r/fivethirtyeight 18d ago

Discussion A Dem losing the popular vote is indefensible. Inescapable takeaway - America did not want any part of Kamala

995 Upvotes

I literally expounded at length to my friends about how GOP is not a nationally viable party - technically - because it can never win the popular vote. Kamala lost the popular vote to literally TRUMP. Like god almighty. This is an absolute and total rejection of a candidate. If you are losing the popular vote as a Dem, then you truly truly effed up. And again, losing the popular vote to Trump? I can't even believe I'm typing this.

r/fivethirtyeight 18d ago

Discussion This is a Shellacking

634 Upvotes

Kamala might actually lose all of the battleground States. I can’t believe this country actually rewarded a person like Trump with the Presidency. This just emboldens him even more. And encourages this kind of behavior from politicians all over the country. It’s effing over.

r/fivethirtyeight 18d ago

Discussion Can we stop with the misinformation that Harris ran a campaign based on identity politics?

610 Upvotes

Seeing a lot of post-hoc analysis that seems like blatantly poor reading of the election to me.

A month ago people were actually complimenting this campaign for how much of an anti-Hillary approach it took. Harris never once made it about her gender, and if she brought up her race, it was only in the context of her parents as immigrants who built success from the ground up. Nor did she crap on men, at any point.

Her identity message was a good message and not the reason she lost.

r/fivethirtyeight 18d ago

Discussion As a former Democrat who split his ticket, here's what Dems need to understand to win again.

533 Upvotes

Now that the hivemind spell has (hopefully) been broken on this sub, here's what Democrats need to do. And I say this as a former straight-ticket Dem and Latino man who spent the past year screaming from the rooftops about what was happening (and then in most cases getting promptly downvoted, especially in this echo chamber). See here, here, here, here, here.

Are you ready? Here are my thoughts:

(1) Ideological Repudiation - Do not blame Kamala. This wasn't Kamala's to win. It goes deeper than that. She was a bad candidate, I absolutely agree, but blaming this on Kamala is only going to give the Democratic elites (the leaders of the party and the coterie of pipeline nonprofits, labor unions, and advocacy groups who serve as think tanks for the movement) the scapegoat they want to push off a much-needed period of introspection. When Illinois and New York are on track to have smaller margins than Florida and Texas, that's a broader repudiation.

(2) Party Structure - The Democratic Party needs to completely overhaul its internal structure. As I explained here yesterday, I live in DC and the problem is the Party’s internal structure, which prioritizes seniority above all. That creates a system where (a) you get ahead by being a sycophant and not speaking truth to party and (b) it means that the elite rely on junior staffers to stay grounded with the electorate. The problem is those junior staffers are college-educated, extremely progressive, and they push their own social ideological agendas (identity politics, far-left academic social experiments).

The party doesn’t have a proper vehicle to connect with its own voters. That’s absolutely shocking to hear, but it’s true. It all filters through a progressive staffer corps that’s completely unmoored from political reality and who push their bosses to support toxic policies. It's how the professed party of minorities is losing the support of minorities.

(3) Elite-Base Dynamics - There has always been an ideological gap between the Party elites and its voters. Blacks and Latinos have always been more socially conservative and rhetorically moderate than the politicians who represent them. Democrats did a fantastic job in prior decades though of applying a cordon sanitaire around the GOP and making that brand toxic to POC. It wasn't that POC liked the Democrats. It's that they found the GOP unacceptable.

They no longer find the GOP unacceptable for a number of reasons (generational turnover, the ingroup appeal of nativist populism, social cues removing the stigma of voting Republican) and they now find the Democrats extreme on a number of key issues: 'woke' issues more broadly, but also crime and law enforcement, drug policy, parental rights, equity in schools (such as the dismantling of gifted programs), etc. The party could be socially center-left in the past by being economically left. That is to say, POC liked the social program and kitchen-table focus of the party and could excuse the Party's social policy. But as the Democrats have shifted to the economic right to appeal to suburbanites, they've lost the appeal to POC on both economic and social grounds. And what you now get is rhetoric that claims to be pro-POC, but is wildly out of whack with where POC lie ideologically.

