June 29, 2016

Thoughts on polls vs. outcomes

A new poll from Quinnipiac shows Trump and Crooked Hillary statistically tied, each in the low 40% range. Their sample included roughly equal numbers of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, unlike many other polls that are stacked more toward Democrats, on the assumption that the turnout for this election to end all elections will look like it did during the boring non-events of the past several elections.

Also encouraging is that Trump wins by a landslide on the issues of the economy and terrorism, and the personal qualities of honesty / trustworthiness and leadership. Those are far and away the most important issues and qualities to the respondents, so much so that others are barely on their radar.

Since people are going to be paying a little too much attention to public polls, as the general election heats up, let's take stock of how good things look already.

At worst, Trump polls around 40% and Hillary around 45%. What can we tell about the state of the race, even if this worst case scenario were true?

Hillary tended to underperform her polls in the primaries, while Trump overperformed them. Add those together, this puts them even in reality despite a 5 point lead in the polls for Hillary.

The 15% of voters who are undecided or not answering at this stage will go more for Trump than Hillary. Probably 10% for Trump, 5% for Hillary. That would make them polling both at 50%, and factoring in their performance relative to polls, gives Trump a comfortable win.

Why will the undecided / no answer people go more for Trump? They can't be confused about where the two stand relative to each other on issues or personal qualities. These candidates are night and day. And the issues and qualities that are most important now have always been since the primaries, and will continue to be through the general -- economy, terrorism, honesty, strong leadership.

If you are closer to Hillary, you are already on board. There's nothing keeping you back. Your peers, family, the media, the entire world is telling you that you're on the right side for voting Hillary.

These undecided voters are really just uneasy about voting for Trump. They are closer to his orbit than Crooked Hillary's, but they're sensitive about bumpy rides. Some times they'll drift closer, sometimes get cold feet, then come back again, etc. Every pressure imaginable is pushing them away 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And despite that, they aren't being converted into higher numbers for Hillary. Her numbers are fairly flat, while Trump's numbers will rise and fall periodically, as his sensitive voters vacillate about joining the bumpy ride.

Ultimately, then, most of these undecideds will vote Trump.

That is just the picture for the national popular vote. The same applies at the state level where it counts. Polls are showing Trump at worst behind Hillary by about 5 points, with double digits undecided. Particularly in blue states, these undecideds have absolutely nothing to worry about in saying they'll vote Hillary -- so why aren't they? They'd conform with their state's recent history, they'd get the respectability of the overly educated elite in their region, as well as the approval of the media.

I'm not saying Trump will blow away Crooked Hillary in all states, let alone in former blue states. But all he needs is one more vote than 50%, and he gets all the Electoral College votes for that state. His national share could be barely over 50%, but if that level holds across the country, he will win in a landslide because of the winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College.

Thus, there will many more "close" states, say where the margin of victory is under 5 points. Trump is turning many blue states into toss-up states -- Michigan, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and others.

This happened before in 1980, when Reagan got 50.7% nationally, but 489 electoral votes because that support was so widespread around the country, rather than concentrated in deeply red states. In 1980, there were 16 close states, 12 of which were won by the winner. Quite a few were former Democrat strongholds in the South, which began to realign in favor of Republicans after the Civil Rights era.

By 2012 there were only 4 close states because the country had become more solidly polarized along liberal vs. conservative lines. Trump is unwinding the lib vs. con culture wars, and is already appealing to a far broader swath of the nation than the Conservative, Inc. candidates from the past quarter-century. This is akin to the earlier realignment of the South, only now there will be a gradual realignment of the Rust Belt, the Pacific Northwest, and parts of the Mid-Atlantic.

Expect for there to be many nail-biter states, as regions realign out of the culture war era, but also expect for more of them to go for Trump than against -- including those with decent-sized electoral prizes, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, and not only Iowa and New Hampshire.

Hillary is not appealing to a very broad range of the country, and seems to be intent on only driving up her numbers in relatively safer states like New York, California, and Illinois, whose large populations make them more influential in national polls. That seems like the only explanation for why the state races are polling so close, while the national race gives her a somewhat wider lead (on the face of it).

