politics

Totally seeing it.

Edit: now with reflection.

I only saw it as a duck, it took your comment for me to look again and see the eagle. You are not alone!

I see it now .... and that is one guilty sweaty duck too ... it makes it look like he's under a lot of stress for all those military coups he's taken part in.

Yeah, but the Dems assume they have it in the bag because they have the popular vote, and sit it out, or don't take the time to understand how the electoral college works.

You're getting downvotes because people disagree with you, but you posted a source and you explained yourself in good faith. That gets an upvote, imo.

Polling errors are not predictable beforehand. If they were, we wouldn't have polling errors. In 2022 for instance there was polling error in favor of democrats not against (or at least too much emphasis on polls with errors in Republican favor).

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/us/politics/polling-election-2022-red-wave.html

We can't know the electorate beforehand, so poll weighting and deciding who is a likely voter is always going to involve some guesswork. So the opposite of what you say is true as well, if there is a small polling error that overstates Trump's support it would have Kamala sweeping every swing state.

But the polls show a close election, all we can do is do our best to do things that help her win. Like voting early to make sure our vote gets in no matter what, encouraging people we know to register and vote, volunteering, canvassing, donating, etc.

There are a lot of reasons to think that it might go the other way this year. In 2016, we had a combination of overconfidence, lack of real enthusiasm, and a general sense of not giving a shit that allowed democrats, who outnumbered Trump supporters, to throw the election. In 2020, polling was completely fucked up by Covid. Democrats had higher margins in pre-election polling but less on Election Day mostly due to the fact that democrats were more cautious about the pandemic, and those who forgot to sign up for mail in voting decided to stay home for safety, and the on the ground get out the vote measures didn’t happen at all on the blue side. This year neither are true, and we saw in polls in 2022 underestimate democrats. Pollsters may have overcorrected for the quiet Trump voters while not accounting for the turnout caused by the scrapping of roe. If you want an example of over correction to account for republicans in polls, look at the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election. I feel like polls are underestimating democrats this time around.

Don't be depressed. You're reading a statistical analysis of something that was already totally unreliable to begin with. The researchers could have conducted a better poll, that would fix the weak points that they perceive to exist in existing data, but they didn't. So now we have even more assumptions stacked on top of other assumptions, and it's really hard to think there's any kind of reliability to that data.

Polls are not so much a prediction of the future as they are a snapshot in time and indicative of a candidate's current momentum.

But you're right. It's deeply shocking that this race is even close. If the DNC ever tried to run a candidate as bad as Trump, I'd just stay fucking home or vote 3rd party as a throwaway vote. I hope some Republicans with any shred of dignity or a functioning moral compass do the same on election day. We need real patriots to come together across ideological gaps and reject fascism full stop.