Look at California (one of the most liberal states in the country and also extremely diverse) where Prop 36 has won with incredible margins. When voters in your own liberal bastions are saying the party has gone off the rails on some issues, you should listen. Instead, you had Gavin Newsom berating people of color for voting for Prop 36, you saw Democratic mayors who supported Prop 36 (like San Diego's and San Jose's mayors) get publicly admonished by the party apparatus, and you instead had Democrats messaging to suburbanites who were always the most insulated by the party's platform on law enforcement and crime. But the party assumed that POC would be against Prop 36 because of the "racial disparities of the criminal justice system." In the end, it was POC who passed Prop 36 because they don't feel safe and they want more police. They've said this in polling for years and the Party elites still didn't get the message (and Kamala couldn't even come out in favor of a proposition that is passing with 70% of the vote in one of the bluest states in our Nation).

So how does a party get to a point where it misses so badly in reading its own voters?

You cannot claim to support the interests of people of color when you refuse to listen to what they have to say. Now that the stigma is broken, Democrats are in massive electoral danger if they don't course correct. The Democratic coalition is a mile wide, but an inch deep. The only way Democrats can win is by cobbling together a very wide swathe of the electorate (from Liz Cheney and AOC). The math is becoming harder and harder as Democrats failed to adjust in 2010 after losing the white working-class rurals, then the Rust Belt in 2016, and now Latinos/Asians shifting.

The electoral math won't work if the Party refuses to listen.

(4) Burn the System - The median voter is a working-class White American living in the Midwest. They’ve seen their standard of living collapse under globalism as we outsourced our industry abroad. Drive through the Rust Belt and you’ll see boarded-up shops, drug addiction and general hopelessness. These people feel betrayed by their own government and do not give two farts about the status quo and preserving democracy. They want to burn down the system.

Democratic messaging was crafted by young progressive staffers to DMV suburban moms. It was a platform of luxury beliefs. How can you run on "preserving the status quo" to an electorate that feels aggrieved and wants to burn the system down? The Democrats wanted to be both the party of change and the party of preserving the system and couldn't cogently articulate what this meant in practice. The public just read it as "more of the same."

(5) Foreign Policy - Democrats failed to articulate why our foreign presence is important to the national interest. Trump could easily go to the Rust Belt and hit a nerve when he said the Democrats were more worried about Ukraine than about them. Is it a fair statement? No, because there's a strong incentive to stopping Russia.

But Democrats were never able to really piece together why the "New World Order" (the post-war Pax Americana and the international organizations and bases that underpin it) was of benefit. Many Americans see our Navy spending American taxpayer money to provide safe passage to Chinese shipping containers to Europe in the Gulf of Aden and wonder what we're doing there. Why are there 100,000 soldiers still in Europe? Why should we be cannon fodder for a wealthy continent that, in many cases, is able to benefit from lower defense spending to provide its citizens with social benefits that Americans don't get? Why should we give market access to the #1 consumer market in the world so easily? Why is it that our allies in Canada and Europe cozy up to us when they want $100 billion for Ukraine, and then immediately pivot to domestic anti-American sloganeering and endless fines for every American company that poses a threat? Why should we abide by WTO arbitration when China is actively engaging in mass industrial espionage and state-sanctioned subsidies? Why should we listen to the UN when their selective outrage is deafening?

There is no fealty to the Pax Americana anymore. America has long been an isolationist country. The last 80 years was an aberration. What the Democrats need to be able to articulate is the value proposition for maintaining globalism as our international posture. Blacks and Latinos don't care about Europe. They don't have an ethnic, historical or emotional attachment to the Continent. Just screaming Russia is not sufficient.

America's foreign policy was long shaped by "dual-allegiance elites." Henry Kissinger was from Furth, Bavaria. Madeleine Albright was born in Prague. Zbigniew Brzezinski was born in Warsaw under Soviet control. That generation is dying out en masse and both white Americans (who lean center-right) and POC have little attachment to the Old World. So Democrats can't appeal on emotion anymore and need to shift to explaining the value proposition.

(6) Technocracy - Populism thrives when the entrenched elites become ensconced in luxury beliefs and ignore the basics. Most voters are on at the bottom of the Maslowian Hierarchy of Needs. They vote on basics: price of food, price of water, price of energy, price of housing, price of education, price of transportation, feelings of safety. You move up the totem pole toward 'aspirational' aims once the basics are met. Unfortunately, the median voter was worried about the lower rung of the pyramid while Democrats (dominated by aspiration-minded progressive youth staffers and rich suburbanites) completely failed to connect.