I still see no major reason to revise my forecast for a comfortable Trump win in November. Not that he's going to literally knock her block off on the debate stage, win 80% of the popular vote, and then dance on her grave. But given the winner-take-all Electoral College, he can leverage narrow wins in many toss-up states into a wipe-out in electoral votes. Those will include not only the old swing states from the culture war era, but now many blue states that want to realign away from Wall Street and an interventionist foreign policy.

18 comments:

  1. Random Dude on the Internet6/29/16, 10:16 PM

    There is definitely a "Secret Shitlords 4 Trump" group out there, which explains why he outperformed during the primaries. In an era where the left wing will try to turn you in to your employer for expressing conservative thoughts and cuckservatives who want to prove so badly to the left wing that they're not racist, it's pretty tough to be vocal about your support for Donald Trump unless you know you're with friends.

    With the media skewing the polls, it's hard to get a read on just how well Trump is doing right now. Although he seems to make inroads on individual issues, he's losing to Hillary in the overall polls. It doesn't make any sense unless there is some manipulation/push polling going on, which wouldn't surprise me.

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  2. Maybe, and maybe not. It is pretty clear what Hillary's strategy is: no goodies (like forgiveness of student loans, or a giant effort to cure cancer, or giant infrastructure efforts to put people back to work). Lots of identity politics. And bashing White men and flyover White people in general.

    Hillary is not stupid, she's never spent a day in jail nor has she wanted for money since graduation. Despite being obviously crooked and criminal in so many actions over her entire life, from Whitewater to Rose Law Firm to the White House Travel agency to the Clinton Foundation shakedown empire.

    It seems this will be a turnout election. Hillary is trying to get every Upper class and aspiring Upper Class White woman on board, that's what the lesbian bowl haircut league of herself and Fauxcohontas Warren is all about. Plus Blacks and Hispanics and Gays and she figures that will be enough.

    Critically, Donald Trump has no ground operation existing already to find and identify Trump supporters, who are harder to reach than Hillary's cohort of identity politics warriors, out to the polls or ideally absentee ballot voting.

    Hillary already has an IT operation that knows exactly who voted for Obama the past two elections, these people are active voters. Trump supporters by contrast have likely never voted or voted only years ago, are not active Republicans, and are hard to identify and motivate to vote. Trump has gambled that he can charisma them out to the polls but against that is the inertia and paralysis of average everyday atomized life, as a radical and lonely individual in the Kultursmog. IMHO unless he changes his bets, and makes a real investment in get out the vote to his core supporters, non-traditional voters aka Reagan Democrats, we'll have the cackling, shrieking First Lesbian President and her sidekick in the Whitehouse, castration mandatory for all Straight White men (Bill especially).

    TL:DR version, it is not the generals but corporals and sergeants who win the wars. And Trump is real light on the non commissioned officers.

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    1. Trump has a ground operation and Obama's analytics team. I don't know why this meme that he has nothing going on ground-wise is going around the rightish side of the internets.

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  3. Let me add that I'm puzzled by Hillary's reluctance to promise goodies. She could be competitive against Trump with her weakest area: White men and longer married White women, by simply making big promises for spending to help the unemployed and underemployed and lower paid people. And she hasn't. I understand that would be an implicit criticism of Obama and the man who controls her non-indictment for the email server that was the heart of the Clinton Global Initiative Foundation global shakedown for cash. But she's got nothing, literally nothing on offer for people who want a job or a higher paying one.

    Heck she could promise a manned Mars expedition by ten years and offer a budget of say, 100 trillion to get it, guaranteeing full US STEM employment, and lots and lots of votes (including from skilled trades etc.) But nothing. Its weird. Its as if she knows there is simply no money to be had, not even the funny kind just printed or summoned out of thin air by the Fed.

    Even Obama in 2008 promised infrastructure spending to put hard hats back to work, even if he predictably reneged and spent it on feminist studies instead when he won. Hillary won't even do that which is really, really weird. And scary if you think about it.

