Trump 275 Biden 263 as of tonight, Biden picking up Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and NE02 and winning the national popular vote but Trump holding the rest of his 2016 states and being re elected in the EC
You can get 10/1 on Trump in the 270-299 EC range.
Re: Robert Cahaly, the story from South Carolina newpaper (see link below) discusses his role in 2010 campaign for Ken Ards for Lieutenant Governor. That year, Ards won hotly contested Republican primary, then easily defeated Democratic opponent.
However, a little over a year after his inauguration as LG, Ards was forced to resign due to his indictment and conviction for violation of state ethic laws.
Excerpt from story:
“In summary, the State Grand Jury charges Mr. Ard with a scheme, developed as part of his candidacy for Lt. Governor, to create the false appearance of a groundswell of political support through fictitious or bogus campaign contributions,” Wilson said in a statement. “These donations to Mr. Ard’s campaign were not a genuine demonstration of financial support. Instead, they represented cash in the amount of $75,000 which was funneled from Mr. Ard to others and ultimately back to his campaign as purported contributions from citizens in the community.”
The charges against Ard include four counts of unlawful reimbursement of campaign contributions; two counts of falsely filing campaign reports; and one count encompassing multiple acts of personal use of campaign funds.
In court, the attorney general’s office detailed how Ard had conducted a campaign finance scheme in which he paid people to donate to his campaign. One woman, a prosecutor said, would meet others in a parking lot with a bag full of cash that totaled up to $20,000. One witness, the prosecutor said, likened the behavior to feeling like a drug-dealing transaction.
Re: Cahaly, story note that
Speaking to an acquaintance, Cahaly once described the State Ethics Commission as being like a wide-open cow pasture with a string of barbed wire around it. Candidates, he’d reportedly said, can do pretty much whatever they want inside the pasture — and if they brush up against the boundaries it might sting a little, but not much more than that. (Conversely, he’d apparently likened the Federal Election Commission to a small prison yard with armed guards with machine guns on the towers ready to fire on anyone who made a wrong move.)
In taking on Ard as client, Cahaly shook up the staff and moved the campaign headquarters from the little hometown real estate office to the big city of Columbia. The move apparently infuriated some of Ard’s merry band of local staffers.
With a more professionalized operation, Ard kicked off his campaign by announcing that he’d raised $127,000 in a single day with an accompanying photograph of him holding an oversized check. (As it turns out, his exit from political life can be tied to that same picture -- prosecutors mentioned it to the judge as evidence prior to Ard’s sentencing at court.)
If Trafalgar systematically take other polls and skew them to the Republicans/Trump by 6%, and last time the polls all had a systematic bias to the Democrats of 6% then last time they would have been very successful. If all the other pollsters have now updated their methodology to account for this bias then Trafalgar will look a bit stupid if they've based their assumptions on the same methodology.
Is that a serious suggestion? Is there any particular reason to suspect that's happening?
In principle opinion polling is one of the defences that a democracy has against an election being stolen by ballot-stuffing, fraudulent counts and similar means.
If a supposed polling company is intentionally producing poll results to be biased then the intention is to hide the blatant stealing of an election.
There's no evidence that Trafalgar is a real, commercial organisation.
It's not incorporated. It doesn't appear to have any employees or a business address. It claims on its PDFs to use a combination of calls and an on-line panel, yet there's no way to join the panel. It doesn't seem to have any customers (so where does the money come from to do these polls), and is dormant in between elections years. And it's run by a Republican operative.
That's certainly suspicious. Thanks to others for their comments.
For balance I do think they do polling: only peeps genuinely running a crappy polling outfit would have the gall to put this on their website
The Trafalgar Group delivers its polling questionnaires utilizing a mix of six different methods:
Live callers Integrated voice response Text messages Emails Two other proprietary digital methods they don’t share publicly.
If Trafalgar systematically take other polls and skew them to the Republicans/Trump by 6%, and last time the polls all had a systematic bias to the Democrats of 6% then last time they would have been very successful. If all the other pollsters have now updated their methodology to account for this bias then Trafalgar will look a bit stupid if they've based their assumptions on the same methodology.
Is that a serious suggestion? Is there any particular reason to suspect that's happening?
In principle opinion polling is one of the defences that a democracy has against an election being stolen by ballot-stuffing, fraudulent counts and similar means.
If a supposed polling company is intentionally producing poll results to be biased then the intention is to hide the blatant stealing of an election.
There's no evidence that Trafalgar is a real, commercial organisation.
It's not incorporated. It doesn't appear to have any employees or a business address. It claims on its PDFs to use a combination of calls and an on-line panel, yet there's no way to join the panel. It doesn't seem to have any customers (so where does the money come from to do these polls), and is dormant in between elections years. And it's run by a Republican operative.