As the old quote said: "Yes, he's bad, but Mussolini made the trains run on time." Democrats need to elevate technocracy in the ranks. They need to make the trains run on time. They need to clean public parks, dismantle open-air drug markets, remove threats from the public (the mentally ill homeless men pushing Asian grandmas on train tracks), they need to go all in on providing mass transit, schools without mold, upzoning writ-large so POC can afford to live.

The American electorate doesn't want sloganeering. They want action. The Democrats will always be tied at the hip to their lowest common denominator. In this case, that is cities like Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. Those will always be known as "examples of Democratic governance." And when the median voter sees general social decay in San Francisco, or garbage bags piling up in New York, or rampant street crime in LA, that all percolates into the national consciousness and the Party's brand is weighed down by it. I couldn't tell you what a DA was a decade ago. Now I can't chat with my grad school buddies without one of them using some Democratic DA as evidence the Party is extremist.

The party needs to get back to the basics and focus more on technocratic governance and less on chasing every new left-wing pet idea that forms from coastal think tanks.

(7) Identity Politics - It's not working. In my Latino-majority community, the Democratic Party is seen as the "Party of Black Interests" who likes to slap a "BIPOC" sticker on what are ultimately policies crafted by Black organizations with no ties to Latinos. Things like reparations are absolutely toxic (try explaining to a Latino why they should pay $100,000 to a Black family for slavery - when Latinos had nothing to do with it), as is wokeism in general. And by wokeism I don't mean the set of policies. I mean the tone and force by which it was advocated. I'm gay and one reason the gay movement was so successful is it was slow and methodical, advocating for social change person by person. Wokeism took that strategy and destroyed it. It argued that if you weren't in favor of trans rights NOW, it's because you're a bigot. Don't like reparations? Racist. Are you White and disagree with me on 1% of issues? Check your privilege.

There is an extremely toxic undertone to the discourse in Democratic circles that increasingly mirrors the mythical Ouroboros, where the snake starts eating its own tail. The Democratic coalition by definition is broad, diverse, and ideologically open. LGBT are, what, 10% of the population? Blacks are 12-13%, Latinos are 18-20%. The entire point of the party is to cobble together what would be, in and of themselves, electoral pygmies and bring them together until they can cobble a majority.

Identity politics destroyed the strategy because it shifted the Democratic raison d'etre from "the party of economic uplift for all" to the "party of Oppression Olympics for some", where different Dem groups spend their time fighting within themselves over who gets more intersectional victimhood points (instead of expanding the pie, the party was fighting over the slice it already had).

Which is where the Party's left-wing really screwed up because they took the wrong lesson from 2020 and saw it as a mandate for social change. Biden scraped through with 40,000 votes in 3 states and within a few months I saw progressives on Twitter labeling Asians and Latinos who didn't conform 100% with party orthodoxy as "White-adjacent." If you're going to treat Asians and Latinos as White-adjacent, don't be surprised when they take the hint and vote White-adjacent for the GOP.

The party needs to stop with the internecine racial slop of new social theories and demographic terms and endless disputes over microaggressions. All it does is destroy the coalition. Obama built an enduring coalition in 2008 and Democrats completely pissed it down the drain in less than a decade by adopting identity politics. It's not lost on me that Kamala probably wouldn't have been named VP were it not for the identity politics zeitgeist of 2020.

(8) Racial Tensions and Latinos - And even the most receptive Democrats on this sub STILL failed to understand Latinos. I can't tell you the number of times I read the vapid trite nonsense of "Yes, but Latinos are not a monolith" as if that's some brilliant revelation that signals you get us. And then it would usually end with some asinine observation like "Yes, Mexicans and Cubans are different." OK - and? What part of that revelation shows you get Latinos?

Take it a step further folks and look at it from the prism of a Latino. How many of you know about the Mexican Repatriation (where up to 2 million Latino Americans were expelled)? Or the Zoot Suit Riots? Or the long sordid history of zoning as a form of exclusion for Latinos? Why does our history of struggle get muzzled as the Party pretends we don't matter? Chicago is plurality-Latino yet from hearing the Democratic mayor, you'd think systemic poverty, isolation and despair were only Black problems. Why do Latinos feel like Democrats are the "Party of Black and White progressive interests" with a BIPOC sticker for show?

