Quote:
Originally Posted by Damien
Really nobody knows now. There are so many narratives you can spin either way about who's going to win. The polling is 50/50 and there is a strong suspicion all the pollsters are 'herding', i.e putting their thumbs on the scale to match each other so they're not out on a limb, which means we could see a surprise on the election night where one candidate was doing quite well but we just didn't have the polls to show us that.
You can easily see Trump or Harris winning quite easily and it not being even close. It's a recipe for disaster actually because the polls have primed people to expect a razor thin election so if one of them does win easily then the conspiracies will be out.
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I actually can’t see Trump winning easily. He has his fired-up MAGA base who will turn up and clap and hoot like performing seals regardless of what he says or does, but I can’t see there being enough dumb people in America to give him a complete and utter free pass to be the rapey mysoginist con man he freely shows himself to be at every opportunity.
And, I can’t stress this enough, he really, really, really neither looks nor sounds like he thinks he’s winning, whereas Laughin’ Kamala so clearly thinks she is.
*If* Trump wins, it will be on a knife edge (i.e. the polls were near-enough correct). But as you’ve observed, there is ample evidence of pollsters correcting so as to avoid being the outlier, making it look as if it could go either way on a knife edge while in fact there’s ample evidence that Harris is romping away with it.
The Salzer poll in Iowa has a cast iron reputation and she has just returned a +3 for Harris. At this stage in 2016 she gave Trump +7 against Clinton; trump took the state with an 9.4 %age point margin. In 2020, she gave Trump a +7-point poll lead over Biden; Trump’s winning margin was 8.2%age points. Further back, her poll gave Obama a +5 point lead in 2012; he won Iowa with a 5.6 percentage-point lead.
Ann Selzer has now given Harris a +3 point lead over Trump. Even allowing for the margin of error (3.4 points) for Harris to come close in Iowa is enough of a hint at how well she is likely to be doing everywhere she needs to do well in order to win convincingly.
The likely reason for Harris doing so well - and, to be charitable to the main nationwide pollsters who I believe are getting it catastrophically wrong - is that the overturning of Roe v Wade, which Trump enthusiastically owns as his sop to the evangelical right, has triggered a lot of women who don’t want state legislatures telling them what they can and can’t do with their bodies. An unusually high female turnout is bad news for Trump and pollsters whose models don’t adequately allow for it.
https://www.newsweek.com/who-ann-sel...harris-1979294