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  4. If there are many very close states I'd factor in the inevitable massive vote fraud by the Dems. In toss up states it could swing enough electoral votes to win. Trump needs to win by yuge margins to obviate the dirty tricks that will be used against him.

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  5. Reagan won the old Southern states from the Democrats in 1980 -- and Democrats and Southern politics doesn't exactly have a reputation for clean operations.

    There will be vote fraud, but I deny that it will be "massive".

    In the primaries, there wasn't the kind of thing you're talking about, and it was just as important back then to nip it in the bud.

    Trump lost Ohio because Kasich shadily pressured a lot of Dems (probably those who depend on government for their income) to vote for him. That's not the same as rigging the machines or whatever, and he won't have that option in the fall -- they were already Democrats, and won't add to Hillary's voter pool.

    http://akinokure.blogspot.com/2016/05/trumps-loss-in-ohio-due-to-kasichs.html

    On the Dems' side, the worst shenanigans were the use of provisional ballots in California, which Bernie probably won or only narrowly lost. The provisional ballots do not get counted until months later, so it allowed the Clinton machine to call CA in her favor early with big margins, to give her phony momentum (which she didn't even get).

    But those ballots are still there, and may even get counted after the Convention to show that, whoops, Bernie actually won CA -- but that doesn't affect who won the popular vote, delegates, superdelegates, state contests, etc. So they won't rescind the nomination just because they belatedly give CA to Bernie.

    Again, they won't be able to pull that trick in the general -- Team Trump isn't going to concede anything, and everyone will want a speedy count of the results. So forget about a large chunk of CA votes coming through provisional ballots.

    There is so much supervising of these elections -- eyewitnesses, smartphones, social media, etc. -- that if something screwed up happens, it will go national (see the upstaging of Bernie supporters at the NV state convention).

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  6. "Trump supporters by contrast have likely never voted or voted only years ago, are not active Republicans, and are hard to identify and motivate to vote."

    That must be why no one tuned into the debates, trekked and waited in line for hours to attend his rallies, and turned out at the polling stations during the primaries.

    None of those things set historical records. Everybody is still sitting at home like it's the '90s, injecting their daily talk radio endorphin rush in isolation.

    Roger Stone swears that the Republican voter database owned by Karl Rove is garbage anyway, and only exists to line his pockets (like virtually all of the spending for big elections).

    Trump has the best team assembled, so I trust them to know the best way to get new or "retired" voters to get registered and turn out.

    I can't be the only person who hasn't voted since 2000, yet voted for the first time in the primaries this time around solely because of the impossible-to-miss Trump phenomenon.

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  7. Pollsters put out false information in order to skew the result. It didn't work in Britain or Spain, though.

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  8. What is your gameplan if early November sees the news being Hillary somehow winning? No, not by fraud or anything tinfoil but by managing to get pluralities in enough states to be legitimately over the 270 mark.

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  9. Trump does the worst when Republicans are attacking him. The previous two weeks saw an unprecedented level of attacks from numerous congressional Republicans and his fellow candidates. You would think this would work in his favor. "I'm not the typical Republican" and all that. Hopefully that settles down after the convention and that they'll all shut up and let him campaign. That remains to be seen.

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  10. Looks like the other way around -- faggot GOPers only pile on Trump when they sense he's having a bad time, and they key in on whatever the offensive topic was -- abortion, reverse racism, etc.

    They've been attacking him more or less non-stop, yet it hasn't affected the movement. If anything, strengthened it. But that's when they're attacking him on his strong issues -- trade, immigration, terrorism, etc.

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  11. Random Dude on the Internet7/1/16, 8:05 AM

    I think that the interparty attacks on Trump will only increase from here on out. There are a good number of Republicans who really think that Trump will be crushed by Hillary so they will focus their election/re-election campaign on throwing Trump under the bus probably worse than any Democrat would. This is unlikely to change, even if Trump is ahead of Hillary by 10 or 15 points in the polls by September and October.

