Never heard of this company before. LinkedIn shows five employees, most of whom joined in 2024 and a company founded ding in 2023. Seems pretty unlikely that this group has identified a blowout that all the bigger and far more experienced players refuse to point to - could be wrong, of course, and maybe they've got a brand new model that is best in class, but seems unlikely.
All polls have numerous corrections, as simple random sampling is basically impossible.
The way polls actually work is that they build up the "typical voter" (a graph of race, ethnicity, age, past behaviors, etc. etc.), and then sample those groups, and then add up the numbers at the end. This is the dirty truth about polling, its impossible to get clean data so these "cleanup" steps have substantial room for errors.
Worse: pollsters talk to each other, meaning a lot of them share methodologies. So we're likely to see every pollster make the same mistake in the same direction. Its just the nature of how communication works.
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This blogpost has numerous claims:
1. Senate Race predicts the Presidential race -- It looks like everyone's senate race numbers match up. But the typical media have
2. Independent voters -- I dunno about this one. I can believe its true, but I'm not seeing how they picked out (or the methodology) behind independent voters. I've also witnessed a lot of behavior where my friends tell me they're independent but then suddenly spout off extreme political viewpoints. I don't understand why people like to pretend they're independent, but... if they do that kind of make-believe or pretend to a pollster, the independent vote number will be wrong.
So the argument almost entirely lies on the Senate vs Presidential race numbers. So there-in lies the question. Are we about to see unprescedented levels of split ticket votes, and are they all going to be for Trump for President / Democrat for Senate?
That.... seems unlikely to me. The Senate Race correlation with the Presidential race is a very strong argument to me. At least within my social circle, I cannot imagine anyone voting for a Democrat in the Senate but Trump for President.
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So the blogpost's argument is that we use this new metric (ie: Senate polls) and try to calculate out the correlation to the Presidential race. Its... a new theory but one that I can largely get behind.
I have to imagine that the people are reasonably consistent between Senate Races and Presidential Races with regards to party affiliation.
You're probably right (and I do use the term "probably" in a rigorous way to mean, statistically, when there are 10 pollsters and 1 reports different data, they are statistically less likely to be correct). However: Many would have said the same thing about Nate Silver in 2008 or the minority of pollsters which predicted a Trump win in 2016. The political landscape is in increasingly uncharted waters right now.
No one expects a blowout. If you had expected a blowout, you wouldn’t have changed your infant into nice clean clothes and taken them to the zoo.
Who are these people who predict an electoral landslide for the dems? It feels like they’re trying to set themselves up to be the fivethirtyeight of 2026 and 2028 if they happen to be proven right.
To state the obvious---if nobody was doing the math to get the result that (by certain methodologies) it's a toss-up, we wouldn't know it's a toss-up. Should forecasters stop publishing results as soon as the needle hits 50/50?
Also, FYI, 538 is no longer using Silver's model. He took it with him when he left.
I mean what if it is a toss up? Were we talking about a literal, actual coin flipping, calling it as 50-50 is a better insight than calling it as either heads or tails.
Nate Silver and his team are not at 538 any more, they were kicked out by ABC. He's at Silver Bulletin. You're correct he's saying it's a tossup but he seems to be favoring Trump the last few days. And he's also recently writing about fishiness he's seeing when comparing state vs national measures.
I like the dashboarding more than the analysis lol. I think FL is just a red state now and positing it as anything else smells a little fishy to me. Also, I think there's a thing now where all sorts of analysts know they can get a name out of making one big correct prediction that everyone else got wrong. That's lead to a lot of predictions being made with the intention of being contrarian.
That's not true, the most respected analyst says a blowout is reasonably likely. Nate Silver says that there's a 40% chance of a blowout even though the odds are 50/50.
There are 7 swing states, and Nate Silver says that the odds of all 7 states going to the same candidate is 40%. 25% chance Trump takes all 7, and a 15% chance Harris takes all 7.
Essentially, a broad 2% polling error in either direction means a blowout. What are the chances of a 2% polling erorr? Pretty darn high.
Many of the reasons political polling is tricky are unique to politics, especially the poll-result-as-propaganda thing. I expect the program of only weird people talking to pollsters is universal, though.
There is a small chance of a tie, because of how two states split their electoral votes. If they were both all-in like the other states I don't think there'd be a way to split the swing states to make a tie.
Readit News
The way polls actually work is that they build up the "typical voter" (a graph of race, ethnicity, age, past behaviors, etc. etc.), and then sample those groups, and then add up the numbers at the end. This is the dirty truth about polling, its impossible to get clean data so these "cleanup" steps have substantial room for errors.
Worse: pollsters talk to each other, meaning a lot of them share methodologies. So we're likely to see every pollster make the same mistake in the same direction. Its just the nature of how communication works.
---------
This blogpost has numerous claims:
1. Senate Race predicts the Presidential race -- It looks like everyone's senate race numbers match up. But the typical media have
2. Independent voters -- I dunno about this one. I can believe its true, but I'm not seeing how they picked out (or the methodology) behind independent voters. I've also witnessed a lot of behavior where my friends tell me they're independent but then suddenly spout off extreme political viewpoints. I don't understand why people like to pretend they're independent, but... if they do that kind of make-believe or pretend to a pollster, the independent vote number will be wrong.
So the argument almost entirely lies on the Senate vs Presidential race numbers. So there-in lies the question. Are we about to see unprescedented levels of split ticket votes, and are they all going to be for Trump for President / Democrat for Senate?
That.... seems unlikely to me. The Senate Race correlation with the Presidential race is a very strong argument to me. At least within my social circle, I cannot imagine anyone voting for a Democrat in the Senate but Trump for President.
-------
So the blogpost's argument is that we use this new metric (ie: Senate polls) and try to calculate out the correlation to the Presidential race. Its... a new theory but one that I can largely get behind.
I have to imagine that the people are reasonably consistent between Senate Races and Presidential Races with regards to party affiliation.
Who are these people who predict an electoral landslide for the dems? It feels like they’re trying to set themselves up to be the fivethirtyeight of 2026 and 2028 if they happen to be proven right.
Also, FYI, 538 is no longer using Silver's model. He took it with him when he left.
There are 7 swing states, and Nate Silver says that the odds of all 7 states going to the same candidate is 40%. 25% chance Trump takes all 7, and a 15% chance Harris takes all 7.
Essentially, a broad 2% polling error in either direction means a blowout. What are the chances of a 2% polling erorr? Pretty darn high.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-state-of-play-in-the-7-stat...
Basically any company that tries to do market research or any organization measuring public opinion is wrong in systematic ways.
there will be some very exciting opportunities for whomever can come up with a polling methods that works with modern communication.
I don't know that anyone who is actually paying attention to the data will be surprised by any outcome that isn't more extreme than that.
Are there free elections anywhere that are easy to predict?
In a world where $1.00 in Instagram ads yields $1.02 in donations, does it matter?
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