The polls show Hillary winning pretty easily at this point, and I for one believe them. I have no doubt she will be elected on Nov. 8.
But when you compare rally attendance, yard signs (from multiple accounts in both red or blue states), and internet enthusiam, you would think Trump would win in a landslide.
It looks like there is very little enthusiasm for Hillary, but people are going to pull the trigger for her anyway. Or, as O'Reilly says, where am I going wrong?
All campaigns run their own internal polls, and they use voter files, not random samples. They know what every voter on file is likely to do in every swing state. Every single voter. They likely use public polls to confirm their numbers, but their numbers are likely much more accurate. So if you want to know if public polling is accurate, check out the actions of the campaign. Hillary is sending people into Utah, Arizona and Georgia. She doesn't need any of these states to win. Trump is sending Pence to Utah. That information should tell you something. Recent polling has shown Utah, Arizona and Georgia as very close. The actions of the campaigns seems to confirm that. Trump campaigned a couple of times in Texas, which seemed odd at the time. Recent polling has shown he's only up 3. Their internal polls probably confirmed that.
Also, a good way to check enthusiasm is not crowd size, but higher incidents of new voter registration. 538 recently reported that they have not seen a big swell of new voters on the republican side that would indicate Trump turning out the "hidden white vote". Maybe he will, but the evidence isn't there.
There is also this new report from WaPo of Trump ending major fundraising for the party. These are not the actions of someone who is going to win, or even thinks he's going to win.
Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/10/25/trump-halts-big-money-fundraising-cutting-off-cash-to-the-party/
Losers.
Romney's team did not believe what the polls were telling them, either. There was so much enthusiasm at their rallies!
The polls did not undercount the Trump vote in the primaries. There is no reason to believe they are undercounting it now.
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Trump talked exclusively about polling in the primaries, because they were favorable. Now they are crooked because they show him down.
All this discussion about oversampling and media bias and global conspiracies, for what? For what?
are both true. The mismatch between polls and what people saw comes from the silent majority.
Trump supporter is the most active and passionate group in the election. I think everybody agree with that. That's what people saw in their eyes. For example, Trumps' rallies since 8/1, have total 560,00 people attended. On same period time Hillary's rallies have only total 36,000 people attended and some of them are paid to attend. But, there may be a silent majority. Poll can detect them and find out their voting decisions. So, the explanation for this mismatch is Trump supporters, although active and vocal, are still outnumbered by silent majority and this majority will vote for Hillary.
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The obvious sampling bias in the latest ABC / Washington Post poll showed a 12-point national advantage for hillary. Like many of the recent polls from Reuters, ABC and The Washington Post, this latest poll included a 9-point sampling bias toward registered democrats.
"METHODOLOGY This ABC News poll was conducted by landline and cellular telephone Oct. 20-22, 2016, in English and Spanish, among a random national sample of 874 likely voters. Results have a margin of sampling error of 3.5 points, including the design effect.
Partisan divisions are 36-27-31 percent, democrats - Republicans - Independents."
Of course, while democrats may enjoy a slight registration advantage of a couple of points, it is nowhere near the 9 points reflected in this latest poll.
Meanwhile, with huge variances in preference across demographics one can easily "rig" a poll by over indexing to one group vs. another.
As a quick example, the ABC / WaPo poll found that hillary enjoys a 79-point advantage over Trump with black voters. Therefore, even a small "oversample" of black voters of 5% could swing the overall poll by 3 full points. Moreover, the pollsters don't provide data on the demographic mix of their polls which makes it impossible to "fact check" the bias.
How convenient.
They all make adjustments in their samples to try to make them more reflective of society at large. And they all follow different methodologies - you could have the same poll data show different things, based on how the pollsters tinker with the numbers.
All I am saying is that the reputable pollsters do not tinker to try to juke the stats. They try to get it right.
I know you won't believe this, of course. You probably figure that Soros runs most of our polling. Or the Trilateral Commission.
Zbigniew Brzezinski at the time. Soros is a globalist and has the same agenda...one world government, dissolution of borders, multi-cultularism and the downfall of American nationalism.
In fact the TriComm was outed in the 70s as the the liberal wing of the intellectual elite. That's where Jimmy Carter's whole government came from.
They, in fact, were noted for stipulating that what was needed for this "New World Order" was "more moderation in democracy".
Translation: Turn people back to passivity and obedience so they don't put so many constraints on state power and so on. In particular they were worried about young people. They were concerned about the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young (that's their phrase), meaning schools, universities, church and so on - they're not doing their job, [the young are] not being sufficiently indoctrinated. They're too free to pursue their own initiatives and concerns and you've got to control them better.
You need to do a better job at indoctrination, chris.
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It's always been close. i told you this 4 months ago.
