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Music from this week’s podcast: Roar by Katy Perry
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I had to skip past the beginning. You Americans think elections are won months in advance and are obsessed as I will admit I used to be on polls.
Something I have learned in the last 4 years. Elections can turn on a dime and the vast majority of voters make up there minds in the last week before the election.
I am a Canadian. We have elections that last a month. I have seen a Majority government of Stephen Harper go into a thanksgiving weekend with a sure majority and come out a week later with PM Trudeau.
Polls are good for some things. But they are just not that important anymore if they ever were.
But thats just my pet peeve. I skip ahead on poll arguments for all podcasts now a days.
Having now finished the show it was pretty good, except for the weird ending with the non-post of the week.
If Trump is emotionally psychologically unstable, why did everything go well until Covid? It just doesn’t make sense that Trump is insane if the policies get better.
I think they mean hes unstable in that hes CRAZY!, but not we the jury find the defendant.
I’m curious what polls Rob is looking at that gives him that level of confidence?
I had to check the date – I thought I was listening to a four-year old podcast for a moment.
At 1 hour and four minute, James Lileks made an incredibly conservative case for Trump. I’m quite impressed.
I wish I knew what it was!
Even worse than the polls themselves, might be TV comedy writers telling us what they mean.
Ah, but according to the left, promulgating conservative policies – and judges, and the rest – is ipso facto insane.
And the comedy writer tells us that nominating Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and the rest, doesn’t make Trump more popular.
Do tell, mr comedy writer.
Too bad John Yoo’s book isn’t mentioned in the show description or notes.
If only we had devoted an entire episode to the book when it came out.
Darn.
Wow…I must be living in Bizarro World because the popularity of Joe Biden is so evident and overwhelming because of one metric – polling – when compared to Trump when stalwart <cough> conservative <cough> Republicans like Collins, Gardner, and Murkowski are the bellwether that Trump is so vastly unpopular with Republicans that according to Rob he definitely needs to be dumped but won’t because – you know most of the current Republican members of Congress are gutless cowards.
Yes, never mind that Republican and Independent voter registration has been significantly outpacing Democrat registration in a number of states.
Never mind that it looks as though Trump may garner around 30 to 40% of the African-American vote – unheard of since blacks tend to vote Democrat above 90%.
Never mind that virtually no one shows up to any scheduled Biden appearances – it was calculated that in August/September some 84 people showed up to greet and cheer on the doddering old man while Trump’s events have totaled almost 200,000 in the same timeframe.
Never mind that in traditional Democrat strongholds there is still no visible support for Joe Biden while Trump signs, concession booths, and massive car and boat rallies on each coast are almost a daily occurrence – even in of all places Hawaii.
Oh, and the riots in Democrat-controlled cities are also somehow Trump’s fault or that the vast majority of Americans are blaming Trump for them – per Rob – and apparently have not moved any votes from Democrats to him. Really? You may want to look into that.
Yes, bring up the Reagan-Carter election but never mind the elections of 1968 where the middle-class and blue collar reaction to rioting and domestic terrorism swayed them to vote for Nixon and in 1972 delivered a popular vote and electoral landslide to Nixon.
How accurate was that polling for Hillary in 2016? Are pollsters still making the same mistakes? Are they oversampling Democrats? Is their methodology outdated and flawed? Is there any political motivation behind any of the polls? I know. I know. Don’t sound like a conspiracy theorist. And I do remember Obama admonishing Americans for not trusting their government when the government was actively attempting a coup by high-ranking DoJ and FBI officials to remove a duly elected president just before and after he was elected. So, I guess we’ll see after the election how accurate the current polling has been.
That said, I won’t make any bets because I do believe the Dems will attempt to submit thousands of fraudulent ballots and destroy or mislay thousands of Republican ballots leading to dozens or hundreds of court challenges weeks after Election Day.
But to hear Rob tell it – Republicans are driving off the cliff and Trump is at the wheel. Yeah, good luck with that.
I mentioned it, no?
I’m torn on the whole polling thing. I think it’s wrong to automatically wave them away. 2020 is not 2016. But I have the same feeling in my head I had in 2016, which is of course Trump will lose, because <harrymudd twin robot voice> that is what I have been programmed to understand </harrymudd twin robot voice> Anecdotally, which is to say “meaninglessly,” I don’t know a single Trump voter who has switched sides. They are actually willing to chew Mason jars so they can crap glass and crawl over it to vote again. I know at least one third-party voted who considered the Trump record and the plans of the opposition, and vowed not to make the protest vote again.
I will say this, and should have said it on the podcast: the most important thing Trump can do in the debate is be happy. Upbeat. Cheerful. Dare I say, sunny.
Absolutely. Especially when he brings up the topic of Hunter Biden’s money from the Moscow mayor’s wife, prostitutes, and human trafficking.
Yes, but, it was talked about in the podcast. And McMaster’s book is mentioned in the description/notes.
And what about people who didn’t see/hear the previous one?
Like I wrote to BY, it’s said, but not in the “written” notes the way McMasters’ book is.
I prefer to highlight one book per episode. You are free to do whatever you like on your podcast.
P.S. We mentioned the book in John’s intro and I’m pretty sure John mentioned it in his segment.
