Unlikely to improve. The Biden team is making it clear that they intend to move to the right to get the voters they think they need this election cycle.
Its also pretty clear to any one with eyes that he's not going to find the voters he needs there, but it is what it is.
For context, no incumbent has ever won a second term with an approval of less than 51%.
And no challenger has ever won with an approval rating as bad as Trump's. One way or another a historically unpopular candidate is going to get their second term.
Yeah, I mean, its super interesting in an academic way.
And, you know.. panic inducing in almost every other way.
If Cornell West hadn't clustered the fuck out of his candidacy, we could have been seeing a Green party & Independent coalition representing a viable third party threat this year. The Green party is the only third party that had the infrastructure in place to get onto the ballot in all 50 states. But West screwed the pooch. I think he with Stein as running mate might have actually been able to make it happen, purely based on how hated the two extant candidates are.
So the biggest issue on polling is that it's a broken system. It relies on all people to answer when asked, and what we're seeing is people flat out aren't doing it. Think about it. When's the last time you answered an unknown number, and if that number wasn't something you were expecting (like your car repair person telling you your vehicle was ready) did you stay on the line?
This same kind of thing is popping up when we look at polling for the primaries and then see the actual voter data. They haven't been lining up for a while.
Think back to 2022. The media, for months, was saying there was going to be a red wave election. Polling was supporting this as well. And... they had a measly 5 seat majority.
I think people are putting way too much faith in polling the past few cycles, because something fundamentally changed in how people interact with them.
If you look at the underlying metrics for this election, it shouldn't be anywhere near to being close. Multiple state republican parties are literally bankrupt, the primary demographic of the GOP is dying due to old age, and they are running a convicted felon.
You also have stuff like trump paying for biased polls. Are we really going to think that other people; didn't know about this and are now doing it as well?
It just doesn't make any sense, and of course our corporate owned media flat out refuses to be the 4th wall and be objective in their reporting. It's infuriating.
Approval is not the same as "won't vote for", and even if it was, if enough of the other guy's base won't vote for him an unpopular person can still win. There's nothing incompatible about an unpopular candidate leading in polls. Whoever wins this election will have a net-negative approval rating.
I mean you can still have a low ass approval rating and best an opponent who has an even lower approval rating. Two things can be true at once. People people can dislike Biden, and dislike the other guy more.
Yeah, I was texted the other day to fill out a survey and didn't even reply with the "stop to opt out". Just, leave me alone. I'm not excited for Biden but I'm going to do what I need to do. That won't show in any polls.
Yeah like, most people have shit to do. I'm excited to vote for Biden again actually (he did get a lot of good stuff done with an extremely tight congress), and sure there are things he 100% did that I'm not on board with, but that's everything. You're never going to get 100% of what you want, but he's the closest I'll get so lets do it!
It's just very frustrating how they're framing the race this cycle. They completely ignore trumps many disqualifiers while talking about polling that, by all rights, he's paying for bad results again.
IMHO, I think the bigger issue is that people don’t understand statistics. They see a poll that says Trump has a 25% of winning, then when Trump wins, they think the poll is wrong. That’s not how statistics works.
That means if you held the same close election four times, Trump would win one.
People mock the polls, but I wonder how many of those people actually took a basic GE statistics 101 glass.
For random events, that's true. But we are able to poll people before the event to see how it will turn out. With a big enough sample size, you're able to get pretty close to actual results. After all, the election itself is just one big poll, not a die roll.
I'm not mocking polls here. I'm saying that if you have a sizeable population of people that refuse to participate in them, even if you get to a statistically significant number of people, the poll will be off. trump was also found to have been paying for polls that were slanted towards him to be put out there.
So, if a candidate is using bad polls to flood the zone with bad results, and then on top of that you have a statistically significant number of people who refuse to participate in said polling, your data is corrupted, is it not? This is exactly how people can use statistics to lie to people.
And it’s stressful as hell because they keep shaping the world around them to be worse, too. Canada’s got too many wannabe republicans and it’s starting to really piss me off.