So I hope I don’t come off as too aggressive or anything here, I just want to combat as much of the classic Reddit misinformation while this space is still small

the huge number of independents is everyone saying that they don’t want to be pigeon holed into anything online

That isn’t how a Gallup poll works. It’s a randomized phone survey with elected participation. Now obviously there’s inherent self-selection bias with any such survey, but it’s still at least an indicator of trends. This type of poll is the best for assessing party sentiment, which is what the subject of the article is about and what my original comment was addressing.

We’ll never know how many Rs we’ve lost to the pandemic either

I don’t understand why people started thinking this? States may have done a bad job reporting cause of deaths, but the death still gets reported. Like… do people think there are a ton of unmarked graves in Florida or something?

Excess deaths modeling over 2020-22 means it’s pretty easy to figure out how many people died in the pandemic. Whether those people were R voters can be reasonably predicted from county/demographic makeup, such as this study here..

But to your point, if all we care about is who votes for whom in 2024, we can just survey that too. And surveys from basically every site, R or D funded, have the race at a dead heat with Biden only slightly edging out Trump.. Now as we learned in 2016, polls can be very, very wrong, but they’re really all we’ve got at this juncture.

Again, hope you don’t read this as aggressive, I just want people to be better informed and stop listening to blog posts like they’re legitimate truths.