(05-31-2020, 02:11 PM)HarleyDog Wrote: Another good post and true. One might look at the challenges America is facing now and in the future before slapping down your vote on your normal preference. For me, I wish there were two better candidates to choose from, but we are where we are and that sucks.

(05-31-2020, 02:51 PM)HarleyDog Wrote: I think his black support is weakening. No facts, no numbers, just an opinion. And you know better than to trust any polls. Polls are what shocked Hilary fans in 2016.

(05-31-2020, 03:21 PM)oncemoreuntothejimbreech Wrote: Yeah, I'm not crazy about either choice. Once again I'll be voting for the one I dislike the least rather than the one I like the most.

(05-31-2020, 03:29 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: That's false. The polls accurately predicted Clinton's popular vote margin. What was inaccurate was using a national popular vote to presume victory in an electoral college system. 

(05-31-2020, 02:51 PM)HarleyDog Wrote: I think his black support is weakening. No facts, no numbers, just an opinion. And you know better than to trust any polls. Polls are what shocked Hilary fans in 2016.

(05-31-2020, 04:30 PM)samhain Wrote: Yeah, I'm sure it's weakening, too, lol.  Candace Owens is mad, so I'm sure other black folks are following her example.  

I can tell you for an absolute fact that out of the 20-25 black people I interact with on a practically daily basis, that it isn't weakening a bit.  In fact, many of them straight up defended Biden after his statement.  I can think of literally one black dude that I know personally that might even think of voting for Trump, and I'm not even sure about that.  

I can tell you what they do seem to remember pretty well, though, and that's our imbecilic president (and much of this board) calling Kaepernick a son of a ***** to raucous delight among righties like yourself for peacefully protesting police brutality in a way that harmed absolutely no one.  They also seem to notice the hypocritical right telling them that they are a-ok with peaceful protests.  

It's going to take more than old man Biden saying something dumb to get the black community to throw their support behind a dispshit like Trump that basically only got elected because the right was still can-barely-walk butthurt about a black guy being elected president twice.  Trump's platform was basically "America sucks because of uppity brown people".  Four years of that isn't going away after one or two misstatements, lol.

(05-31-2020, 03:42 PM)HarleyDog Wrote: Ok, if you say so.

(05-31-2020, 05:10 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: Clinton received 2% more of the popular vote. National polls measure the popular vote. The RCP average in the weeks leading up to the election was +3% Clinton.

That’s pretty damn accurate. I understand that it’s a meme within conservative alternative information circles to say that polls are inaccurate, but they’re incredibly accurate.

(05-31-2020, 05:20 PM)HarleyDog Wrote: To the best of my knowledge, I remember the polls predicting a much higher percentage to Hillary. And although they varied, I believe they were between 5-8%. If I'm wrong then that's cool. Not worth a debate really?

(05-31-2020, 05:25 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: You are indeed wrong. The data is available. Seeing people erroneously say that polls aren’t accurate is something I always feel the need to fact check.

Quote:Why 2016 election polls missed their mark

[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)]BY ANDREW MERCER, CLAUDIA DEANE AND KYLEY MCGEENEY[/color]

[color=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)]Supporters of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton watch televised coverage of the U.S. presidential election at Comet Tavern in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle on Nov. 8. (Photo by Jason Redmond/AFP/Getty Images)
The results of Tuesday’s presidential election came as a surprise to nearly everyone who had been following the national and state election polling, which consistently projected Hillary Clinton as defeating Donald Trump. Relying largely on opinion polls, election forecasters put Clinton’s chance of winning at anywhere from 70% to as high as 99%, and pegged her as the heavy favorite to win a number of states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that in the end were taken by Trump.
How could the polls have been so wrong about the state of the election?

There is a great deal of speculation but no clear answers as to the cause of the disconnect, but there is one point of agreement: Across the board, polls underestimated Trump’s level of support. With few exceptions, the final round of public polling showed Clinton with a lead of 1 to 7 percentage points in the national popular vote. State-level polling was more variable, but there were few instances where polls overstated Trump’s support.