    The modern GOP has no idea how to win Presidential elections or take risks. They will be fighting Trump as he drags them kicking and screaming into the White House. Even when he leaves the White House in 2025, Republicans will still be droning on and on about MUH JESUS or MUH PRINCIPLES.

    It's why I'm voting for Trump but I'm not a registered Republican: the party is too pathetic. Here's hoping Trump can inject enough charisma and testosterone into the party and change it into something respectable.

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  12. Not that anyone didn't know it already, but AG Lynch just destroyed any remaining doubt about her integrity when she explained what she was talking about when she met Bill for an "allegedly" spontaneous talk aboard a jet. She said: "There was no discussion of Benghazi, no discussion of the State Department emails, by way of example,'' she said. "I would say the current news of the day was the Brexit decision, and what that might mean. And again, the department’s not involved in that or implicated in that."

    An honest account doesn't begin with "I would say". Had she told the truth, she'd say "the news of the day" right off the bat. I learned from a dude who runs a great website (statementanalysis.com) that the shortest answer is the most honest one. Rambling and extraneous words serve to buy time for the liar as they attempt to construct a story. An honest speaker gets to the point.

    She also throws an a "for example", which isn't necessary and also implies that she isn't admitting every thing/topic that was discussed. Why not just say, "we didn't discuss topic X, or Toxic Y, Or topic Z."

    You'd think she'd be a better liar, but as the FBI expert points out frequently, literally all liars will invariably insert tells in their statements.

    Laughably she and her lapdogs are trying to say that it was an "ambush". She had no clue Bill was gonna pull this. Yeah right. It was a Boomer black woman (about the most entitled thing known to man) and slick Willie brazenly conspiring right in our faces.

    What a farce (and tragedy). An AA AG (befitting an AA president) succumbs to sleaze, as is often the case with blacks. And as usual with black "leaders", they fail to even adequately conceal the depth of corruption.

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  13. "There are a good number of Republicans who really think that Trump will be crushed by Hillary so they will focus their election/re-election campaign on throwing Trump under the bus probably worse than any Democrat would."

    It won't harm him, for the same reasons that Trump would have won even if the cucks ran an independent candidate:

    http://akinokure.blogspot.com/2016/02/gop-establishment-pondering-independent.html

    The voters who resonate most with Trump-slamming live in the Cuck Belt, where there is already a wide lead for Republicans. Where the race would actually be tight, cuck candidates don't resonate at all.

    Apart from not being able to swing any state's election (other than perhaps Utah), attacks by the old guard would boost Trump's popularity, credibility, and authenticity with Independent voters.

    He could play it up, asking folks why do the Chamber of Commerce, Mitt Romney, the Bush clan, et al. try to block his path, if he were really the same old Republican? He's not, and their hostility is proof that he threatens the Establishment of both parties.

    That's how he wins Oregon and possibly other West Coast states.

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  14. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/donald-trumps-coalition-of-restoration/488345/:

    According to figures provided to me by PRRI, Trump supporters (including both Republicans and GOP-leaning independents who backed him during the primary) are more likely than Democrats, independents or other Republicans to say that they worry about being a victim of terrorism or violent crime; that they are bothered when they hear immigrants talking in a language other than English; that discrimination against whites is as great a problem as discrimination against minorities; and that American and Islamic values are inherently at odds. Fully 80 percent of Trump voters say that immigrants are more burden than benefit to America; just 27 percent of Democrats, 41 percent of independents, and 53 percent of other Republicans agree.

    Often the contrast between Trump supporters and all other adults widened further when the poll measured those who hold these positions most vehemently. Fully 44 percent of Trump supporters, for instance, said they “completely agree” it bothers them when they hear immigrants speaking a language other than English; less than half as many independents, Democrats, or non-Trump-supporting Republicans agreed. Likewise, while about two-fifths of Trump Republicans “completely” agreed that “because things have gotten so far off track in this country, we need a leader who is willing to break some rules,” less than one-fifth of Democrats, independents, and other Republicans concurred.