That's certainly suspicious. Thanks to others for their comments.
For balance I do think they do polling: only peeps genuinely running a crappy polling outfit would have the gall to put this on their website
The Trafalgar Group delivers its polling questionnaires utilizing a mix of six different methods:
Live callers Integrated voice response Text messages Emails Two other proprietary digital methods they don’t share publicly.
The last page of their PDFs claims they use a combination of "automated voice polling and an on-line panel".
May be a surprise to (elderly) PBers and others, but my guess is that most of the Putinists cavorting to "YMCA" are NOT aware that it was once (a couple of generations ago) a gay anthem.
For most people, YMCA is simply a fun old pop song from the days when disco was king.
M-A-G-A fitting well with the chorus seems to be the main reason it's been picked. Perhaps the cop/military/cowboy/construction worker/biker mix also appeals.
What that mix got up to in their downtime less so.
Trump 275 Biden 263 as of tonight, Biden picking up Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and NE02 and winning the national popular vote but Trump holding the rest of his 2016 states and being re elected in the EC
A couple of genuine questions.
1) Do you have many other examples of a specific pollster being a "Gold Standard" pollster in repeated Presidential elections 2) Are you surprised that many supposed respected pollsters who called it wrong in 2016 haven't adjusted their methodology to counter mistakes from last time and/or that the polling gap between them and Trafalgar hasn't narrowed as a result?
Interesting results from some light research by PBers re: Trafalgar.
Turns out this "gold standard" pollster is a GOP super-hack up to his eyeballs in dirty tricks and worse.
South Carolina politics is an infamously tough league, thanks to bean-ball pitchers like Cahaly. For whom (based on evidence) manipulating some polling would seem to be the LEAST of his demerits.
FPT - more on the Ellon result (and stressing also it's crap for the LDs and Labour, as one would imagine in a straight battle to the death between the SNP and the Tories in the Brexit and covid era):
PS for HYUFD - the Tory vote went down about 10 percentage points. It is not a FPTP seat.
Looking at the results, it looks as if Tory toxicity overrides unionism in SLD and SLAB voters.
Doomed, the union is doomed...
Of the 7 current Holyrood seats at constituency level held by the Tories, Edinburgh Central, Aberdeenshire West, Ayr, Dumfrieshire, Eastwood, Ettrick, Roxburgh and Berwickshire and Galloway and West Dumfries the Tories won every one of them last year at the general election even under Boris except Edinburgh Central and Ayr and Eastwood so the Tories are unlikely to lose more than 2 or 3 seats at the constituency level and may even pick up Banffshire and Buchan Coast and Moray which are currently SNP held at Holyrood but which the Tories won at Westminster last December.
So the Tories do not really need SLAB or SLD tactical votes to hold most of their MSPs and make 1 or 2 gains, however SLab who only won 1 Scottish Westminster constituency and the LDs who only won 3 Westminster constituencies desperately need Tory tactical votes to beat the SNP in the central belt constituencies and the Highlands and Edinburgh
Trump 275 Biden 263 as of tonight, Biden picking up Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and NE02 and winning the national popular vote but Trump holding the rest of his 2016 states and being re elected in the EC
A couple of genuine questions.
1) Do you have many other examples of a specific pollster being a "Gold Standard" pollster in repeated Presidential elections 2) Are you surprised that many supposed respected pollsters who called it wrong in 2016 haven't adjusted their methodology to counter mistakes from last time and/or that the polling gap between them and Trafalgar hasn't narrowed as a result?
PPP were the gold standard in 2008 and 2012 because they correctly forecast the vast black turnout for Obama which other pollsters underestimated, especially in 2012, I never wavered from my view Obama would be re elected in 2012.
Trafalgar are now the gold standard with Trump on the ballot for as 2016 showed they are the best pollster at identifying the shy Trump vote, especially in the rustbelt swing states, hence I am now also of the view it is more likely than not Trump will be re elected even if he loses the popular vote again
If Trafalgar systematically take other polls and skew them to the Republicans/Trump by 6%, and last time the polls all had a systematic bias to the Democrats of 6% then last time they would have been very successful. If all the other pollsters have now updated their methodology to account for this bias then Trafalgar will look a bit stupid if they've based their assumptions on the same methodology.
Is that a serious suggestion? Is there any particular reason to suspect that's happening?
In principle opinion polling is one of the defences that a democracy has against an election being stolen by ballot-stuffing, fraudulent counts and similar means.
If a supposed polling company is intentionally producing poll results to be biased then the intention is to hide the blatant stealing of an election.
There's no evidence that Trafalgar is a real, commercial organisation.