Yeah, I also can’t think of anyone who voted for Trump in 2016 who would actually be talked out of it now. But many people who voted for Hillary, or third party, or didn’t vote at all, because Trump was an unknown risk or whatever, no longer have that excuse.
Can you give your source for this? Here’s 538 from two days ago:
According to BlackDemographics.com, no Republican Presidential candidate has ever won more than 15% of the Black vote (Gerald Ford in 1976). 30 to 40% would be beyond unprecedented and would likely turn several blue states to red.
Granted 40% may be aggressive…but I think 15% to 25% isn’t. I think it’s very much in the realm of possibility.
https://pjmedia.com/election/matt-margolis/2020/06/05/rasmussen-black-voter-approval-for-trump-has-surged-to-over-40-percent-n499859
https://pjmedia.com/election/matt-margolis/2020/08/02/if-this-poll-is-accurate-trump-will-be-reelected-easily-n742618
https://www.blackenterprise.com/trumps-approval-rating-with-black-americans-grows-after-rnc/
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/sep/1/trump-campaign-advisers-see-jump-support-black-his/
From Breitbart:
It may be different in other parts of the country, but what I find interesting is that for all the polls showing Biden in the lead, I’m just not seeing the normal yard signage/bumper stickers that usually accompanies those types of polling numbers (let alone the disparity in turnout during campaign appearances, when Biden is allowed out by his staff for the grand-slam breakfast at Denny’s before calling it a day). I suppose it’s possible that voters can hold both a virulent hatred of Donald Trump and complete apathy towards Joe Biden and Kamala Harris at the same time, to the point they don’t want to go through the effort to get glue on their bumpers are aerate a small part of their yard with messages for the Democratic nominees. But if you hate the current president with the passion of a thousand suns, and the key to the election is supposed to be the wave of suburban support for the Democrats because of that, you’d think those angry people would want to tell someone about their Election Day candidate preference.
How accurate was that polling for Hillary in 2016? Are pollsters still making the same mistakes? Are they oversampling Democrats? Is their methodology outdated and flawed? Is there any political motivation behind any of the polls?
As far as Nate Silver…count me as unimpressed based on his spectacular miss in 2016. Has he improved his methodology? It remains to be seen. Is the 538 team still comprised of rabid Democrat supporters? Well, yeah.
Does Joe Biden’s campaign team even have a ground game? Are they knocking on doors anywhere? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Maybe they figure they can just cheat their way to victory?
There’s another aspect to the enthusiasm gap and that’s the enthusiasm of the respective front runners.
One is energized and putting in a hectic travel schedule asking for your vote to exuberant throngs of voters.
The other is struggling to emerge from his basement, doesn’t appear in front of audiences, doesn’t take any unscripted questions, speaks for no more than 30 minutes (at most) and frankly looks exhausted from a sparse schedule devoid of any real campaign events.
It’s been my sense, in the six and a half decades that I’ve lived on this planet and began paying attention to elections at a very early age (since my family was always quite fascinated with politics) that voters want you to court them. If you’re too tired or physically incapable of doing that…it comes across that you don’t really care that much whether you get the job or not. And typically when that happens, you don’t get it.
I don’t buy the line that Biden doesn’t have to do anything and he will still win because the polls currently show him leading. And I think there are other aspects of this race that the traditional polling isn’t capturing. So, stay tuned.
Neither of the two polls cited in the 538 quote above were 538 polls. One was Morning Consult, the other was the Democracy Fund. But I recommend reading the entire piece on 538 as it is very thorough look at all of the African American polling conducted this year, all of it done by groups other than 538.
And, since you are suspect of polls conducted by “rabid Democrat supporters” (is that what Nate Silver is?), here’s a Fox News Poll from 12 days ago showing Biden with 93% of the Black vote.
What should we count you as now?
I think Peter said “this is my last question” only twice, this time. Is that a record low?
Well I can’t imagine it was about movies being spinach. So maybe it was about people thinking they can vote for Biden and the riots will stop etc, but they likely won’t?
Based on the articles I’ve read on the 538 site, yeah, I would say that the 538 team is comprised of rabid Democrats.
Still not impressed. I don’t believe Biden has actually made an additional 1% gain in the black vote from 2016 and that Trump has lost 3%. And given the Democracy Fund and the Morning Consult poll you cited earlier, the Fox poll shows a jump of 10% in support for Biden from blacks…so, if compared to those polls, the Fox poll is an outlier which calls it into question.
By the way, the Fox poll methodology states that they called 1,300 random people (presumably of many races and ethnicities), so, we don’t know how many of those 1,300 random people were black. Clearly they didn’t call 1,300 black people. If there were only 18 respondents that were black or 9 then that’s not a terribly good sampling and not very representative of the black population at large, is it? Will they do a poll where 1,300 blacks around the country are chosen at random?
The Fox poll states that the polling error rate jumps for subgroups. For blacks voting for a particular candidate it jumps to +/-9% which could mean that Biden, by their unknown number of black respondents, could really be 84% while Trump could be 14% which would be a 6 point gain for Trump from 2016. But my guess is that because they don’t quantify the number of actual black (or other subgroup) respondents to their pollsters that much of the subgroup data is not that valuable because they’re not large enough representative samplings of each group when mapped over 50 states – since they are subsets of the 1,300.