Trump vs. Harris - Please put all new polls here.

Who will be first to say the election was stolen? I want to say Rick but it will be either Okee or Vegas

 

You’re absolutely right, Ora, that the current market prices could be irrational. However, if the prices are obviously irrational, we have to wonder why other people aren’t taking advantage of it by betting on Harris. It can’t be that every person is irrational.

And I think you’re right that many people suspect that polls are undercounting Trump again. Okee seems has been convinced that this was the case from the beginning. And you’re also right that just because polls undercounted Trump in the past doesn’t mean it will happen again. This uncertainty is what we are trying to predict with the market.

One last note: I think rationality is a slipperier concept than most appreciate, and I don’t think posterior outcomes always determine the rationally of prior predictions. The markets also suggested that Hillary would win in 2016. Was this irrational? I don’t think it was. Everyone thought that Hillary would win. While everyone was proved wrong, I don’t think that in itself demonstrates irrationality. Everyone thought this because there was good reason to think this.

 

For some reason, Trump’s schtich only works for Trump. My guess is there are enough R’s in AZ that are willing to put up with Trump for 4 more years but do not want to have to deal with Lake for the next 20. They see that Republicans are likely going to win the Senate and they have the luxury to split their ticket this election.

 

To my point, the last time the dem coalition looked like this election, this was the miss. Not at all saying this will happen, just that people have short memories.

 

In addition to 2012 and 2022 I would also add 2008 to the comparison. Obviously anecdotal I don't think there has been as much enthusiasm among younger voters and especially first time voters as there was since 2008. Also keep in mind that younger voters a demographic with a relatively low propensity to vote may not be picked with polls based on "likely" voters since of the screens pollsters used to determine whether respondents are likely is past voting behavior.

 

Majority of Americans Feel Worse Off Than Four Years Ago

Majority of Americans Feel Worse Off Than Four Years Ago

Economic Confidence Index remains negative at -26

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- More than half of Americans (52%) say they and their family are worse off today than they were four years ago, while 39% say they are better off and 8% volunteer that they are about the same. The 2024 response is most similar to 1992 among presidential election years in which Gallup has asked the question.

 

My key takeaway from this was not necessarily the current numbers concerning Biden/Harris, but look at September 2020. Wow... highest percentage of American people in 40 years felt better off with Donald Trump as president in the middle of a pandemic, than they were four years prior.

 

Couple of things. The current polls, even if they are spot on (i.e. not overestimating one candidate or the other), are saying Trump wins easily. The current polls would have to be erring badly against Harris for her to win. RCP's current national polling aggregate has Harris up +1.3 points. Trump will win 312 electoral votes rather easily if Harris only wins the popular vote by 1.3 points. Remember, Biden won the popular vote by 4.5 points in 2020 and just skated by with ~125,000 votes in PA, GA, WI and AZ. All of the 7 major battleground states where it's close, Trump is leading in the aggregate of the state polling as well.

My point being, we don't have to assume a polling bias against Trump. Even if gamblers take the current polling data at face value, Trump wins 312 electoral votes. What really worries Dems now is Harris hurting the down ballot, because there are four Senate seats that are too close to call and they are all in states Trump is currently favored to win. Not saying this will happen, but it's very plausible we wake up November 6th looking at a 55-45 GOP majority in the Senate, which would make Trump's confirmations a helluva lot easier.

P.S. The betting markets in 2020 thought Biden would win too. That 90% number he threw out was BS. I will give @oragator1 the benefit of the doubt and assume he was merely copying and pasting disinformation from a dirty source. Here's what it looked like on the last day in 2020:

 

The entire reason I think Harris wins, and pretty handily at that, is that people are just exhausted of Trump at this point. This is his third time running, we know him and his agenda, and most of America soundly rejected him in 2020. Add in all the Trump voting boomers and anti-masker/vaxxers that died from Covid, all of the new record amount of young voters who will be voting for Harris, and common sense points to a win for her. Trump’s only hope per usual is the EC, which he admittedly has a decent shot at, but he’s going to get annihilated in the popular vote. Way more Americans do not like the guy than do, he’s just not that popular.