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was so shocked at election night when he realized he lost. A year later, Romney's wife, recalling that night, said she told others at that moment, she felt so sad and so emotional that she probably can't go to stage with Romney to give concession speech. She just can't believe Romney lost election, she's totally unprepared. it is because Romney believed the polls at that time and believed it was competitive race and he had a great chance to win.
There are many kinds of analysis later on 2012 polls. One conclusion is same from them: most polling firms, regardless of their leaning to R or to D, underestimated Mr. Obamas performance in that election.
I added one linked analysis on 2012 polls.
Link: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/which-polls-fared-best-and-worst-in-the-2012-presidential-race/?_r=0
even though he had won the first debate.
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Although, I'm in a college football pool where we pick straight up. The line doesn't usually do very well.
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And you should read your article again. It says that the Romney campaign had polls that showed them behind....the conventional wisdom, which is conventional for a reason, says that they didn't BELIEVE them. They were shocked on election night, and that is not in dispute anywhere.
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BuT I also know that the Clintons & Obama & the DNC will cheat as surely as the sun rises in the East.
I agree that I am also seeing far more Trump yards signs/stickers/etc than with previous GOP candidates.
I think we are seeing two phenomenon in the polling. First, there is the obvious fixing of some polls (polling a disproportionate # of Dems for instance) to bolster the Dems and dishearten the GOP's. This has been shown to affect voter turn out - which is why they do it.
Second, I believe that there is a strong Brexit phenomenon occurring. What conservative in their right mind wants to admit that they are voting for Trump? On the other hand, the liberals have so rationalized all that Hillary does, that they have no shame in admitting they will vote for her, in fact, they are so far gone that they really don't see that their candidate is horrible as well.
It's very close, and you can tell by the extra efforts the Clinton Campaign is making right now that they know it. It's not just them "finishing it out".
State outcomes are highly correlated with one another, so polling errors in one state are likely to be replicated in other, similar states.
In 2012, Obama beat his polling by 2 or 3 percentage points in almost every swing state. The same was true in 1980 when Ronald Reagan won in a landslide instead of the modest lead that polls showed a few days before the election and claimed 489 electoral votes by winning almost every competitive state. You also frequently see this in midterms Republicans beat their polling in almost every key Senate and gubernatorial race in 2014, for example.
Basically, this means that you shouldnt count on states to behave independently of one another, especially if theyre demographically similar. If Clinton loses Pennsylvania despite having a big lead in the polls there, for instance, she might also have problems in Michigan, North Carolina and other swing states. What seems like an impregnable firewall in the Electoral College may begin to collapse.
It won't be as close as any of the last four elections.
Watching you perform mental gymnastics since the conventions to rationalize voting for Trump has been vastly entertaining.
I know you guys prefer to believe your conspiracy narratives, but in the real world the polls are not fixed. Each makes different calculations regarding "likely voters" and they make adjustments to the samples. That is all. The LA Times poll, for instance, is a "tracking" poll, which means it contacts the SAME people every time. Not too many others do that.
Pollsters want to be right. That is how they make their money.
But, as always, explaining stuff to board zealots is a waste of time.
And good luck with the "undercounting" hope-against-hope. I'm sure that'll pay off.
Putin called the Dems bluff and asked for independent outside oversight of the elections.of course this was declined.
Honestly, there may be context there that I don't understand. Just wondering if you saw them. It looked like he wanted polls that oversampled Democrats.
If a campaign is interested in a particular demographic group, say college-educated women, then they will oversample that group in their polling to get a better understanding of trends in that particular group.
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These polls aren't covered by the MSM like the Fox/CNN/ABC/Gallup/Monmouth polls. So yeah you can have someone from the campaign come on TV and say "well our internal polls show different", but those figures aren't added to prediction models and RCP polling averages. They are essentially anecdotes. And a campaign wouldn't need to run a oversampling poll when they could just lie without running any type of poll. Remember polling costs money, Trump has spent 1.8 million on polling so far this cycle, no need to spend money on a fake poll that provides no real benefit.
As kingfish pointed out, there is a reason campaigns oversample, and Trumps campaign manager Conway, who is a pollster, knows this.
Oversampling of one group or another is a danger of any polls. But the goal of all of them is to be accurate.
Link: http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/
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Also:
Its becoming more challenging to conduct polls as response rates decline. The polls performance in the most recent U.S. elections the 2014 midterms and the 2016 presidential primaries was middling. There have also been recent, significant polling errors in democracies elsewhere around the world, such as Israel and the United Kingdom. It may be naive to expect the pinpoint precision we saw in polls of presidential elections from 2000 through 2012
Don't get me wrong. I'm on record as saying that Hillary will win, because I am not so confident that there are millions of people like me that don't answer polls. Maybe there are; maybe there aren't...we will find out soon enough. But, I do think you are painting too simplistic of a picture.
I have a grad school buddy who is a pollster - his shop was the one that asked the question about whether you'd rather vote for Trump, vote for Hillary or have a giant meteor hit the earth. The meteor won, with 53% of respondents.
