2020 Election Analysis

[Skinypupy]

Thought this was a pretty accurate analysis (thread)

[YellowKing]

Yeah I was thinking along those lines the other day when I was already in pre-worry mode about 2024. I felt a little better when I realized that Biden will be the hard-to-dislodge incumbent at that point and won't be in the same challenger position.

Of course, Biden running for a second term is a mighty big "if." I'm still hopeful, however, that Trump was a unique cult leader and that it will be difficult for anyone to capture conservatives in quite the same way he did even if they do stick with his agenda. If Biden can pull us out of a pandemic and get us back on the path of economic recovery by that point, we should be in a pretty good position.

[Daehawk]

[Little Raven]

[Jaymann]

Here is an excellent analysis of Benford's Law applied to some election results by an actual mathematician. Well worth your time.

[The Meal]

His more-recent take down of Kent County's (Michigan) numbers is also worth watching (as is his book, Humble Pi; and many of his other, more purely mathematical videos).

[Grifman]

“Our political system is unfair. Democrats just need to deal with it”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/opin ... ution.html

[Defiant]

Thread worth reading:

Despite this swing, I was one of just a few Democrats nationally to outperform Biden. Here's why:
1. Focused on the economy
2. Knocked on 23k doors & had convos w 133k ppl via phone & text
3. Invested big in radio, mail, digital & TV
4. And did it all in English AND Spanish (3/8)

As to why she thinks she lost:

There were many factors: a targeted disinformation campaign to Latinos; an electorate desperate to re-open, wracked with fear over the economic consequences; a national party that thinks racial identity is how we vote.

It's not just about socialism. (6/8)

[malchior]

“Our political system is unfair. Democrats just need to deal with it”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/opin ... ution.html

He doesn't address that we just got a first-hand lesson that long-term building this huge coalition he is talking about is untenable. He's not wrong if the situation wasn't worsening. However, it is. Drastically. We very well eventually might fall into authoritarianism before we stabilize it. Oh well I guess.

[noxiousdog]

I think a lot of voters are open to the idea that there are problems and we need to fix them. I think where many voters get scared away is when the fix is presented as something radical. Most people don't want to tear everything down and start over. That's why something like 'defund the police' costs votes. As a battlecry if you're in the trenches fighting the fight, it's brilliant. It's something that can rally more people to your side and increase the power of your protests. It's destructive in elections though.

The challenge for the Democratic party is to make clear to voters what is a Democratic position and what is a grassroots movement. This means risking angering the grassroots movement by distancing yourself from them in certain situations. It might help to remind the grassroots movements that if they insist the party endorse their movement, they will kill the chances to win elections which is ultimately going to render their movement impotent.

Barack Obama doesn't like it either.

[YellowKing]

Totally agree. I think I literally cringed the first time I heard the "Defund the Police" slogan. Worst. Marketing. Ever.

[Remus West]

Totally agree. I think I literally cringed the first time I heard the "Defund the Police" slogan. Worst. Marketing. Ever.

I'm right there with you but isn't that the hallmark of the left? Shitty messaging.

[Little Raven]

I'm right there with you but isn't that the hallmark of the left? Shitty messaging.

It wasn't always.

[Defiant]

But sometimes it was:



Some politicians (FDR, JFK, Clinton, Obama) are just more skilled at communication than most Democrats (although even Obama had a few mistakes here and there.... it might have also been easier in the older days before 24 hour news coverage).

[geezer]

Totally agree. I think I literally cringed the first time I heard the "Defund the Police" slogan. Worst. Marketing. Ever.

I'm right there with you but isn't that the hallmark of the left? Shitty messaging.

Harder message to convey.

[Remus West]

Totally agree. I think I literally cringed the first time I heard the "Defund the Police" slogan. Worst. Marketing. Ever.

I'm right there with you but isn't that the hallmark of the left? Shitty messaging.

Harder message to convey.

I'd argue that it is bad choices regarding which messages to convey. Realize that the electorate is mostly stupid and keep your message simple.

[YellowKing]

I'd also add to make sure your message is clear enough it can't be instantly twisted by your opponent. I mean how did anyone in the Democratic party not think that "defund the police" was going to lead to Republican commercials of empty 911 call centers?

Side note: I think Biden was shrewd enough to know that the slogan was an trap and wisely side stepped it, even though I assume he probably agreed with the sentiment.

[Skinypupy]

An interesting data point.

New York's swing towards Biden at certification means the only states that have shifted *towards* Trump since '16 are:

1. Hawaii +2.7
2. Utah +2.4
3. Florida +2.2
4. California +0.9*
5. Arkansas +0.7
6. Illinois +0.1*

*Not final

[Pyperkub]

Totally agree. I think I literally cringed the first time I heard the "Defund the Police" slogan. Worst. Marketing. Ever.

The interesting thing is that by refusing to pass state, local aid, it's McConnell and the GOP who are *actually* defunding the police.

Don't get me started on "reparations" tho.

[Jaymon]

The trouble with the polls. We all saw it, the polls were off, sometimes way off.
Where was the landslide? the wave, or whatever it was called? Well, I have a suspicion about the answer.

As modern times march on, and the various gens grow up into voting age and beyond, we are seeing a shift.
But its not a shift of who is voting for what, its a shift of, "who is willing to answer the questions of strangers"?

It has been for me more than 20 years since I answered a poll of any sort over the phone. Its also been probably that long since I had a land line. Thats probably not a coincidence.
I don't answer the phone from any sort of stranger, if they did leave a message "call us back and take a poll" I would not do it.
I don't click on polls in my email, is that even a thing? Polling via email?