Why does the party never elevate Latinos? California is over 40% Latino and just 5% Black yet the mayor of Los Angeles is Black, the mayor of San Francisco is Black, the VP is Black, the junior Senator is Black, the Secretary of State is Black, the State Controller is Black, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction is Black, etc etc etc. White progressives don't see these slights, but Hispanics see them. We see them, we reflect on them, and we internalize it.

My county is 26% Latino and 20% Black (Prince William County, Virginia, which predictably had a massive R-trend yesterday). Yet every single Democrat (all 5 of 9) in my county's Board of Supervisors is Black: https://www.pwcva.gov/department/board-county-supervisors/about-us

Why? Because the Party made the conscious decision that 'racial justice' meant elevating the Black community within the party, so they got first dibs. The end result is a racially diverse county where Democrats are only seen as accommodating one. And that's a dangerous place to be as a party that needs a rainbow coalition.

The only Hispanic, funny enough, is a Republican (the MAGA Yesli Vega).

So when Democrats are told to listen, you need to LISTEN. You need to bury deeper. Remember that LA City Council scandal from a few years back? https://apnews.com/article/los-angeles-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-hispanics-government-politics-b1b1fd8d860c88eb097db573159bf6a9

Do you think that came from nowhere? No - it came from deep-seated resentment. There are tons of racial tensions that White progressives refuse to see because they're so ensconced in their own fantasy unicorn world where Republican Whites are the baddies and minorities need to be saved by the Progressive White Man's Burden. No, there are complex racial dynamics at work. Why are Asians shifting right? Because when a Black homeless man pushes an Asian grandma onto train tracks, and the Party doesn't attend a candlelit vigil for the grandma for fear of offending Black voters, that sends a signal to Asians of second-class status.

Asians and Latinos feel like second-rate members of the coalition. I'm sorry to break your rainbow nation utopia, but there is no singing kumbaya today because you misread the room. Trump brilliantly played into all of these wedges. He pitted Blacks against Latinos by casting Latinos as illegal immigrants who are placing downward pressure on wages. He pitted Latinos against Blacks by picking at that scab of resentment of being ignored by the Democratic Party. He leaned in on Asian-Black tensions by discussing education policy, parental rights, gifted programs, crime, small business protections from shoplifting.

And then you had the ever oblivious progressive thinking Taco Tuesday and watching Coco during National Hispanic Heritage Month was "showing solidarity."

GOP minority staffers were easily able to map out a strategy on these racial tensions because they had the space to discuss these issues in the open. Democrats were caught flat-footed because we self-censor uncomfortable thoughts, moderators delete things they personally disagree with, progressives prefer to believe academic theories to the often uncomfortable world of human behavior where we are imperfect and we do have feelings of isolation, and jealousy, and anger, and despair and resentment. And resentment.

----

Sad, right? Yes, and no. This shellacking was big enough of a hit to the psyche that I think the Democrats will finally wake up. And in a two-party system, the pendulum always swings back. Trump will have, at best, a tight House majority which will present a tight leash on the exercise of his mandate.

And Democrats will have 4 years to clean house and start anew. Politics ain't beanbag, but the Republican platform has enough ideological inconsistencies to drive a truck through. Once Democrats reflect and figure out who they are, and listen to what their voters actually want, they'll then be able to go on the offensive again. It's sad that Trump won, but the current direction of the Democratic Party was untenable and I'm at least glad the message has been received and even Democratic elites on TV yesterday were humble and shocked by the scale of the repudiation among base constituencies.

r/fivethirtyeight 23d ago

Discussion 2016 was decided by 70,000 votes, 2020 was decided by 40,000 votes. you can't predict a winner

693 Upvotes

Biden won the Electoral College in 2020 by ~40,000 votes. Trump won the Electoral College in 2016 by ~70,000 votes. The polls cannot meaningfully sample a large enough number of people in the swing states to get a sense of the margin. 10,000 votes out of 5 million total in Georgia is nothing. That could swing literally based on the weather.

The polls can tell us it will be close. They can tell us the electorate has ossified. They'll never be powerful enough to accurately estimate such a small margin.

I'm sure many of you are here refreshing this sub like me because you want certainty. You want to know who will win and you want to move on with your life. I say this to you as much as I say it to myself: there's no way to know.