 

Rasmussen just posted a NV Senate poll showing that the R candidate is up by 2 but when you look at the cross tab it shows men prefer the R candidate by two points and women prefer the D candidate by seven points and somehow the R candidate is up by 2? Rasmussen is just doing what they always do

 

Saw this this morning at ElectoralVote.com and thought it is worth reposting. It speak about the quality of internal polls versus some public polls.

T.A.O from Minneapolis, MN, asks: I frequently encounter expressions like "The GOP knows from internal polling that Trump's in trouble," and even Electoral-Vote.com's occasional references to "internal polling," suggesting that each party's polling data is somehow more accurate than polls released to the public. I don't understand how this could be the case, without there being some polling techniques and know-how the parties have that other professionals do not. Why wouldn't those superior methods leak out (especially if both parties somehow acquired them from somewhere)? Can you explain this reverence for internal polling?

(V) & (Z) answer: The parties use really good professional pollsters who do this for a living and have been doing so for years. Having run 1,000 polls in the past teaches you stuff that newbies may have to learn the hard way (e.g., if you want to include young mothers in the sample, do not call at 7 p.m. on a Thursday). The pros may also try to adjust their model of the electorate in real time, depending on what they have learned this year; the amateurs may just use the 2020 electorate. The pros are going multichannel, sending URLs or QR codes to people as text messages and asking them to do the survey online at their leisure. Some pros pick people at random from voter registration lists, so they know these people have some interest in voting.

Some of the small colleges may mean well and are doing their best, but they don't have the experience and expertise the pros have. Some of the public polling is done by organizations that are fine, like Mason-Dixon and SurveyUSA and colleges that have been this for years, like Siena College and Quinnipiac, but a lot of the public pollsters are not very experienced or well-funded (you need statisticians, people who are good at modeling, psychologists, and much more).

Just to give one example, people who do this a lot know that the answers to these questions will be different:

• Will you vote for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump?
• Will you vote for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris?
• Will you vote for the Democrat Kamala Harris or the Republican Donald Trump?
• Who will you vote for in November for president?
• If the election were held today, who would you vote for?

It matters if the horse race question is early on in the survey or later on and what comes before it. Asking if Jan. 6 was real before the horse race question changes the results because it reminds people about Jan. 6. The pros understand all this stuff and more as they have run many experiments trying many questions and formats and comparing the results. Many of the smaller and newer pollsters just don't have this level of detailed expertise, even if they are trying really hard to be fair.

There's also one other thing. Because the internal pollsters have a different task than the public pollsters, the internal pollsters often ask additional questions, like "Would it affect your vote if you learned that Donald Trump supports ending income taxes on tips?" With that information in hand, they not only know where their candidate stands, they can make a pretty good guess about whether there's room for improvement. If they conclude their candidate is not only behind, but that there's no particular path for them to win some more voters over, then they know better than the public pollsters that their candidate is in trouble.

ElectoralVote

 

This thread has gotten really weird with people trying really really hard to tell everyone what is or is not going to happen. Can’t you guys just post the polls and go about your business?

 

Brown has run a terrible campaign by most reports and the polls have backed that so I'm not sure I would put a lot of stock in that poll. Early voting in NV started today so we should start getting a better idea of what is actually going on out there.

 

I agree, but it’s inevitable folks here will want to discuss them in detail.

 

You're the worst of them - based on how hard you've hit this board I assume you will literally be on suicide watch if Trump somehow loses.

 

Rasmussen is one of the more accurate pollsters, in part because Rich Baris has taught him a few things. I think he was kicked off of 538 at one point for being too9 accurate. Or as 538 put it, for being too much of an outlier. I heard that on the What Are The Odds podcast with Baris and Barnes. Apologies if it was a different pollster and not Rasmussen, but that's my recollection

 

So, complaining about people posting about the subject matter at hand, but throwing ad hominem around. Seems about par.

 

President Romney can vouch for the accuracy of the Rasmussen poll.