And I can't even image what sort of garbage response would happen for a facebook poll.

So the polling problem is thus, it only reports results from people who are bothered to answer polls. Which is an increasingly small subset of the population. As opposed to 1960 when nearly anybody with a phone would answer a pollster.


All ya'll , would you take a blind call from an unknown number and provide honest answers about your voting intentions?

[TheMix]

Not a chance.

Edit: I did answer the door a couple of times. They weren't polls though. Just folks stumping. And in every case they were already the people I was voting for. But I might answer questions in person.

[Holman]

The trouble with the polls. We all saw it, the polls were off, sometimes way off.
Where was the landslide? the wave, or whatever it was called? Well, I have a suspicion about the answer.

As modern times march on, and the various gens grow up into voting age and beyond, we are seeing a shift.
But its not a shift of who is voting for what, its a shift of, "who is willing to answer the questions of strangers"?

It has been for me more than 20 years since I answered a poll of any sort over the phone. Its also been probably that long since I had a land line. Thats probably not a coincidence.
I don't answer the phone from any sort of stranger, if they did leave a message "call us back and take a poll" I would not do it.
I don't click on polls in my email, is that even a thing? Polling via email?

And I can't even image what sort of garbage response would happen for a facebook poll.

So the polling problem is thus, it only reports results from people who are bothered to answer polls. Which is an increasingly small subset of the population. As opposed to 1960 when nearly anybody with a phone would answer a pollster.


All ya'll , would you take a blind call from an unknown number and provide honest answers about your voting intentions?

There have already been lots of discussions of this. Here's a good one.

tl;dr:
Polling is harder as people retreat into their media bubbles, but polling in 2020 wasn't bad compared to history: Biden led the polls and Biden won the race. This was the case in most places where the races showed clear tendencies.

Modern polling isn't just pollsters dialing every number in the phone book. They factor in whether particular voters have a strong or spotty history of showing up, whether they have consistent patterns, and even whether they've answered the phone before. There's a lot of a data available, and it's possible to work out suggestive patterns even if lots of people ignore cold calls these days. (Plus, FWIW, Facebook and other online surveys aren't considered at all in serious polling.)

[stessier]

All ya'll , would you take a blind call from an unknown number and provide honest answers about your voting intentions?

Yes. And I did. I felt it was the best way to give The Powers That Be information. I answer all polls truthfully. There was a poll that appeared to be about advertising and went through every hour of every day of the week and asked which programs I watched on NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox. The pollster read off a program and a time slot and I had to say if I'd seen it in the last week. Then they asked about where I buy stuff and what I've purchased recently. It took about 25 minutes and the pollster was so grateful at the end - said I was the first person who took the time to get all the way through it and I was so pleasant as I was doing it. The political ones were much shorter. I used to live in WI, and still get polling calls from there. As soon as I figure out that is where the questions are originating, I make sure to point out the the pollster that I know enough to answer the questions, but I'm not living there and so won't be terribly useful (so I don't waste their time).

I did cold call alumni fund raising for my college when I was attending. I know how hard those calls are to make, so I go out of my way to be pleasant to the people just trying to do their job and get their numbers.

[Isgrimnur]

Polling has changed in twenty years, and even in the last four.

538

Pollsters told us they were now weighting their samples by education, because one key takeaway from 2016 was just how important someone’s level of educational attainment was in predicting their vote. “In mid-2016, we changed our weights by education, moving the percentage of high school or less respondents up while dropping the college-plus down,” said Jeff Horwitt, a senior vice president at Hart Research, one of the pollsters for the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
...
NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls are even weighted by the share of respondents from urban, suburban and rural areas. “This helps to make sure we are fully representing rural Americans,” said Horwitt, adding that it also “removes another factor which can contribute to poll-to-poll variation.”
...
A number of pollsters have also changed the way they recruit respondents to make sure they are reaching every pocket of the population. Courtney Kennedy, Pew Research Center’s director of survey research, explained that Pew has moved away from conducting polls by live phone calls that use random-digit dialing to reach respondents to an address-based approach in which Pew first gets in touch with respondents by snail mail to recruit them. Horwitt also told us that NBC News/Wall Street Journal no longer uses random-digit dialing; instead, they draw their samples from lists of registered voters, which allows them to “calibrate the mix of respondents between Republicans, independents and Democrats on each survey.”

Pollsters that reach respondents by phone are also relying more on cellphones. Some older voters still primarily use a landline, but 96 percent of Americans reported owning a cellphone in 2019, according to Pew Research. So some pollsters like Suffolk University are upping the share of people they reach by cellphone. Suffolk’s Political Research Center director David Paleologos told us, for example, that they have increased the share of their samples contacted by cellphone from 80 percent to 88 percent.

However, calling more cellphones isn’t without its downsides. For starters, it’s expensive, as federal law prevents pollsters from using auto-dialing technology to reach mobile devices. So some pollsters like Cygnal, Public Policy Polling, Emerson College and SurveyUSA also use SMS texting to reach respondents. “We find that younger people, but also men and people in urban areas, would much rather answer a poll by text than be called on the phone,” said Tom Jensen, PPP’s director.

[Kraken]

All ya'll , would you take a blind call from an unknown number and provide honest answers about your voting intentions?

If my phone ever rings and it's not someone in my contacts, it's spam. I keep Do Not Disturb turned on so my phone doesn't vibrate when rejecting such a call.

[Alefroth]

Google call screening works well for that too.