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"National head to head polls"
Which is meaningless since our elections ARE NOT "National".
States like Washington, Oregon, and California are going to Biden. Full stop.
States like Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana are going to Trump, full stop.
So the ONLY polling that's worth following is in the states which may be questionable and, frankly, there aren't a lot of them.
Arizona - Trump +7
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/arizona/
Georgia - Trump +6 to +7
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/georgia/
Michigan - Tied to Trump +3
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/michigan/
Nevada - Trump +6 to +10
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/nevada/
New Mexico - Biden +8 but from August, not useful.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/new-mexico/
North Carolina - Trump +9 to +10
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/north-carolina/
Pennsylvania - Biden +1
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/pennsylvania/
(this one has been flipping back and forth)
Virginia - Biden +4
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/virginia/
Wisconsin - Trump +3 to +4
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/wisconsin/
Here's what that looks like on a map:
293 to 245 Trump.
Biden CANNOT win without Michigan and Wisconsin, two states that Clinton infamously neglected to campaign in and lost. Getting them, with this equation, puts Biden EXACTLY at 270.
Polls out this far from the election are essentially meaningless, so there's also that
And also, this was news to me, but apparently they're for the most part still doing polls by calling people on the phone from a random number. I cannot possibly imagine that that's true but that's what the article says.
They're like micro optimizing for individual per cents, and then doing something which will eliminate 80% of Gen Z from their polling, and when you ask them about it they apparently say "¯_(ツ)_/¯ IDK we do phone"
Yep. For the last half a dozen elections, the polls have overestimated Republican strength, and underestimated Democratic strength. I think it's in large part because the pollsters still haven't managed to figure out how to poll people who simply will not answer unknown numbers.
Also, the Republicans rig the voting machines sometimes.
Polls were really bad in 2016, but the seem to have largely corrected that. 2018 polling just before the election was accurate. 2020 was projected as close and it was, there were a few problem states, but nothing like 2016. 2022 was again very accurate.
Polling around the presidential election or maybe just Trump is less accurate, but it's been getting better since 2016.
Not quite. Polls underestimated Democratic support in 2018, 2019's special elections, 2021's special elections, the 2022 midterms, and last year's elections. It's been remarkably consistent how far off they've been.
Do I prefer that to the other way around, as happened in 2016? Sure. But they've clearly over-corrected, and are having significant trouble getting back on track due to the difficulty of polling young people.
Which is why you keep following them to spot trends.
When I started following these states, it was roughly 50/50. Now it's almost all Trump and the gains are increasing, not decreasing.
Right now, Biden has a chance of winning Michigan and Wisconsin, best to know that NOW rather than Sept/Oct/Nov.
Are you a campaign manager or a pundit getting paid to talk about politics? There's honestly no reason at all for the average person to care about polls this far out
There are some circumstances you may want to make certain preparations based on the possibility that one candidate or the other may win, and polling trends can help you determine what sort of plans and preparation you should be making.
One example that comes to my mind is that prior to Trump getting elected, my wife was concerned that a trump presidency could lead to Republicans killing Roe V Wade and/or making it more difficult to access birth control, and so she opted to get a longer-lasting IUD prior to the election.
Ok, but didn't the polls have Clinton winning leading up to the 2016 election?
The popularity polls, yes. She also won the popular vote by a significant margin.
Trump won some battleground states by slim margins, mostly because Clinton did a terrible job of deciding where to campaign. Also a lot of sketchy voter suppression tactics made those battleground state wins questionable.
They did, but she was doing her own analysis of the polls and had some concerns that made her think the race was going to be much closer than the polls suggested.
You shouldn't just blindly take the polls at face value, you also need to be thinking critically about them, theres a lot of ways to misrepresent data, a lot of issues that can crop up due to how the polls are conducted, etc. and when she took all of that into account, the polls suggested to her that it was going to be a much closer race than most of the media coverage was saying.
She was still a little surprised that Trump actually won, but it wasn't totally out of left field.
There's plenty of reason to care. It's a sign Biden's campaign is not yet effective, and Trump is. While most incumbents don't really step up the campaigning until closer to the election, it gives an idea of the ground they need to make up.
It's also worth considering the Trump has been and continues to be great at campaigning. You can not like the guy, but his ability to get large crowds excited at multiple events per day can't be ignored.
There's likely going to be something that really swings the election still, but hoping a random event helps your party is poor strategy. In Trump's case it's unlikely a poor comment is going to hurt him, like the deplorables or binders full of women comments. Hoping for a conviction to change things is an OK backup plan, not plan A.
There absolutely is. You follow them continually to establish a trendline.
Since I've been following these key states, I've watched them go 50/50 to virtually all Trump, to all Trump by a wider margin.
Following polls over time lets you see the momentum.
By the time the election comes around, there should be no surprises.
If your goal here is to not be surprised, I hate to tell you polls have margins of error that mean surprises are inevitable. Also, many polls are not infrequently found to be outside their SE when the actual results come in.
Again, you can reduce the margin of error by plotting the trend line.
It's the same science for watching climate change:
If one candidate is trending up towards election day and another is trending down you can tell which way it's going to swing.
Unless the Electoral College magically goes away, this will be a rough election for a majority of Americans. Lots of long-standing issues are coming to a head with the realization that we've already been fascist for a while.
There IS a plan to move to the popular vote, but it only kicks in if we get enough states to represent 270 electoral votes.
As of now it's at 205 enacted with 88 pending.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact