WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2024
That is, with the Iowa Poll: In the past, Ann Selzer's Iowa Poll had frequently landed pretty much right on the money.
Every four years, results of the final survey would be released on the Sunday before the election. This year, that final poll showed Candidate Harris ahead of Candidate Trump by three points statewide, 47-44 percent.
We'll say this for the Iowa Poll—when it finally missed the mark, it held little back. Here's the current report on the topic in the Des Moines Register:
Pollster J. Ann Selzer: 'I’ll be reviewing data' after Iowa Poll misses big Trump win
Renowned Pollster J. Ann Selzer said Tuesday she would be reviewing her data to determine why a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll released just days before the election produced results so far out of line with former President Donald Trump's resounding victory.
Trump handily won Iowa for a third time, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris by 14 percentage points with more than 90% of the vote counted―a sharp contrast to Saturday's Iowa Poll that had Harris leading by 3 points.
"Tonight, I’m of course thinking about how we got where we are," Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., which conducts the Iowa Poll, said in a statement.
"The poll findings we produced for The Des Moines Register and Mediacom did not match what the Iowa electorate ultimately decided in the voting booth today. I’ll be reviewing data from multiple sources with hopes of learning why that happened. And, I welcome what that process might teach me."
As Kevin Drum noted last week, there are many ways a survey of this type can go wrong. So-called "margin of error" is only the start of the possibilities. And by the way, just a guess:
No journalist could possibly hope to explain the way that statistical artefact works. We couldn't exactly do so either, but at least we'd know not to pretend.
Simply put, everyone talks about margin of error, but no one does anything about it! In fact, basic "sampling error" comes into play if you're simply pulling red and blue ping-pong balls out of a big giant drum.
Sometimes, the sample you pull out of the drum will match the proportion of red and blue balls found inside the drum—but a fair amount of the time, the sample you pull out of the drum won't be a perfect match.
That's how it works with ping pong balls in a big giant drum. If you're polling a presidential campaign, other factors come into play, potentially messing things up.
Many people won't answer their phone when you try to reach them. Some people will answer their phone, but they won't answer your question.
Some people won't tell you the truth if they decide to answer your question. Some people may have changed their minds by the time they cast their votes.
The possible ways a poll can go wrong continue on from there.
On 24-hour "cable news," the pundits spend a lot of time, before an election, puzzling over the polls. At some point, this becomes an excellent way to kill giant amounts of time—a way to pretend you're presenting "news" as part of a process called "journalism."
This past Sunday, the Iowa Poll had Candidate Harris up by three points, with nine percent still floating around in the ether. (Three percent had said that they'd be voting for Candidate Kennedy Jr.)
For one brief shining moment, that's where matters allegedly stood. According to this AP post, here's where the statewide vote in Iowa stands with 98 percent reporting:
Statewide presidential vote, Iowa 2024
Trump: 55.9%
Harris: 42.7%
Kennedy Jr.: 0.8%
Three other hopefuls got handfuls of votes. Eventually, though, the day had to come:
Trump won by more than thirteen points! The Iowa Poll got it wrong.
This election may turn out to have had nothing to do with polling. Like the 2016 election, which included a great deal of outside help from Comey and Putin, there may be explanations related to meddling in other aspects of the campaign. I will wait to see whether that is true before believing that excellent pollsters somehow got it all wrong.
ReplyDeleteIt may boil down to misogyny and racism. It may be related to people's fears of vigilante violence from MAGAs. It may be that no one assumed that Harris could win, so they stayed home in droves. None of these explanations would show up in polling because those questions weren't asked of anyone. It is going to take a long time to discover what happened in this election.
Meanwhile, Trump is a disaster and I don't hear many people talking about what we do now. How do we mitigate the damage that Trump and his allies will surely do to all of us?
Where do women stand? Does it mean anything that Somerby has singled out this one female pollster when so many male pollsters got it just as wrong? I think it is typical of what Somerby does, and another reason why some voters couldn't imagine Harris as a viable presidential choice.
Note that Somerby is not telling us who he voted for. I'll bet, in the secrecy of the voting booth, Somerby voted for Trump, because in his heart Somerby is a bro and bitches be lyin', and Trump was unfairly convicted because Stormy is a grifter (according to Somerby). And if you cannot trust Somerby to tell the truth about his vote, you cannot trust anything else he says here, even about pollsters and Trump's margin of victory in a very strange election, manipulating partly by the NY Times and billionaire donors (on both sides), not to mention Russia. But Somerby wishes to pretend the polls were problematic and not the election they were measuring. And the con continues.
ReplyDelete"What was the matter with Iowa?"
Democrat pollsters are liars.
This has been another installment of simple answers to simple questions.
Somerby says that to be a liar, one has to know the truth and deliberately say something else. Did Selzer know Harris wasn't going to win Iowa? I doubt it. But isn't it a lot more fun to call people names?
DeleteWhy would someone tell a pollster they were going to vote for Harris, and then vote for Trump instead? Perhaps those last-minute ads by Harris reminded women that their husbands would beat the shit out of them if they dared to vote for Harris? Or maybe their husbands just grabbed the mail in ballots and filled in both of them themselves? Or maybe they grabbed their wife's ballot and tore it up, resulting in unexpectedly decreased turnout.
Sometimes there are simple answers to simple questions.
As Somerby says, anything is possible. That's why we need investigation to know what happened. The purpose of research is to eliminate alternative explanations for what happened. Somerby thinks the polling was flawed. Is that likely? I think there are other explanations that need to be explored before concluding that experts don't know how to do their jobs.
DeleteSomerby has no faith in experts, so he leaps to his favorite, preferred conclusion, that pollsters don't know how to poll. Time will tell us what happened, but it won't be as easy as calling the pollsters liars when they don't predict an election result (especially when their job is to measure attitudes, not to predict).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenpastis/2024/11/04/presidential-polls-might-be-saving-face-in-final-election-sprint-heres-why-they-might-be-wrong/
Delete"Somerby thinks the polling was flawed. Is that likely? I think there are other explanations that need to be explored before concluding that experts don't know how to do their jobs."
DeleteHold on there, expert-lover.
For starters, this is the third presidential election in a row where the polls have under-predicted Trump's performance.
But as a larger, logical matter: if a poll predicts result A and the actual result turns out to be far away from result A, what other explanation is there other than the poll was wrong?
Is it reality's job to conform to the experts' expert expectations?
I'm not defending the poll. It was clearly wrong. I am suggesting that there may be other explanations for the deviance of the results from the poll than the one Somerby is implying here. I thought that was pretty clear from what I said.
Delete"What was the matter with Iowa?"
ReplyDeleteSomerby is riffing on a book title by Thomas Frank, "What's the Matter with Kansas?". That book asked why so many voters in Kansas voted against their objective self-interest. That would be a very apt question for Somerby to have focused on this time, except he is more interested in chiding Selzer (because she suggested Harris might win).
As usual, Somerby borrows the phrase without mentioning where it came from, as if he thought it up himself. It was original when Frank said it, but is derivative when Somerby does, especially without relating anything in his essay back to the focus of the original book, an important examination of populism.
"Somerby borrows the phrase without mentioning where it came from"
DeleteHe might assume his audience is bright enough to know where he got the phrase and if not, knows it isn't such a big deal in any case.
But I guess with you he's asking more from the reader than you're able to give.
Respecting the creative effort of other people is important to those who did the creating. It doesn't matter how clever people feel when they "get" one of his allusions.
DeleteThe title of Frank's book is based on an essay written in 1896 by William Allen White called "What's the Matter with Kansas?”, which you would know if you had read it.
DeleteYou are undoubtedly equally ignorant about his book "Listen Liberal". I **really** recommend you read it!
From Frank: "I decided to take on the second biggest political question of them all: Why has American liberalism been so singularly unsuccessful at halting the deterioration of the middle class?
The result was Listen, Liberal: a history of American liberalism that seeks to explain the Democratic Party’s weird indifference to out-of-control inequality. The answer wasn’t lack of opportunity: Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-seven years, and yet the decline of middle-class power has only accelerated. Wall Street got its bailouts, wages still went nowhere, and the free-trade deals just kept coming.
My answer was that the Democrats aren’t who we think they are. Once, perhaps, they were the wide-awake guardians of blue-collar prosperity, but today they understand themselves differently. They are a party of the professional class—a.k.a. the “learning class” or the “creative class”—and they are infatuated with the idea of a post-ideological society in which competence is all that matters. The prosperous white-collar industries whose worldview the Dems reflect so faithfully don’t really have a problem with inequality. Indeed, in the rich suburbs and affluent college towns that are today the party’s stronghold, it is taken for granted that wealth is the rightful reward of a good education."
The only reason Trump hates the wealthy is because he couldn't make it as a businessman.
DeleteThese assertions were controversial when the book came out. Somerby is not alluding to anything said in that book because he hasn't read it either. He thinks his title is clever because he can stick the name Iowa in it and sound astute, but none of the ideas translate to or apply to his topic today.
DeleteI appreciate your summary, but it misses the point. For one thing, Iowa is not Kansas and does not have the same political history. For another, Somerby's complaint is not about populism but about respect for expertise. Somerby attempts to discuss sampling margins of error (as if he understood what that means) not fundamental mistakes in explaining obtained results. If this swing to populism were happening in Iowa, there is no reason whatsoever why it wouldn't have shown up in Selzer's polling. Margin of error has nothing to do with why the polls were wrong (way outside the margin of error). This is a modeling problem and Somerby has no idea how modeling in polls works. But he is happy to climb on any bandwagon that involves beating up on a female pollster.
Like you, Somerby has continually told us that the things Democrats value are unimportant to the right and apparently middle America. But he is wrong to say that Democrats seek some sort of meritocracy based on education or expertise. That is an Ivy league thing (which Somerby is hung up on) but far from either Democratic party or progressive ideals. It is more to be found in Thiel's concept of a technocracy run by tech bros, which is very right wing.
What was activated by Trump's campaign was not any sense that Democrats represent elites or are selling out blue class workers to globalism, but a hierarchy based on sex and race, in which white men with a sense of grievance were promised prosperity by attacking scapegoated immigrants and a return to male dominance over women.
I doubt any of this was as intellectualized as you are making it. I believe that men looked at Trump's projection of masculinity and identified with it, hoping that if they elected Trump again, they too would be alpha males without suntanning their balls. And male Hispanic and black voters seem to have jumped on that bandwagon.
I do not understand why the vote was suppressed in general (low turnout especially for Dems but also for Republicans) or why women didn't come out for Kamala Harris as hoped and expected. Perhaps there was effective voter suppression, roll purging and hurricane interference, or perhaps women were still not mobilized to vote their own ballots. That has nothing to do with Somerby's theme that Democrats are unlikeable because of being too enamored of elitism. Embracing toxic masculinity, as Trump did, is never going to be a Democratic thing. But why didn't women come out to preserve their abortion rights? Your explanation doesn't address that either.
Listen to what Kamala Harris says her campaign was about, then compare it to the negative pictures of Democrats above and in Somerby's essays:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9yFR6mzZ60
This is what leadership is about. Harris knows her workers and volunteers and supporters everywhere are upset and she is providing the words that will help us through this disappointment with the energy to keep trying in the next election cycle. I am proud of her effort.
DeleteCan you imagine Trump giving this kind of speech? Not in a million years. This is why I voted for Harris. I don't know what possible reason Somerby could have had for not actively supporting her, but he should watch her speech and feel ashamed.
DeleteCan anyone imagine Trump demonstrating strength, courage or resolve? Of course not. We, the people, will find those traits in ourselves as we endure the next four years. It is sad that our president doesn't have the courage of the American people, especially those who will be targeted by his hate and incompetence as he goes through the motions of being president again.
DeleteOptimism, truth, faith and service.
DeleteWhere are these in Somerby's or Frank's dark visions? Where are these in Trump's vision for America? These are Democratic values scorned by Trump and Republicans. And this is why we will not give up or stop trying to improve our country, even when it seems like Trump is trying to sabotage everything good that has been achieved up to now.
@7:12 asks “Can you imagine Trump giving this kind of speech?”
DeleteHe gave one last night.
And you consider it comparable in what he said?
DeleteCorby spent an hour and half replying in just this one part of the comment thread. Didn't leave much time to help her grandson with his homework.
DeleteDavid in Cal,
DeleteYou must be temporarily thrilled that Trump's base showed-up, like it was the "Unite the Right march" on Charlottesville.
The leopard, who got David's vote, eating his face in 3...2...1...
DeleteHere is Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog, discussing the ultimate problem with the Harris campaign:
ReplyDelete"
Sixty countries have had female heads of state, but it's starting to seem as if America never will. It's not just the two Democratic women who have lost -- Republicans consistently reject female candidates in presidential primaries. Many of us think Sarah Palin is no longer taken seriously as a Republican leader because she's ignorant, because she talks nonsense, and because she's a tabloid-friendly drama addict -- but how does that make her different from Trump? Palin is Trump with a vagina. He's dominated the last decade of American politics. She's a has-been.
America is full of Christian conservatives who genuinely don't believe women should hold leadership positions. It's also full of young and not-so-young men who feel disgust when women seem powerful or step into what they regard as male spaces. Hire female leads for a remake of a beloved buddy movie and they wail, "You're ruining my childhood!" How do you get an Angela Merkel or a Jacinta Ardern past all that?
In the days before Barack Obama, I assumed that the first Black president and the first female president would be Republicans. Now I don't think I'll live to see a female president. There are too many trad Christians and too many whiny boy-men -- and they just elected the biggest whiny boy-man of them all."
Here is Trump's enemies list, compiled by Alternet and Politico:
ReplyDelete"Who’s on his list? According to Politico, nearly two dozen individuals, largely in the legal and political spectrum, along with dozens of intelligence specialists, and unnamed journalists:
President Joe Biden
Vice President Kamala Harris
Former President Barack Obama
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi
New York Attorney General Letitia James
Manhattan Justice Arthur Engoron
Former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney
Special Counsel Jack Smith
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg
Former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley
Former FBI Director James Comey
Hunter Biden and the rest of the Biden family
Former FBI special agent Peter Strzok
Former FBI attorney Lisa Page
Rep. Adam Schiff (Now Senator-elect Schiff)
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg
Former Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Mark Pomerantz
Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen
U.S. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd
Rep. Jamaal Bowman
51 intelligence professionals who signed letter about Hunter Biden laptop
Members of the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack
Unspecified people engaged in election fraud
POLITICO reporters, editors and publisher
It’s not just Politico.
Trump has often called the mainstream media, the “enemy of the people.”
In his victory speech early Wednesday morning, Trump referred to the press as, “the enemy camp,” according to The Guardian.
“Introducing his running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, Trump said: “I told JD to go into the enemy camp. He just goes: OK. Which one? CNN? MSNBC? He’s like the only guy who looks forward to going on, and then just absolutely obliterates them.”
Somerby, are you happy that you helped to elect a president who will use the power of the presidency to persecute political opponents (and people just doing their jobs too)?
"Do Campaigns Even Matter?
ReplyDeleteNovember 6, 2024 at 3:22 pm EST By Taegan Goddard [Political Wire]
Seth Masket: “This is a fair question. Kamala Harris ran, to my mind, a nearly flawless campaign. It was absurdly well resourced, had a sophisticated turnout organization, and included some very incisive and creative advertisements. She decimated her opponent in their one debate, headlined a well-orchestrated and well-received convention, picked an engaging running mate, and hit all the right themes in her speeches and interviews.”
“Trump, by contrast, ran a sloppy, undisciplined campaign, was massively outspent, and it didn’t seem to matter.”
“You may disagree with some of the above characterizations, but I’m hard pressed to name something Harris should have done differently that obviously would have helped her. That doesn’t mean the campaigns had no effect; she might have lost by more if not for the $1 billion-plus she managed to raise and spend. But it’s hard to see a whole lot of minds being changed here.”
“ Somerby, are you happy that you helped to elect a president who will use the power of the presidency to persecute political opponents (and people just doing their jobs too)?”
ReplyDeleteHere’s the nitty hitting the gritty. All the vaunted sadness, disappointment, and grief put into service as a shot at Bob. Let’s not forget the job description, eh, anonymouse 4:19pm.
Somerby could have supported Harris but he didn't. It is as much on him, as on anyone else who failed to step up and thereby gave Trump another term.
DeleteI fear you may vastly overestimate both the reach and the influence of Our Host's little project here. I'm not at all certain that anything written here could have made up Harris's deficit.
DeleteNo, but he didn't even try. Many of us worked our butts off to prevent this from happening while Somerby lied and mocked our efforts.
DeleteI don't know if Bob has a set time when he plans to stop blogging or if he wants to do it till he kicks out completely, but I know anonymices will never be successful in turning him into the online version of aligned cable news programming. He’ll never be Maddow or Sean Hannity.
DeleteEven Maddow is not Sean Hannity, thank God.
DeleteSoros-financed orgs should've offered Somerby more money. If they did, Comma-la-la and Corby would've been joyful now, instead of being saddened.
DeletePutin's bitch won.
DeleteSoros?
DeleteIsn't he one of the Jews that "fine people" on the Right who marched at the "Unite the Right march" in Charlottesville said wouldn't replace them?
