A year away from Election Day 2024, former President Donald Trump is set to testify in a civil fraud trial and separately faces more than 90 criminal charges, setting up the possibility that a convicted felon tops the Republican ticket next November.
But it’s President Joe Biden’s political prospects that are plunging.
In another extraordinary twist to a 2024 campaign season that is more notable for court hearings than treks through early voting states, Trump is expected to be called to the witness stand in New York on Monday. This is hardly typical activity during a post-presidency. But Trump was, after all, the most unconventional president.
Still talking about the Hillary polls?
The polls correctly predicted a high likelihood of her winning the popular vote. It’s not the fault of the polls that the actual decider is an anti-democratic and unpollable system that disproportionately favors empty land over people.
There were several models from sources like 538 that took the electoral map into account and still got it wrong. People didn’t admit their cult membership back then, today they are afraid to hide it.
538 said Trump had about a 30% chance of winning.
In what way did they “get it wrong?”
That’s partly true. 538 in particular has a tendency to be overly sure of itself and too cute by half.
A lot of what they do includes much more educated guesswork than actual polling, though, so “538 got it wrong” ≠ “the concept of polling got it wrong”
I think you’re mistaken about “getting it wrong” here. If a statistician says “Candidate A has a 99 % chance of winning”, and the candidate loses, that doesn’t mean the statistician was wrong, just that the improbable happened. If you have a repeatable experiment you can do the experiment many times to see if Candidate A wins 99% of the time, if they don’t then the statistician is wrong.
Problem is: We can’t do multiple, uncorrelated elections to test, so we can’t ever disprove the statistician. What we can do, is look at a bunch of prior elections, the predictions made, and see if we prefer trusting the statistician over not trusting them.
I think if you look at a bunch of election results and predictions, and take confidence margins into account, that you’ll find the statisticians are more often right than wrong. But you need to interpret the statistical predictions correctly.
Point taken.
so you agree the polls were wrong and inaccurate
No. They correctly and accurately measured likelihood of winning the popular vote.
That people misinterpret them doesn’t make the polls wrong, it makes the people misinterpreting them wrong.
Its a lot easier to be wrong when you cant factor in things like cheating… you might want to take note that trump has been indicted for cheating in 2016 by Bragg, thats not something polls could have known or could have factored in. And the hush money case is just one we know about, I assume he and the repug cheated on all sorts of levels to get trump in, again none of those factors can be predicted accurately.
AND being WRONG about something is not the same as ‘The Polsters were Lying in 2016’ which is what the far right constantly asserts without proof. Polls are not lies just because they got one wrong once time, this is the main problem with all right wing thought, they cannot tell the difference between MSNBC getting something wrong once 12 years ago, and the proven in court fact that FAUX 'News" Lying right to their faces on a nightly basis.