    The George Will types are living in the past. Small government principled high brow conservatives don't realize that changing demographics have thrown the entire West into turmoil. When America was 80%+ white and mostly native born, before the 1990's, we didn't need a forceful ruler to sort things. Back then, we had the luxury of debating the "appropriate" role of government. A country consisting mostly or entirely of native-born NW Euros knew that excesses wouldn't happen.

    Permitting massive migrations of peoples produces all kinds of discord. The only option for cleaning up the mess is a big man, a strong man, who will defend his nation by punishing and evicting aliens against whom populist rage is (rightly) focused. England's closest thing to a big man is Nigel Farage, but the U.K. is rooted/white enough that the clean up won't need too much force.

    The U.S. is much different, a still nascent civilization for which questions of race and nation identity have long been a source of angst among virtually parties with the possible exception of Southern Scots/Irish, many of whom probably take a wry glee in how utterly execrable Northern blacks are. The bigger the pop. of white pansies, the worst the blacks get. Just look at Wis. and MN.

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  15. Another troubling thing for America is the degree to which "cultured" whites (e.g., strivers) have greater empathy for striving immigrants than native born whites. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/britain-united-states/489410/

    I've seen Iowa polls that are close. Closer than Wis./MN. Probably 'cuz Iowa is less educated, and striver hives hate Trump. A big reason the GOP sucks at national elections is because electorally ginormous California has been swamped by hordes of all shades. Besides non-whites themselves being natural Democrats, the state became so expensive that many downscale (thus socially conservative) whites fled. Unpretentious whites grew disgusted by striving liberal whites and immigrants, got fed up, and many left. Post 1990 liberals have no use for lower class whites. If we recalibrated our demos. to 1982. the "progress" made by culturally liberal strivers and their pet New Americans would be reversed. If we don't make some efforts toward this, America will hit, at best, mediocrity. At worst, we'll descend into oblivion thanks to those who subverted the fortification of a true American identity (which is to say, one that is proud to cast a furrowed brow towards Asians, Mixtecs, and fraternizing with blacks).

    Gen X-ers and Millennials have come entirely of age in a mercenary and superficial climate. Thus, why "making it" in a hip city (or by living a "cool" lifestyle) supersedes any kind of solidarity with the America that was great in the 40's/50's or even, hell, Reagan's America. While strivers of all ages have gotten flippant about defending America, the younger generations are the worst. Not all of us bought into multi-cult, striving, or smug liberalism. But way too many of us did.

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  16. "Fully 44 percent of Trump supporters, for instance, said they “completely agree” it bothers them when they hear immigrants speaking a language other than English; less than half as many independents, Democrats, or non-Trump-supporting Republicans agreed."

    In other words, the Trump voters are THE ONLY ONES WHO GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THE RULES AROUND HERE.

    Dems, Indies, and cucks feel just as alienated as we do when they hear indecipherable languages, especially spoken by people who look alien. It just doesn't motivate them to want to do anything about it.

    They are defectors from norm enforcement -- they want someone else to make sure that these foreigners all assimilate at least to the degree that they speak English in public places.

    They probably envision that as a government agency identifying foreigners and signing them up for free ESL classes, but they imagine it happening one way or another.

    We Trump supporters are more likely to see government modes of assimilation not happening, and to therefore give them a weird disgusted look and say SPEAK-EE ENGLISH MOTHAFUCKAAAA.

    Wimps will only pitch in to norm enforcement that doesn't require much, for rules that don't matter much. Some low-T Scandi will pretend like it's totally ordinary to hear Somali being barked into the air around him, but if one of those turban-heads crosses a road outside of a sidewalk, he chases after him (after finding a proper crosswalk) and lectures the guy about how to avoid the crime of jaywalking in your adoptive country.

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  17. It makes me nervous when we read too much optimism into these polls. Weren't we all stunned with Romney's poor performance in 2012? Levin brought this up last night and I agree with him. I think I would feel more comfortable if he was up by 5 points.

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