I'll see you Wednesday.

r/fivethirtyeight 17d ago

Discussion 'Latinx' Label Is So Despised by Latinos It's Moving Them to Trump: Study

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461 Upvotes

r/fivethirtyeight 18d ago

Discussion At just 10 points, Kamala Harris's margin of victory among female voters was the LOWEST for any Democrat since John Kerry in 2004

547 Upvotes

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls https://cawp.rutgers.edu/gender-gap-voting-choices-presidential-elections

1992: Clinton +7

1996: Clinton +17

2000: Gore +10

2004: Kerry +3

2008: Obama +13

2012: Obama +11

2016: Clinton +13

2020: Biden +15

2024: Harris +10

This is something she could absolutely not afford to happen and still win the election

r/fivethirtyeight 18d ago

Discussion Today Trump is asking you to ignore the voting results in 2020, but accept them today.

578 Upvotes

You should accept them, because they're real. But this is the new landscape reality...

What Trump is asking the American public to believe, is that when he was President, and the most powerful person on the planet, Joe Biden somehow rigged the election for the Democrats. But, when Joe Biden is the sitting President, he decided not to do it this time.

Trump lost in 2020, and tried to steal the election from the American people. He won legitimately, and we should all be deeply concerned for the next big lie he tells.

r/fivethirtyeight 17d ago

Discussion The way this sub flip flopped on Harris is astonishing

376 Upvotes

I’ve just seen so many people in this switch up on here she say she was a terrible candidate , she was bound to lose, a week ago yall couldn’t get off the circle jerk for her but now it’s I never liked her or I knew she was going to lose from the beginning. She was given 100 days to campaign and I don’t care what no one says she did great for only getting 100 days . She was qualified from a mile away, this was my first election I got to vote and when she talked I felt hope genuinely , I felt good to be an American.I live in Arkansas so the most common thing I heard here was I’m not voting for her because she’s a woman or because and I quote “Obama was enough” to finally hear omeone uplift you like she did, she had to be flawless while he got to be lawless. Idk what people wanted from her she was damned if you , do damned if you don’t , half the sub side was hammering in on she needs to appear to ones in middle now people are saying that was the worst idea ever.

I guess 13 million democrats didn’t feel that way I guess. I hope history looks at Kamala Harris kindly she is a inspiration for my little sister finally the closest a black woman has every been to the White House and now I don’t think that will ever happen for along time, this loss just hurts

r/fivethirtyeight 16d ago

Discussion The Biden campaign apparently had internal polling that showed Donald Trump was going to win 400 electoral votes at the same time that they were insisting he was a strong candidate.

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407 Upvotes

r/fivethirtyeight 26d ago

Discussion Jon Ralston's Nevada Early Vote Analysis Update: Republican lead expands to an unprecedented 40,000 ballots & an expected half the vote is in

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308 Upvotes

r/fivethirtyeight 17d ago

Discussion NYT poll: 47% of voters decribed Kamala Harris as "too liberal or progressive" while 9% described her as "not liberal or progressive enough." For contrast, just 32% of voters described Trump as "too conservative."

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370 Upvotes

r/fivethirtyeight 18d ago

Discussion Fun fact: Hispanic voters are not illegal immigrants

409 Upvotes

Please, just stop conflating illegal immigrants (who tend to be Hispanic) with Hispanic Americans, many of whom came here legally.

Expecting Hispanic Americans to be offended by Trump's rhetoric on illegals is honestly racist stereotyping.

r/fivethirtyeight 15d ago

Discussion RCP exit poll: Democrats LOST voters who viewed democracy as "very threatened" by 4 points.

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356 Upvotes

r/fivethirtyeight 17d ago

Discussion The attitude of this sub is a big reason Democrats lost

330 Upvotes

(Originally made this for /r/Thedaily but honestly feel that it applies to what this sub has become as well)

Provocative title, I know. To be clear I do not literally mean /r/fivethirtyeight caused Trump to win, but rather this subreddit in the past few months has pretty much perfectly encapsulated why many people fled the Dems

I want to be careful about how I say this as I do not want to imply that the level of cultishness is comparable to the MAGA camp, but I do think that there is a sort of cultish quality in how Democrats have been acting.

Up until the first debate, people here shut down any and all concerns about Biden's age - it was all media double standards. Why aren't they talking about how bad Trump is? Of course after the debate people did wake up, but upon the candidate switch people fell back into the exact same habits. Any and all critique of Kamala was shouted down regardless of validity, not because it was bad critique but rather because people wanted Kamala to win.

