00 GreenHorizons wrote:
On June 30 2024 20:28 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
On June 30 2024 20:00 GreenHorizons wrote: [quote]
I'm over Bernie personally
Out of curiosity, why are you over Bernie?
DPB's right that they aren't going to replace Biden unless they have to due to him just falling off a cliff medically. Why DPB and other Democrats/Biden supporters think the next 4 months will be so much better for Biden than the last 8 months I can't say though.
I never said that the next 4 months will be "so much better for Biden than the last 8 months". In fact, what I've been consistently saying is that the election will most likely come down to a coinflip. Spring polling (for whatever that's worth) agreed with me, and if summer/fall polling end up showing a post-debate dip for Biden that eventually starts to rebalance in 1-3 months, then it'll continue to be a coinflip. If the debate never happened, then staying the course of a coinflip would have also been a reasonable prediction. At no point had I suggested that Biden is going to start doing "so much better" in the polls.
For what it's worth, even if Biden is replaced, I think it'll still be a coinflip between the new candidate and Trump. Maybe the new candidate will have 55-45 odds instead of the reverse, but running an event like this only one time means that neither side can be super confident, even if it's 60-40 or 65-35 in favor of a candidate.
Bernie was a compromise to start with. The potential of him being the nominee/president was enough to keep a sliver of electoralism alive for me (back in 2016).
"Coinflip" (~50:50 and down by ~1-2% nationally) sounds a lot better than it is when you realize Biden was a 9:1 favorite with a 8.5% lead (4:1 with a 9%+ lead at this point in the race) going into an election he won by the skin of his teeth against the same guy in 2020 while citizens were dying by the hundreds or thousands per day from an ongoing pandemic Trump had clearly mismanaged.
Mind you this is up against a 2x impeached, 34x felony convicted, insurrectionist (who wasn't any of those things at this point last time, though he had been impeached once)
Biden/Democrats are in so much more trouble than you/his supporters/Democrats are prepared/willing to accept. This hubris could cost Dems the most important election of their lives and it's clear to anyone that isn't obsequiously supporting Biden imo.
Maybe I'll end up being wrong about my coinflip prediction - maybe in September and October, we'll see the polls tilted 70-30 or worse, in favor of Trump. Maybe things spiral out of control over the next few months. And if that happens, I'll have no problem saying that my prediction was wrong. But let's at least agree that my coinflip prediction is not the same as your claim that I "think the next 4 months will be so much better for Biden than the last 8 months", okay? I didn't say that, and I don't believe that.
With Biden's terrible debate performance, his chances of winning are surely worse now than they were a week ago. I said that I expect Biden to dip in the polls, and that I wonder if he'll recover from it; I'd hardly call that "hubris".
That's the fun of giving probabilities for presidential elections, as long as you give something a chance, you can't really be wrong.
We're presumably using the polls to inform the probabilities. For example, it would be inconsistent, based on the data, if someone said the current chance of Biden winning is 30% if the data says it's 50%.
One issue I'm trying to point out in that post is that it took a 8%+ lead in polls for Biden to squeak by Trump by thousands of votes. Biden consistently polling a couple points behind Trump is much worse than you/Democrats/Biden supporters are grasping. If the next 4 (3 before voting starts) months don't go much better than the last, then Biden is toast.
You're drawing a causal relationship that is unfounded. It's true that Biden was leading Trump by 8% in November 2020, and it's true that Biden just barely won the election, but it's incorrect to say that a polling lead of 8% is required for him to win again (especially in a different election).
The reason it's ~50:50 on 538 isn't the gap in the polls, it's the distance from the election (and the "fundamentals" favoring Biden).
The reason it's 50/50 is because a lot of people were asked who they'd vote for, and about half said Biden and about half said Trump (particularly for the key swing states they were polled in). That's it. 50/50 now means 50/50 now. It doesn't guarantee 50/50 in November, it doesn't guarantee 40/60 in November, and it doesn't guarantee anything else based on "the distance from the election". This is the problem with using early polling to extrapolate too far, rather than seeing a poll as a snapshot of a specific moment in time.
If you think people will gradually change their minds away from Biden, over the next few months, due to reasons like his poor debate performance, then that's fine, but those changes will still appear in the polls. For all the stock you've been putting into the polling data over the past few months, you're very quick to assert that those numbers really mean completely different numbers.
If Biden was polling like this in November it wouldn't be 50:50. To actually be 50:50, Biden has to do a lot better in polling than he is now and has been for 8 months.
If about half the people polled in November said they'd vote for Biden, and half said they've vote for Trump (particularly for the key swing states they were polled in), then the polls would say roughly 50/50.
So if you think it's going to be a 50:50 election you also believe that the next 4 months will be significantly better for Biden than the last 8 whether you say it explicitly or not.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on what I believe. lol.
"inconsistent" isn't wrong.
