So, in the latest case of liberal cope that I've seen regarding the poll numbers the second things turn south for the left, a common narrative I'm seeing is that republican polling firms associated with Trump are poll bombing the averages. Now, in 2020, I did believe this to be the case. And I even removed several polling firms from RCP's averages in order to get a clearer picture of what's going on. And that's why I had an 88% chance Biden was gonna win, rather than a 62% chance. And I wasn't even close. And long story short, don't mess with the polling averages, that can make you more off than you'd otherwise be.
But...let's say we did it again. Let's say I went through the polling averages RCP has in the 7 states, removed offending firms like Trafalgar, Insider Advantage, Center for American greatness, etc, and I recalculated the averages, what would my forecast look like?
....and nothing of significant value has changed. Outside of the rust belt, the effects are completely negligible and things moved 0.1% at most. In the rust belt, MI and WI shifted leftward by 0.3%, with PA being the only state that flipped and saw any significant difference at all at 0.7%. None of these shifts fundamentally altered the state of the race. My overall forecast remains largely unchanged at 45-55 in Trump's favor, although PA did shift back to the blue column.
Either way, none of these differences make or break the forecast. They really are simply the matter of a rounding error in a lot of cases, and don't greatly affect the averages.
I mean, for reference, PA is currently at a 49% chance in my official forecast, it's 56% here. Both are functionally coin flips. WI shifts from a 53% chance to a 56% chance. MI shifts from a 41% chance to a 44% chance for Harris. None of these are ground breaking.
So, let's dispense with this narrative that Harris is only declining because republicans are bombarding the averages. They are, but they are mostly doing relatively decent polling and removing them isn't massively shifting the race. Many of the biggest blows to Harris's polling averages come from relatively unbiased pollsters with outliers that swing hard Trump. Nevada had a poll from the Wall Street Journal that was Trump +6. It is almost single handedly responsible for shifting it from being a D+1 state to being an R+<1 state. Michigan had a R+4 poll from Quinnipiac that tanked Harris's average there. PA is the only state where several R leaning pollsters published several R leaning results that could affect the lean of the state. And even then most of the most recent polls are only R+1 or R+2, they're kind of in line with the average and aren't shifting it THAT much.
The fact is, Harris is just declining. And this is a numerical fact. I know dems seemingly like to cope and bury their heads in the sand whenever the democrats start to lose. I mean, remember the mass delusion over Biden's chances? Yeah. Dems really dont like to admit that they're losing or something is wrong with their candidate or strategy. And they need to stop that crap.
No, something is going wrong here. Maybe it's just a temporary shift, or maybe as we enter the final month of campaigning, Harris's momentum is falling apart. Denying reality isn't gonna help us. We need to address the problem head on and fix it. I don't want trump to win either, but I also don't lie in my forecasts. I keep it real and follow the data. And on that data, who knows how reliable it is. It could be underestimating trump again. It could be underestimating harris in overcompensating for the flaws of 2016 and 2020. Or it could be dead on. We won't know until election day. And to be real, Harris still has a good chance. It's 45%. While I'd rather be trump right now with the current numbers, again, anything less than 60-40 is a coin flip. The race is still a toss up. it's just a trump leaning one rather than a Harris leaning one.
No comments:
Post a Comment