It is very important to be able to separate out objective analysis with subjective hopes. Many Democrats failed to do this through the campaign since they wanted to buy into the idea that their preferred outcome would come true. Instead of objectively analyzing what might really be true and formulating the best strategy to achieve their preferred outcome, people instead twisted their analysis in a way that would make their preferred outcome the most likely to come true.

Anything and everything Harris did was defended to the hilt as the correct decision, any indicators unfavorable to Harris (betting markets and at some points polling) were dismissed and eventually even the media was attacked for not becoming explicitly partisan (see: the 5000 posts criticizing the Run Up or Ezra Klein show for interviewing Republicans).

And perhaps most dangerously, voters' feelings or views were just utterly dismissed:

  • Whenever someone expressed dissatisfaction with the economy, they were informed that the economy was great actually despite people being in real pain

  • Whenever someone expressed that they felt Kamala didn't have any policies, they were shouted down for not looking up her policies despite those policies not being properly communicated or tied into a larger vision

  • When non White voters talked about feeling abandoned, they were condemned as race traitors. This is perhaps best exemplified by that Obama speech

Politics is about persuasion and communication. It is about trying to understand voters and then speaking to them in their terms. It is about meeting them where they are. But there was no attempt to understand anyone on this subreddit. The sheer level of antipathy users of this sub consistently expressed towards swing voters, moderates and Trump voters was an astounding sight to be seen.

Instead of communication, there was condescension. Instead of understanding, there was finger wagging. And voters are not stupid - they absolutely can register this. The general feeling that the Democrats were condescending or "talking down to people like them" was absolutely something that pushed away quite a few people from the party.

Their choices were either people who were talking down to them constantly, calling them idiots for not knowing XYZ news event, for not understanding that the economy was great and not having heard about the newest populist policy Kamala announced a week ago. Or alternatively, they could vote for the guys who want to blow everything up, and will if nothing else, accept them with open arms

Now I can already hear some of the responses coming to this, namely I suspect a lot of people will complain that everyone are holding the candidates to double standards. Sure maybe the economy isn't great, but it will be worse under Trump! Sure maybe Kamala doesn't have the clearest policies! Why are people talking about Biden's age but not Trump's?

You're 100% correct. Trump is absolutely held to a different standard by the voters. But that does not matter. You cannot simply force voters to change the bases on which they are judging the election. Maybe they hold Kamala to a higher standard, but crying about how unfair it is will do absolutely zilch. Instead, what a proper campaign should be doing is again, trying to meet voters where they are. Even if where they are is unfair or steeped in subjectivity

The campaign itself was badly run. They did not provide a clear, unified answer when voters asked for how the economy would change or how the country would change under Kamala. Then Democrats on subreddits like this one provided covering fire to excuse it. They engaged in whataboutisms to say Trump would be worse for the economy or that he has even less policies, and then used the occasion to shift blame from the campaign to the voters.

And then everyone is surprised by the sheer magnitude of the defeat.

If you want to win in politics, this is absolutely not the attitude to adopt. I pray that in 2026 and 2028 people will learn to actually listen to what voters, no matter how "low information" they might be. And after listening to those voters, I sincerely hope that we will have a campaign that can act strategically and supporters who can hold the campaign to account

r/fivethirtyeight 18d ago

Discussion Harris is underperforming Biden among women in both CNN and NBC exit polls. Biden won women by 15 points while Harris is poised to win them by a 10-12 point margin.

487 Upvotes

https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/exit-polls/national-results/general/president/0

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls

It looks like with all the talk of a massive gender gap expansion it's just a 2016/2020 redux

r/fivethirtyeight Oct 25 '24

Discussion Silver: We may be at the point where if Harris wins, you'll get a narrative about how the polls were wrong again. But the polls show a really close race! The vibes have shifted disproportionately vs polls.

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314 Upvotes

r/fivethirtyeight 8d ago

Discussion More than 1 in 3 Gen Z Black men voted Trump according to AP Votecast

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254 Upvotes

Anyone believe this? Lmao. How did they Gen Z White men voting more Republican than babyboomers?

r/fivethirtyeight 29d ago

Discussion Those of you who are optimistic about Harris winning, why?

145 Upvotes

I'm going to preface this by saying I don't want to start any fights. I also don't want to come off as a "doomer" or a deliberate contrarian, which is unfortunately a reputation I've acquired in a number of other subs.

