I’m sorry… who answers their phone anymore for an unknown number and why would you use them as a metric?
Polls are all they’ve got to run a horse race with.
“Such is down-on-Biden sentiment that if a government shutdown occurs at month’s end, 40% say they’d chiefly blame him and the Democrats in Congress, versus 33% who’d pin it on the Republicans in Congress – even given the GOP infighting behind the budget impasse.”
Wow. That’s as stupid as can be.
The US is just baffling to me, working class people prefer Trump, a wealthy businessman (from the perspective of his voters/supporters) over Biden who is the most pro-union president in a long time.
It’s also crazy that the strategy of steering the slow-to-turn oil tanker that is the US economy towards a cliff during your turn as president and then chastise your opponent who takes over for damaging the tanker while desperately trying to navigate away from the cliff works cycle after cycle. Reagan, both Bushes and Trump are all guilty of racking up the defecit (with control of both houses and the presidency) while screaming fiscal responsibility and making sure that any collision will happen when they’re not in power or when they’re soon to lose it so the aftermath can be blamed on the Dems.
That’s because Republicans are masters at marketing a message that connects with average folks. They are absolutely terrible for those folks, but as you pointed out, the US economy is so massive, it takes time for legislation passed today to actually affect people in hometown America. So while Republicans are great at pretending they are all blue collar folks, Democrats are absolutely inept at explaining their policies to regular people. All those regular people see a bunch of Democratic lawmakers wasting their resources on teeny, tiny fringe groups. So regular people who represent large voting blocs that can get politicians elected watch this on the news and wonder when are Demcrats going to pay attention to their problems.
At my last company, we had a TV in the break room that was tuned to the news. Mind you, it wasn’t Fox News or any obvious garbage like that. I vividly remember seeing reports on the news on how all these Democratic politicians were spending all this time helping DACA people. They would promise them Healthcare and free education. I could hear my coworkers mumble to themselves. They just had to send in a fat check to their kid’s college to pay for classes while these DACA people were being promised free education. Regardless of of these coworkers supported the DACA folks or not, it just doesn’t look good to average voters when they are scraping together a tuition payment and the elected officials you helped get into office are telling these people who aren’t even citizens. It’s very tone-deaf when the masses have the same or similar problems and yet onky these fringe groups get visible attention from Democrats. And this is but one example of many similar instances which really help solidify the image thag Dems are out of touch, even if that isn’t true. In politics, image is more important than just about anything else.
Your example just further highlights the stuff I’m so baffled by, how can someone be mad about a nation of 300 million supporting less than 100 thousand KIDS. And AFAIK they never got free tuition, they just got access to scholarships and got to pay the instate fee even if out of state. Helpful sure but far from a free ride. And even further if they don’t get education their life time earnings will be lower and thus also the tax they pay. Money spent on kids and their education gets repaid in taxes several times over in general. And further if no education or prospects exist crime is the only way to not fucking starve if you’re undocumented. It’s shortsighted to a level that is either wilfull or the manipulation / brain washing is just to a level that I as an outsider can’t comprehend.
And then the fucking icing on the cake is what is then Republicans proposing? It sure as shit isn’t reduced tuition, tuition caps or tax credits to help offset tuition costs or anything. It’s just focus on some sick, mildly racist angle of “look at Dems caring about non-Americans more than Americans!” and then pocket all the money themselves.
At least the Dems are doing something aside from fucking over the average American and putting money in the pockets of the already rich.
I understand the idea of statistics but I do question calling 1006 people randomly on the phone and asking them, then applying the results to 150,000,000 people. But more importantly, national polls don’t take the electoral college into account.
Yeah, there’s a lot less randomness to it than you seem to think… Anything over a thousand is statistically usable, though not definitive.
That being said, there IS some inherent bias in the methods of some pollsters, such as calling landlines and only talking to people who pick up the first time, both of which skews the people polled older and more conservative than the general public.
Assuming for a moment that they got the popular vote as it stands now right, though, the EC is likely even worse, since it’s very much stacked in favor of the GOP…
Would the threshold of 1000 people be different if it was intended to represent say, 2,000,0000 vs 150,000,000? Why is 1,000 the magic number there? It seems like it would become more reliable with a larger sample size. And yeah, the population of people who answer unknown numbers with no warning and are willing to take a poll probably doesn’t represent the entire voting public accurately.
