315 points

Vote every time. Polls mean nothing. Vote.

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76 points

Yep. Polls are getting less reliable anyway, because so many of them rely on landlines, and some segments of the population are less likely to respond to surveys than others.

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29 points

Which is telling, because the land line polls tend to over inflate Conservative voices, and it still has Trump losing in a landslide.

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27 points
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Deleted by creator
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12 points

Overinflating conservatism in the US is par for the course. See: the three-fifths compromise and the electoral college.

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7 points

The polls showed him losing solidly to Clinton right up until he won though… The numbers are looking worse this time, but still.

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2 points

This actually kind of sucks because then if/when the votes don’t look close to how they expect according to polls they automatically assume something fishy happened.

And yes, I realize many will think that regardless.

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2 points

Polls have evolved since then you know.

I’m not saying they are perfect, but they understand, generally, that landlines aren’t key anymore. It’s literally their job.

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7 points

From the article:

Interviews were conducted in English, and included 319 live landline telephone interviews, 480 live cell phone interviews, and 111 online surveys via a cell phone text

But you are right on polls not really meaning that much. Especially over a year away.

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5 points

Also, you have to take into account the weirdos who answer unknown numbers on their cell phones

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59 points

Also, national polls mean nothing. We don’t have a national election.

Trump lost in 2016 by 2.1%, he became President by winning in WI, MI and PA. 2 states Clinton failed to campaign in and a 3rd she alienated.

The total number of votes that elected Trump were just 22,748 in WI, 10,704 in MI and 44,292 in PA.

77,744 people made Trump a President. The rest of us knew better.

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7 points

Trump became president because the Russian state interfered in our elections. Full stop.

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0 points

Also true, but it wouldn’t have happened if Clinton had actually campaigned in states she took for granted and didn’t say stupid shit about coal.

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6 points

I agree except for that last point

77,744 people made Trump a President. The rest of us knew better.

Sorry but that’s not how math works. 63 million people made trump president, and only 66 million of us knew better. That huge number of trump voters is the horrible reality of American politics weve had to come to terms with. Luckily some of the trump supporters learned from their mistake, but there’s still millions of them out there, not <100k

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4 points

Millions out there, countered by millions of Democratic voters, and over votes on both sides in states like Texas and California.

It was the 77K in those three states that threw it to Trump, and note, in 2020, Biden did not repeat Clinton’s mistake.

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-1 points

I don’t think YOU understand statistics, lmao

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1 point

I mean, pollsters actually do account for how elections work in their models. There are all sorts of actual reasons polls have failed to be reliable lately, but if you think it’s because they just count total responses across the country, that isn’t the case.

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7 points

Not really, case in point is this very poll:

“In the national survey of 910 voters, 47% of voters said they would definitely or probably support Biden, while just 40% said they would back Trump.”

Which is meaningless, because unless 47% of voters flip the correct states, it won’t matter how much Biden wins.

Remember, Clinton won the popular vote. Gore won the popular vote AND Florida. It didn’t matter.

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0 points

Serious question, which state she alienated and how?

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5 points
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Pennsylvania. She gave a speech in neighboring Ohio where she said:

“We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

That echoed through coal country, and while nobody expected her to win states like West Virginia, it absolutely killed her in PA.

https://www.npr.org/2016/05/03/476485650/fact-check-hillary-clinton-and-coal-jobs

https://pagop.org/2015/08/03/clinton-pledges-to-continue-the-war-on-coal/

It was a self inflicted injury, which was so, so avoidable.

She COULD have rolled it into a victory like this:

“I’m going to tell you something right now that not a lot of people know… my great grandfather was a coal miner in Durham, England. Moved to Scranton with his six kids dreaming of a better life for all of them. I’d like to see a better life for your fathers, brothers, and sons that doesn’t involve risking their lives underground for a few scraps of coal that they’ll never share in the profits on.”

True story: https://www.palatinate.org.uk/hillary-clinton’s-great-grandfather-was-a-durham-miner-says-local-historian/

Instead? “Imma put a bunch of you out of work. U mad bro? LOL.”

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8 points

Absolutely! If polls were deciding the outcome, Hilary would win in 2016.

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9 points

Only twice in three elections. This means Trump had a one third chance to win that election. Which, sadly, he did.

If the weather forecast says 30% chance of rain and it rains do you question the validity of the forecast or do you think “I guess I ended up getting some of that rain”?

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99 points

After 2016, anyone who believes in polls is a fool.

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26 points

Believing is one thing. Anyone who changes their behavior because of polls, I wanna meet this fucking idiot and find out what’s going on in that dumb brain

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8 points

The 2016 polls were not inaccurate though. They said Trump had a small chance at victory, and he pulled it off. They never said it was impossible, they just said smart money was on Hillary.

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5 points

Ya, if I remember right FiveThirtyEight had Trump at around 30% chance in 2016, so slightly unlikely but not exactly a crazy longshot.

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2 points

They were one of the few that gave him that large of a margin, iirc. The rest were in the 90’s for Hillary.

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1 point
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The national polling was also pretty accurate, it was the state polling that missed. Trump squeezed out wins in 4 states by a combined total of 50,000 votes. Nationally though the numbers were within their prediction.

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6 points
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Vote now on your phones!

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57 points
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Literally nobody wants conservative garbage in office. The party of liars and frauds always defanging enforcement of laws and regulations and everyone knows because we have been talking about it since that Liar War George WMD Bush and housing crash that he did.

Every chance we had at reigning in the psychopathic elites was thwarted by the Conservatives ONLY.

The white dudes sold half of my generation to a liar war and the other half to crippling debt. So we voted in a black man and they revolted by selling out to foreign enemies to steal an election because they got caught stealing 2000 with the Brooks Brothers Riot.

The party of garbage is being taken out and the midterms show it. Polls are garbage and we don’t answer them because we want them to look like assholes like we did during the mid terms AND 2024.

What’s their plan? Ruin our lines of communication from now until 2024 by buying and destroying media in a way that looks like incompetence.

They might go and get crazy and attack the country again OR start pretending they’re Democrats - they already do.

Look at Ron ShitSandwich. Total incompetent shit bag. And he’s only 44. Plenty of time to get worse.

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2 points

Fucking PREACH!

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-63 points

And then you woke up

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41 points

The only reason conservatives win anything is because of lines on a fucking map. No one likes that shit

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18 points

Oof. Almost every institution of politics in America allows them to rule the country as a minority party.

Think about how there are two senators for every state. So tens of millions of people in California get the same political representation as the like one million in Nebraska.

The Supreme Court was designed so that the institution was buffered from political winds. A bunch of conservatives can interpret the Constitution however they want with no political repercussions as a consequence.

States have a lot of leeway in deciding how to conduct elections. That’s why they can have single ballot box at a single location in a district with millions of voters. And they do that and say the elections are fair.

Conservatives have advantages all over the place.

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-41 points

Both parties are gerrymandering as much as they can get away with. If you meant the electoral college that’s part of being a federation of states, sorry. Changing the rules to benefit your team is not exactly fair either, right?

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47 points

remember that the trump campaign spent money convincing people to stay home in 2016. their two messages were “clinton’s got this in the bag, your vote doesn’t matter” and “trump and clinton are basically the same anyway”. vote early and vote often, nothing is sure until after the post-election terrorism has died down.

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38 points

Literally no polls matter outside of election season, people lie to them, often for protest or primary reasons. Plenty of fascists want desantis because he’s a much bigger monster.

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5 points

I’m just assuming Trump will win at this point, psychologically prepare myself for the absolute worst outcome currently plausible

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