It's not incorporated. It doesn't appear to have any employees or a business address. It claims on its PDFs to use a combination of calls and an on-line panel, yet there's no way to join the panel. It doesn't seem to have any customers (so where does the money come from to do these polls), and is dormant in between elections years. And it's run by a Republican operative.
That's certainly suspicious. Thanks to others for their comments.
For balance I do think they do polling: only peeps genuinely running a crappy polling outfit would have the gall to put this on their website
The Trafalgar Group delivers its polling questionnaires utilizing a mix of six different methods:
Live callers Integrated voice response Text messages Emails Two other proprietary digital methods they don’t share publicly.
You are assuming that they are CURRENTLY using all of these methods. When it could be that they've used (how legitimately who knows?) them at some point in the PAST.
IMHO Trafalgar is just a robo-call chop-shop, that hit the jackpot in 2016 thanks to less-than-stellar polling (the real kind) plus the criminal incompetence of Robbie Mook ("a mook by name and nature) . Caveat emptor!
There has been a lot of analysis of this issue, as you'd expect, on the TV here in the US. But no-one ever seems to address what pollsters are doing differently this time to avoid that mis-sampling of the white vote.
Is there somewhere that explains the changes made by pollsters? About 3 months ago I read one article from one pollster saying that they had corrected for the Midwest Mistake (I forget how, and no longer have the reference), but I have seen nothing else.
Trump 275 Biden 263 as of tonight, Biden picking up Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and NE02 and winning the national popular vote but Trump holding the rest of his 2016 states and being re elected in the EC
Anyone think that there might be some Govt thinking that favours making the economic effect of Covid-19 as bad as possible (which people en masse don't seem to be blaming the Govt for) to hide the economic catastrophe of a no-deal brexit?
The bit I'm loving is where either Biden supplied a hard drive to the shop to get the data backed up and after failing to collect the hard drive still decided to register the warrenty card for the drive a week later orrrrr the repair shop threw in a hard disk that cost more than what was charged for the backup process as a freebie.
May be a surprise to (elderly) PBers and others, but my guess is that most of the Putinists cavorting to "YMCA" are NOT aware that it was once (a couple of generations ago) a gay anthem.
For most people, YMCA is simply a fun old pop song from the days when disco was king.
M-A-G-A fitting well with the chorus seems to be the main reason it's been picked. Perhaps the cop/military/cowboy/construction worker/biker mix also appeals.
What that mix got up to in their downtime less so.
I'm sure they appreciate real men who know how to use their fists.
May be a surprise to (elderly) PBers and others, but my guess is that most of the Putinists cavorting to "YMCA" are NOT aware that it was once (a couple of generations ago) a gay anthem.
For most people, YMCA is simply a fun old pop song from the days when disco was king.
M-A-G-A fitting well with the chorus seems to be the main reason it's been picked. Perhaps the cop/military/cowboy/construction worker/biker mix also appeals.
What that mix got up to in their downtime less so.
IDK. From what we’ve seen of various Republicans getting up to in their downtime, the appeal is not implausible.
The bit I'm loving is where either Biden supplied a hard drive to the shop to get the data backed up and after failing to collect the hard drive still decided to register the warrenty card for the drive a week later orrrrr the repair shop threw in a hard disk that cost more than what was charged for the backup process as a freebie.
Either makes sense to me.
Whatever Hunter Biden has allegedly done, I fail to see what it has to do with Joe Biden.
Anyone think that there might be some Govt thinking that favours making the economic effect of Covid-19 as bad as possible (which people en masse don't seem to be blaming the Govt for) to hide the economic catastrophe of a no-deal brexit?
Nope, the medicines shortages alone caused by No Deal would be amplified a lot during a really bad pandemic.
Even if we weren't in the midst of a pandemic, the medicines shortages would lead to some avoidable deaths.
It's something the NHS Trusts are really worried about.
Anyone think that there might be some Govt thinking that favours making the economic effect of Covid-19 as bad as possible (which people en masse don't seem to be blaming the Govt for) to hide the economic catastrophe of a no-deal brexit?
If Trafalgar systematically take other polls and skew them to the Republicans/Trump by 6%, and last time the polls all had a systematic bias to the Democrats of 6% then last time they would have been very successful. If all the other pollsters have now updated their methodology to account for this bias then Trafalgar will look a bit stupid if they've based their assumptions on the same methodology.
Is that a serious suggestion? Is there any particular reason to suspect that's happening?
In principle opinion polling is one of the defences that a democracy has against an election being stolen by ballot-stuffing, fraudulent counts and similar means.
If a supposed polling company is intentionally producing poll results to be biased then the intention is to hide the blatant stealing of an election.
There's no evidence that Trafalgar is a real, commercial organisation.