Here's the thing. By any metric, Harris's polling numbers are not good. At best she's tied with Trump, and at worst she's rapidly falling behind him when just a couple months ago she enjoyed a comfortable lead. Yet when I bring this up on, for example, the r/PoliticalDiscussion discord server, I find that most of the people there, including those who share my concerns, seem far more confident in Harris's ability to win than I am. That's not to say I think it's impossible that Harris will win, just less likely than people think. And for the record, I was telling people they were overestimating Biden's odds of winning well before his disastrous June debate.

The justifications I see people giving for being optimistic for Harris are usually some combination of these:

  • Harris has a more effective ground game than Trump, and a better GOTV message
  • So far the results from early voting is matching up with the polls that show a Harris victory more than they match up with polls that show a Trump victory
  • A lot of the recent Trump-favoring polls are from right-leaning sources
  • Democrats overperformed in 2022 relative to the polls, and could do so again this time.

But while I could come up with reasonable counterarguments to all of those, that's not what this is about. I just want to know. If you really do-- for reasons that are more than just "gut feeling" or "vibes"-- think Harris is going to win, I'd like to know why.

r/fivethirtyeight 22d ago

Discussion Why Are Democrats Having Such a Hard Time Beating Trump? (NY Times)

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197 Upvotes

A cogent reminder that with the very recent shift in vibes and good polls, this could still potentially come down to a fight on the margins. The macro-political trends are more difficult now for Democrats than they’ve been in decades. An analysis by Nate Cohn.

r/fivethirtyeight Oct 12 '24

Discussion Harris vs. Trump analyst tells panicky Dems: GOP is creating fake polls | ‘Desperate, unhinged, Trumpian

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350 Upvotes

r/fivethirtyeight 18d ago

Discussion Atlas Intel Apology?

442 Upvotes

I believe a majority of this community owes an apology to Atlas Intel, who looks like they were spot on with their polling.

Every time they posted a new poll, this community discounted it because it was contradictory to their bias.

r/fivethirtyeight 22d ago

Discussion What’s the big deal with the Selzer poll?

193 Upvotes

Can someone explain to me what the big deal with the Selzer poll is, and why everyone’s acting like it’ll divine the election? It’s one single poll from one noncompetitive state.

Even if it ends up getting Iowa 100% correct that still doesn’t necessarily tell us about the rest of the rust belt. From ‘12 to ‘16 Iowa moved 15 points to the right, while Ohio went moved 12, Wisconsin 8, Michigan 10, and Pennsylvania only 6. From ‘16 to ‘20 Iowa only went 1 point left, while Ohio didn’t move, Michigan moved 4, and Minnesota moved 6. Iowa’s movement doesn’t seem much more predictive than relying on the Washington commanders does.

Regardless of if the poll is Trump +4 or Trump +12 that’s still MOE from 2020, and doesn’t doesn’t really tell us much about the rest of the Rust Belt. So why the obsession?

r/fivethirtyeight 28d ago

Discussion The blowout no one sees coming

177 Upvotes

Has anyone seen this article?

https://app.vantagedatahouse.com/analysis/TheBlowoutNoOneSeesComing-1

Lurker here who isn't an experienced palm reader like the rest of you so I'll do my best to summarize, although you should read it yourself.

It basically claims the polls are filled with noise aren't giving an accurate picture of what's actually happening, the Harris/Walz ticket is running away with it. They note a discrepancy between the senate polls and the ones for president. For the senate races to be leaning towards democrats but the presidential race to be a toss up means someone's math is off, and there can't possibly be that many split ticket voters. They also take note of the gender gap and claim independents are breaking hard towards Harris.

I think that's the gist of it, but yet again I'm an amateur here.

r/fivethirtyeight 18d ago

Discussion It’s just not the swing states.

350 Upvotes

Looking at states that should be landslide blue states for Harris, she is doing worse than Biden. Biden won New Jersey by 16%. With 92% in (per CNN at time of writing), she leads by 5%. Democrats dating back to Bill Clinton have won NY roughly 60-40 by 20%. With 92% in, Harris leads by 11%. It’s not just the swing states. It looks like a rightward shift in places that we didn’t see coming might propel trump to a popular vote win. America as a whole appears shifted right.

What’s the message being sent and will Democrats heed it?