The EC is stacked in favor of the GOP due to smaller rural states, sure, but the extra dumb thing about the way it works in the US is that only about 10 states really matter. The rest are, of course, considered a sure win for one side or the other, and since the system is winner-takes-all, it’s not even worth campaigning or caring about how people on the other side vote in those states.
Believe it or not, the threshold for a reliable confidence measure can be a lot lower than you think. And the difference between a valid sample size for 1,000,000 people versus 350,000,000 people is almost certainly zero. Once you are confident in a result concerning many thousands, that usually extends to effectively everyone.
If you want 95% confidence with an interval of +/- 5% for every human being on the planet, your sample size only needs to be 385 participants. That gets way larger really quickly where you need to consider cohorts like gender, geography, age groups, income, and so on, but for a generalized read you need surprisingly few people. A higher confidence and smaller interval also increase the number significantly.
1000 is pretty much a compromise between the ideal and what’s realistically possible. Most opinion polls have a sample size between 800 and 1500, with those under 1k considered much less reliable, around 1k pretty much standard and 1500 extra rigorous.
There’s a lot of technical details on how to select those 800-1500 people to be reliably representative of a much larger population and different poll takers use different methodology, but that’s all too deep in the weeds for a lemmy reply and some of it is outside the scope of my knowledge as a curious and thus pretty well-informed layperson.
And you’re absolutely right about the EC on all counts. That and the filibuster are both examples of a supposed democracy being EXTREMELY undemocratic.
I guess for more info about the mathematics they use, I could ask my uncle - he’s a university statistics professor.
Yes, also the Senate was specifically designed to be undemocratic as to not give larger states more representation than smaller ones. At this point it’s absurd that states with 12 million people have the same representation as states with 800,000.
It’s a ridiculous compromise. It’s all they can do, but it’s just wrong.
And that’s not even the main problem; the main problem is with the reporting of it. That’s where the wrong end of the stick is used to beat around the bush.
States with 38 million people have the same representation as states with 600,000, even.
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jesus fucking christ. how do so many americans have memory worse than a goldfish. And less critical thought
Defunded and poorly run public education.
Source: I am a product of Texas public education. I’m surprised I can read.
I think one of the best things to have ever happened to me was suddenly getting really good at English in the 9th grade and pursuing AP English every year thereafter. I sucked at it. But the analysis my classmates did gave me something to look up to.
I’m long past high school, but that type of critical thinking has stuck with me longer than almost everything since that time in my life.
And you know what’s funny? I’m all for DeSantis’s classical curriculum. People should read the classics and think about them. And they’ll quickly realize why the Republican party specifically and capitalism more generally have betrayed the philosophies that developed them.
Roosevelt was a Republican and an environmentalist. Modern Republicans want energy independence knowing full well it will contribute to climate change. The word ‘Republican’ in those two sentences is not synonymous.
Wait…. We’re still following polls a year out from elections?
Ha! “We” are not. Polling lost its @$% in 2016 and it can gtfo now.
Corporate news is calling a horse race, and they’re manufacturing a false narrative to do it. That’s what they do. It’s also why journalism is a smoldering husk of what it should be.
I am going to play Devil’s Advocate for a second, hopefully to show a bigger picture.
Biden was ahead of trump by 12% when he ran against him, and barely won. Now he is nearly 9% behind and we are supposed to have a victory parade?
I like Biden, more then likely will vote for him again, but we cannot miss the obvious warning signs that Biden has a very good chance of losing to Trump.
Mostly because
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He didn’t keep his promises.
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The economy is slowly rebounding, but it is clear that the average American is still feeling the stress of this post-recession economy.
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His age is showing. He’s hunched, he is talking more softly, he’s slower then he was 4 years ago, and cannot project himself like he used to. He’s aged like a fine wine, but he’s also fermented like one too.
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Biden doesn’t have a reason to spend 4 more years in office, but he does have a plan to prevent Trump from being elected. Which is okay, but it is the exact same playbook that lost Hilary to Trump in the first place. I hear nothing about Biden’s policies outside of the semi-conductor bill, but I sure do know that Trump is going to put the corporate tax at 15%, I know he is going to allow people to shoot Mexicans on their soil, agree to an abortion timeline. Horrible stuff, but at least people understand where he is.
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That’s not edging out. That’s a blowout.
Outlier.
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