The fact that so many forecasts were off-target was particularly notable given the increasingly wide variety of methodologies being tested and reported via the mainstream media and other channels. The traditional telephone polls of recent decades are now joined by increasing numbers of high profile, online probability and nonprobability sample surveys, as well as prediction markets, all of which showed similar errors.

Pollsters don’t have a clear diagnosis yet for the misfires, and it will likely be some time before we know for sure what happened. There are, however, several possible explanations for the misstep that many in the polling community will be talking about in upcoming weeks.

One likely culprit is what pollsters refer to as nonresponse bias. This occurs when certain kinds of people systematically do not respond to surveys despite equal opportunity outreach to all parts of the electorate. We know that some groups – including the less educated voters who were a key demographic for Trump on Election Day – are consistently hard for pollsters to reach. It is possible that the frustration and anti-institutional feelings that drove the Trump campaign may also have aligned with an unwillingness to respond to polls. The result would be a strongly pro-Trump segment of the population that simply did not show up in the polls in proportion to their actual share of the population.

Some have also suggested that many of those who were polled simply were not honest about whom they intended to vote for. The idea of so-called “shy Trumpers” suggests that support for Trump was socially undesirable, and that his supporters were unwilling to admit their support to pollsters. This hypothesis is reminiscent of the supposed “Bradley effect,” when Democrat Tom Bradley, the black mayor of Los Angeles, lost the 1982 California gubernatorial election to Republican George Deukmejian despite having been ahead in the polls, supposedly because voters were reluctant to tell interviewers that they were not going to vote for a black candidate.

The “shy Trumper” hypothesis has received a fair amount of attention this year. If this were the case, we would expect to see Trump perform systematically better in online surveys, as research has found that people are less likely to report socially undesirable behavior when they are talking to a live interviewer. Politico and Morning Consult conducted an experiment to see if this was the case, and found that overall, there was little indication of an effect, though they did find some suggestion that college-educated and higher-income voters might have been more likely to support Trump online.

A third possibility involves the way pollsters identify likely voters. Because we can’t know in advance who is actually going to vote, pollsters develop models predicting who is going to vote and what the electorate will look like on Election Day. This is a notoriously difficult task, and small differences in assumptions can produce sizable differences in election predictions. We may find that the voters that pollsters were expecting, particularly in the Midwestern and Rust Belt states that so defied expectations, were not the ones that showed up. Because many traditional likely-voter models incorporate measures of enthusiasm into their calculus, 2016’s distinctly unenthused electorate – at least on the Democratic side – may have also wreaked some havoc with this aspect of measurement.

When the polls failed to accurately predict the British general election in May 2015, it took a blue ribbon panel and more than six months of work before the public had the results of a data-driven, independent inquiry in hand. It may take a similar amount of time to get to the bottom of this election as well. The survey industry’s leading standards association, the American Association for Public Opinion Research, already has an ad hoc committee in place to study the election and report back in May (Pew Research Center’s Director of Survey Research Courtney Kennedy is chairing the committee).

Pollsters are well aware that the profession faces serious challenges that this election has only served to highlight. But this is also a time of extensive experimentation and innovation in the field. The role of polling in a democracy goes far beyond simply predicting the horse race. At its best, polling provides an equal voice to everyone and helps to give expression to the public’s needs and wants in ways that elections may be too blunt to do. That is why restoring polling’s credibility is so important, and why we are committed to helping in the effort to do so.[/color]

(05-31-2020, 06:10 PM)HarleyDog Wrote: Ok, so I followed your advice about the data being available and googled. I seen this, read it, and I guess I may be off by 1% on the high side and even worse on the low side. However, I think it says what I was trying to say. I don't know the website, nor do I know if it leans right or left. I just clicked on it because the title and here it is.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/why-2016-election-polls-missed-their-mark/

(05-31-2020, 06:10 PM)HarleyDog Wrote: Ok, so I followed your advice about the data being available and googled. I seen this, read it, and I guess I may be off by 1% on the high side and even worse on the low side. However, I think it says what I was trying to say. I don't know the website, nor do I know if it leans right or left. I just clicked on it because the title and here it is.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/why-2016-election-polls-missed-their-mark/

(05-31-2020, 07:14 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: Pew notes that they ranged from 1-7%, which is true. What would be incorrect is saying that they were between 5-8%. 