I'm not saying he needs an 8% lead, I'm saying he needs better than to be losing as he has been for 8 months.
You're just misunderstanding how 538 is reaching its "50:50" probability.
When we have few polls or when it's early in the campaign, our model's predictions are mostly based on the fundamentals — with their standard deviation usually around 6 points or so. But when it's Election Day in a state with a lot of polls, our uncertainty about public opinion is a lot smaller, so we will put a lot more weight on the polling data (and subsequently, our polling averages that feed into the model) when generating our final prediction.
So 50:50 in the polls doesn't equate to a 50:50 chance. It only does now because "the fundamentals" in the model are more heavily weighted against polling and favor Biden. But those fundamentals are only going to become less weighted and if Biden's polling doesn't pick up (better than it has for 8 months) to counteract it, his odds will drop significantly even if his polling is marginally better.
I understand that Biden's strong economic and political fundamentals have been helping him in 538's early polling stages (I believe I've said about 10 times over the past few months that early polling is not necessarily a strong predictor of November outcomes, which is why I've been cautioning you and others to not take them as gospel). Introvert was the one who said that the next few months won't have fluctuations because the past few months have been steady. I didn't say that, and I don't think that one can safely make that causal claim.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if there's some volatility along the way to November (especially due to the debate), but I still predict that the November results will end up being a coinflip. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe your prediction that Biden's polling numbers will consistently decline from now until November, as the weighing of fundamentals ease up in favor of other criteria, is correct. Maybe all three of us end up being wrong. We won't know until November, so I don't understand why you keep picking fights with me and others about these kinds of things.
I'm not saying (or conditioning) it not being a coinflip on Biden's polling getting worse, I'm saying that 538 wouldn't consider it a coinflip even if Biden was polling marginally better than he was before his debate disaster as we get closer to the election. He has to get higher in the polls than he's been in 8 months just to keep it near 50:50.
Biden's just in much more trouble than you appreciate currently.
Also you/Democrats/Biden supporters are advocating for a guy you iirc (and most of his 2020 voters) believe is aiding and abetting genocide, and could kill your mom in cold blood right in front of you and still not lose your vote or advocacy. I find that catastrophically problematic on several fronts, not the least of which, what it says of the ostensible "democracy" you're trying to "save" with that deplorable position in the first place.
You and I (and many others) have talked about this topic at great length. You disagree with our positions and explanations and rationalizations and justifications, and that's fine. I don't think I have anything else of substance to add to that particular conversation.
You asked why I keep challenging your narratives, so I gave you some of the reasons.
My hope from this exchange was that you'd at least recognize your error in assuming Biden polling about the same as he is now or slightly better when people start voting in September would net him 50:50 odds on election day. He has to do better for the next 4 months than he has for the last 8 months just to keep the odds near a coinflip. One of the big problems there being even his own staff says they can only get ~6 hours a day out of him and he's going to need to be sharp for far more than that to do the campaigning necessary just to salvage the debate, let alone actually take a lead. Based on letting/pushing him on the debate stage like that, he simply can't do what it will reasonably take to win.
Another aspect of Dem's problems is that replacing Biden is far from a magic bullet because they ignored the people saying Biden can't be the nominee for too long. So they're stuck unabashedly saying things like
[Biden] could have walked out, shit his pants, and then shuffled off and I'd still vote for him
On July 01 2024 04:52 Conaing wrote: This is a good political commentator, mostly on Russia, analysing the debate. Way better than any of the cookie cutter 'The rest is politics' or David Pakman or Destiny or Meidas Touch or The Bulwark stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rVY5kBODTw
Out of curiosity, what makes this political commentator better than the others you listed?
GreenHorizons, what are you even arguing for. It is 2024. We can't go back to 2016 and make Bernie Sanders beat Trump. That would have been great, but that didn't happen.
Biden is the candidate. Even if he shits his pants during the next debate. It isn't a 'cult' because the US is a two party system because of first past the post. And if the other guy wins, it may be the last election.
The entire US political establishment will let Netanyahu commit genocide, which he isn't doing, and cringe but not step in. That's baked into the cake since 20 years. Deal with it.
You have been so horsehoe politics for a decade on here, always been proTrump from the far left. I really don't want to hear what you have to say. It is so child-like and mind-mumbling uninteresting.
On July 01 2024 04:52 Conaing wrote: This is a good political commentator, mostly on Russia, analysing the debate. Way better than any of the cookie cutter 'The rest is politics' or David Pakman or Destiny or Meidas Touch or The Bulwark stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rVY5kBODTw
Out of curiosity, what makes this political commentator better than the others you listed?
Less focused on entertainment, more philosophical, more taking a step back from the insanity of being part of the news loop. All the others are different in all their own ways So I can't really say more in depth stuff. If you want to watch that Vlad Vexler video, go ahead. If not, don't.
EPT