This is why tech billionaires have bought Trump and expect to use him as their puppet to create their own vision of society:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.thenerdreich.com/trumps-weird-freedom-cities-and-the-network-state-cult/
This is the brainchild of Peter Thiel who operates the handpuppet JD Vance. When Trump becomes too old to pretend to govern, this is what they expect to put into place as "Freedom Cities," which are sovereign states independent of the US government and its regulations, designed to implement
implement both tech that is currently out-of-bounds (such as genetic experimentation) and non-democratic forms of social control, on land donated by Trump's government to these billionaires who will operate them without oversight.
DeleteI'm glad Trump won. I have no particular attachment to Democrats or Republicans and would have lived easily with either outcome but the nightly insane asylum of MSNBC seems to have infected an entire generation with some kind of coping disorder. It started with Hillary Clinton's surprise defeat. These people appeared to believe she was entitled to the position and Trump's unique personality set their rage off even more. It never relented from there and I for one am happy that the American voter did something that will hopefully shut them up for a while. As offensive as some of Trump's comments have been, he has nothing on the unhinged ravings of his critics.
ReplyDeleteBetter trolling please.
Delete6:43,
DeleteOf Trump's many bankruptcies, which is your favorite, and why?
Notice that there is no widespread concern tonight about political violence arising from the left due to this election's outcome. That should tell you everything you need to know about the differences between the left and the right in our country.
ReplyDeleteThat's weird. Democrats refusing to take to the streets after the election of a Nazi.
DeleteDems are not snowflakes like Repubs. Now that they have lost to Trump in a landslide, Dems will get on with the business of limiting the harm Trump and his cronies do to society and focus on winning in the next round. Dems are more focused on campaigning in a way that actually motivates their voters - see the elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022 as case studies. This year's landslide victory by Trump was a mere aberration. There was no indication Trump would win in a landslide but he did. He won the popular vote by over 4 million votes. Notably, polls indicated Harris would win both the popular vote and the electoral college. But she didn't. Trump won both the popular vote and the electoral college in a landslide. A+ polls had been adjusted from the errors of 2016 and the more slight errors of 2020, so it was thought they would likely be more accurate but they were not. They were way off and didn't predict the landslide loss Dems suffered.
ReplyDeleteNothing in the universe is certain, everything is on a spectrum and comes down to probabilities (wave functions etc); a key way to survive is to develop coping skills to deal with uncertainties so that you are not trapped by constantly needing external reassurances. This is why Dems have developed "good" coping skills and can deal with the Trump landslide victory and overwhelming loss of the popular vote that just happened.
🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽
Two more middle fingers and you’ll be the Hannibal Lecter of coping skills, anonymouse 8:01pm.
DeleteOf everything I’ve read after last night’s bloodbath, “Democrats have developed coping skills” has to be the most hilarious.
DeleteYes, it is so funny ha ha ha ha.
DeleteIs Trump Fredo? Or is it Vance?
DeleteHa ha ha, all a big joke
DeleteAnonymouse 10:05pm, Democrats have such healthy coping skills that people now lie like rugs to pollsters for fear of being potential targets of their coping skills.
DeletePutin has the Republican Party in his pocket.
DeleteTrump, in his debate against Biden: “I will have [the Ukraine] war settled between Putin and Zelenskyy as president-elect before I take office on January 20th. I’ll have that war settled.”
ReplyDeleteThat's wonderful news! The war will end in less than 75 days!
Unless it doesn't.
Yes, the war between two camps of Russians on the other side of earth is the most important thing ever.
DeleteTo us the Quakers. Because we the Quakers are morons.
If Putin says there is no connection between high grocery prices and deporting immigrants who work in out agricultural industry, who are we to question him?
DeleteTo the 20-odd-million voters who decided to sit this one out, here's a big, fat fuck you!
ReplyDeleteit's a lot more than 20 mil. nearly half of americans who are eligible to vote, don't
Deletecompared to 2020
DeleteHow can polling methods and analysis be improved to better account for unpredictable Block Blast elements like last-minute voter decisions or non-responses?
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteI am a Republican who voted for Kamala, because I read Democrat media.
Turns out I was the only one reading the Democrat media.
Putin's idea of having Trump mime an act of fellatio on a microphone stand swung the election.
ReplyDeleteTurns out reality is no match for the feelings of the electorate.
ReplyDeleteOver 50% of the voters chose a guy who gave corporations a HUGE tax break in 2017.
ReplyDeleteLet's make sure we factor that in when we're told it was the struggle of everyday people economically that gave the Presidency to Trump.
You all killed Peanut. Nuff said.
DeleteTruer than making it about economics.
DeleteAND Fred.
Delete