But he tries damn hard to get the poll to be accurate. And he can explain the different methods others use, but mostly how they all try to do the same thing.
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Also, remember that every poll has a margin of error. I have to question the utility of any poll that quotes an MOE of +/- 5 or greater, and I have noticed plenty of them this cycle.
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Because most polls out there are.
according to this board.
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I tend to think that there are a lot of Trump voters (myself included) who wouldn't dare attend a rally, or put out a sign in their yard, or even tell a phone poll my vote. I've been called for polls a couple dozen times over the past year, but I just tell them I don't give my opinion over the phone. But, I don't think there are enough people like me to sway the end vote in favor of Trump.
I just think, from various conversations and watching the media, that there are far more Americans who are more outraged at "locker room talk" than they are about criminal corruption. That's just the way it is. That is our population right now. It is more important that our president be kind to women than that the president protect the jobs of women or not accept millions in cash from people who persecute women. That is the ultimate in sexism (we need to protect women more than enable them) and hypocrisy, but that is where we are. Hypocrisy and corruption are better than rudeness when it comes to being president.
But, we will all find out soon enough.
Do you honestly believe that is "locker room talk?"
Perhaps I'm weird in that my friends and I have never talked about unwanted finger blasting.
Like you, I don't know anyone that talks like that, and if I did, I would stop hanging out with them. I know the kind of person I want to be, and one of the better ways to be that kind of person is to hang out with people who also want to be that kind of person. Trump is clearly not like that. He's a scumbag. His comments were despicable, and I would probably dislike him greatly if I were ever to meet him personally.
Of course, I also don't know any billionaires on their third model wife, who grew up being used to women saying yes to bumbling, crude proposals/initiations of sexual activity. I'm just a middle class guy used to women saying no to my most skilled proposals. I'm sure he has a history of indulging temptations that I will never encounter. (Harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, and all that.) So, I really can't relate to where he is coming from.
Regardless, I know I would dislike the man. Hillary would be nicer to be around because she would be better are not divulging her darker secrets.
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Sort of like how I still call Democrats "Democrats" instead of brownshirts. I could label things what they are, but then people would get confused.
Mr. Adams suspects Mr. Trump's poll numbers are depressed owing to "shy Trump supporters," who favor him but won't admit it to others because it is socially unacceptable--or perhaps who have decided to vote for Mr. Trump but haven't yet developed a rationalization, so they think of themselves as undecided.
In an indirect way Mr. Adams's experience illustrates the power of social-acceptability bias. In June he formally endorsed Mrs. Clinton, "for my personal safety." It sounds like a put-on, but Mr. Adams insists he's serious: It's "definitely funny," he allows, but "it's only a joke by coincidence."
He notes that detractors "have literally been comparing Trump to Hitler--an actual comparison to Hitler. . . . That is a call for assassination. There's no other way you can [expletive] interpret that. . . . And you've seen how many Trump people have been beaten by crowbars for wearing his shirt, or beaten up [outside a rally] in San Jose, my backyard."
I don't go around advertising my politics. I vote in the Democrat primary usually. I'm considering a donation to a local Democrat as blood on the doorpost.
The left says they are worried about Trump being a dictator, but the violence has been 99% on the left. As to Trump's comments about punching, Biden has made similar comments, but they are ignored. Meanwhile, the LA Times ran an editorial calling for Trump's assassination if he wins. Dems have been firebombing GOP offices. Paid Democrat operatives instigated violence in Chicago, leading Trump to cancel his rally there. They brag about this stuff on hidden cameras. They halt prosecutions of people standing outside of polling places with clubs. They are the ones who declared a journalist to be criminal suspect (merely for doing his job) so they could read his emails...if Trump did that, there would horrible outcry, but Obama actually did it. They are the ones who want to halt free speech. Dictatorship may come, but I see it more on the left than the right. Just look at how the left enables their leaders, covering for them and justifying them? If Trump were elected, he would be undercut by the right at every turn.
Sen. Pocohontas has called for the resignation of SEC Chief Mary Jo White because she refuses to pass a rule that would require companies to disclose their policial donations so the Left can shame them. The worst part about our campaign finance system is that donations are publicly available on the internet. I will not donate to any pols for this reason. It's not worth risking offending a client. Look at Yale and the resignaiton of the two professors. The Left has intimidated the Right into staying silent.
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outraged over his "woman behavior", yet have no issue putting the enabler of her sexual assaulting husband and that predator husband in the WH is stunning.
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Link: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/10/wikileaks-soros-linked-voting-machines-now-used-16-states-rigged-2004-venezuela-elections/
If this is an anecdotal or artificially created experience, then it will stand alone isolated. Let's see how many other reports come out like this.
Link: http://www.infowars.com/report-votes-switched-from-trump-to-hillary-in-texas/