You can go to RCP and look at the final average, which was 3%. That takes into account all of the available polling. Of the last 20 polls, 6 were within the 5-7% range, which means 70% of the polls ranged from -2% to +4%, with the final actual percent being +2%. The majority of the polls were not in the range you stated.

Nate Silver, the biggest figure in modern statistics, breaks it down:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-are-all-right/

What makes people believe the polls were inaccurate is the fact that the election was decided by 4 states with a total of 114k votes between the 4. When you have state polls giving a candidate a 1-2% edge and they lose by 0.1% to 1.2%, that falls within the margin of error. It indicates that the poll was accurate, but anyone interpreting it as guaranteeing a win would have been wrong. As Silver breaks down, the 2016 polls were historically accurate. 

(05-31-2020, 07:31 PM)HarleyDog Wrote: Ok, so I'm right? Then I'm wrong? If you look at my post, it was a "To the best of my knowledge" post. Do you understand why it's hard to have an opinion in here? Geez. But thanks for letting me know I was right for a moment, I will hold onto that part right there and walk away on that specific topic because like I also said, It's really not worth a debate. But if it makes you feel better, I said 5-8% and you said 3. I guess I was outside the range. You win.  :andy:

(06-01-2020, 09:20 AM)GMDino Wrote:

The White House bunker has been used twice in recent history. Once while we were being attacked by foreign terrorist and the second time when #BunkerTrump was afraid of some people protesting and breaking through his entire secret service. This man has no backbone. pic.twitter.com/10cfYkQZJ9

— Datvidalguy (@vida_of_vidal) June 1, 2020

Donald J Trump almost made a career out of saying OTHER people were "losers" who couldn't handle things right. That "only he" could handle everything the right way. And given his moment he was too small for it.

(06-01-2020, 09:36 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: I've got to say, this criticism rubs me the wrong way. There are communities all over this country that are literally on fire because of civil unrest. When there is a demonstration outside of the White House I don't begrudge POTUS for seeking shelter. Situations like that can turn into defecation striking the oscillation in a hurry and as much as I dislike our current president I think it's a smart move. Besides, was it his call or was this the SS?

(06-01-2020, 09:53 AM)GMDino Wrote: The guy who said he'd run into a building to stop an active shooter.  Who calls others cowards.  Who criticizes anyone and everyone for not be "tough" enough.  That guy gets no room from me for going into hiding.  I understand the importance of protecting the POTUS.  But Trump, the "man" deserves every bit of criticism from every angle because of who he is.  You and I both know that SS or not he's hiding out until he can be around his MAGA and then he'll talk tough about how he "unleashed" the National Guard and how the SS was "really tough" and all the other key words to make his minions think he's a tough guy and not just a big mouth in hiding.

He hasn't even addressed the country other than a few tweets.

He's a coward and an unfit leader.

(06-01-2020, 10:59 AM)BmorePat87 Wrote: He is a coward and an unfit leader, and his inability to address the nation without quoting anti Civil Rights slogans from the 60's is an issue.

That said, I don't know if this was actually his call. The optics are absolutely terrible for him because he puts so much stock in appearing tough (even though he isn't), so I am sure he is fuming over this being leaked.

(06-01-2020, 09:36 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: I've got to say, this criticism rubs me the wrong way. There are communities all over this country that are literally on fire because of civil unrest. When there is a demonstration outside of the White House I don't begrudge POTUS for seeking shelter. Situations like that can turn into defecation striking the oscillation in a hurry and as much as I dislike our current president I think it's a smart move. Besides, was it his call or was this the SS?