Polling guru Nate Silver and his election prediction model gave Donald Trump a 63.8% chance of winning the electoral college in an update to his latest election forecast on Sunday, after a NYT-Siena College poll found Donald Trump leading Vice President Kamala Harris by 1 percentage point.
He’s just a guy analizing the polls. The source is Fox News. He mentions in the article that tomorrow’s debate could make that poll not matter.
Should you trust Nate or polls? They’re fun but… Who is answering these polls? Who wants to answer them before even October?
So yeah take it seriously that a poll found that a lot of support for Trump exists. But it’s just a moment of time for whoever they polled. Tomorrow’s response will be a much better indication of any momentum.
The key to doing statistics well is to make sure you aren’t changing the results with any bias. This means enough samples, a good selection of samples, and weighing the outcome correctly. Even honest polling in pre-election is hard to get right, and because of that it’s easy to make things lean towards results if you want to get certain results, or or getting paid to get those results.
There’s only one poll that matters, and that poll should include as large of a sample as possible, and be counted correctly. Even though some will try to prevent that from happening.
It just seems strange because I don’t think that many people are on the fence. Perhaps I’m crazy, but I feel most people know exactly who they’re voting for already. Makes me wonder how valid this cross-section was that was used as the sample set. If it accurately represents the US, including undecided voters, then… 😮
The issue isn’t really people on the fence for Trump or Harris but mainly with generating turnout. After Biden’s poor debate performance, people didn’t change their mind and decide to vote for Trump, they became apathetic and maybe wouldn’t show up to vote.
Harris doesn’t need to persuade people to abandon Trump, she needs to get people excited to show up to vote.
I listen to those news things that interview people on the street and I’m amazed at how many are uninformed and can go either way.
There’s a Trump undercount in polling: Trump voters don’t trust “MSM” and therefore don’t answer calls from pollsters, or are embarrassed to admit they will vote for him.
Same goes for asking random people on the street.