It's not incorporated. It doesn't appear to have any employees or a business address. It claims on its PDFs to use a combination of calls and an on-line panel, yet there's no way to join the panel. It doesn't seem to have any customers (so where does the money come from to do these polls), and is dormant in between elections years. And it's run by a Republican operative.
That's certainly suspicious. Thanks to others for their comments.
For balance I do think they do polling: only peeps genuinely running a crappy polling outfit would have the gall to put this on their website
The Trafalgar Group delivers its polling questionnaires utilizing a mix of six different methods:
Live callers Integrated voice response Text messages Emails Two other proprietary digital methods they don’t share publicly.
The last page of their PDFs claims they use a combination of "automated voice polling and an on-line panel".
So, which is it Trafalgar?
With the Arizona poll I think I've got a tell on what they are doing and it does start with genuine polling.
They list the percentage of response by Congressional district. Arizona has 9. By Amazing coincidence the 5 held by Dems make up only 49% of the respondents and 51% come from the 4 Rep held seats.
If Trafalgar systematically take other polls and skew them to the Republicans/Trump by 6%, and last time the polls all had a systematic bias to the Democrats of 6% then last time they would have been very successful. If all the other pollsters have now updated their methodology to account for this bias then Trafalgar will look a bit stupid if they've based their assumptions on the same methodology.
Is that a serious suggestion? Is there any particular reason to suspect that's happening?
In principle opinion polling is one of the defences that a democracy has against an election being stolen by ballot-stuffing, fraudulent counts and similar means.
If a supposed polling company is intentionally producing poll results to be biased then the intention is to hide the blatant stealing of an election.
They suggestion by others (not myself - i have no idea) on this thread is that Trafalgar is
1) Not a polling company and doesn't actually do any polls 2) Produces its "polls" by taking an average of everyone else's and adding 6% to the Trump/Republican percentage.
They essentially admit it but call it weighting.Trafalgar say, simplistically, that the Trump/Republican vote is understated by “shy Trumpers” (another favourite of @HYUFD ) so their methodology is to ask the individual how they think their neighbours will vote. If the respondent says the neighbours will vote a different way to them then they say they’re a “shy” (invariably Trump) voter. They are cagey about the precise methodology.
What most pollsters got wrong in the rust belt last time was (A) to fail to foresee that undecideds would break for Trump 6 to 1 and (B) not to find enough uneducated voters. As a result Trafalgar struck gold in 2 states by accident. This time (A) their are far fewer undecideds and (B) other pollsters have adjusted their methodology to weight more for education. If there is a systemic polling error this time, which there could well be, it is unlikely to be the same one as last time. People are fighting 2016 over again but it’s a different race with a very different dynamic - notably that the Democratic candidate is far more popular than the last on every measure.
I want to know what Trafalgar do when there is no election on. How do they make money between cycles and who commissions their other polls?
"How they make money between cycles"? Think their website is pretty clear about that - they make money as Republican operatives:
"As leader of The Trafalgar Group, Cahaly oversees a group of allied companies. Together with his team he works with federal, state, and local candidates as well as business and industry groups. Cahaly has particular experience and expertise in strategy, polling, and data analytics. He is also regarded as a specialist of issue advocacy and independent expenditure campaigns."
Note that the whole Trafalgar "polling" operation -actually a species of push polling - is straight (or rather crooked) right out of the Lee Atwater playbook.
May be a surprise to (elderly) PBers and others, but my guess is that most of the Putinists cavorting to "YMCA" are NOT aware that it was once (a couple of generations ago) a gay anthem.
For most people, YMCA is simply a fun old pop song from the days when disco was king.
M-A-G-A fitting well with the chorus seems to be the main reason it's been picked. Perhaps the cop/military/cowboy/construction worker/biker mix also appeals.
What that mix got up to in their downtime less so.
I'm sure they appreciate real men who know how to use their fists.
The type that roll up their sleeves and get stuck in.
Based on national data using 5 days as the infectious time during the incubation period I can say we were at R=1.2 and London was at R=1.1 last week when using the week on week comparison (which is fair as it smooths out daily data), using modelled data the R is currently 1.1 nationally and 1.0 in London. I don't think we're out of the woods though. I can't be fucked to write a script to automate this process so I'll probably just do it sporadically.
Other interesting stats, the R peaked nationally at over 2 in the middle of September and tracks the start of school and then it goes up again around a week to ten days after the start of uni. It fell in between those two period and it looks like it's falling again.
The bit I'm loving is where either Biden supplied a hard drive to the shop to get the data backed up and after failing to collect the hard drive still decided to register the warrenty card for the drive a week later orrrrr the repair shop threw in a hard disk that cost more than what was charged for the backup process as a freebie.
Either makes sense to me.
Whatever Hunter Biden has allegedly done, I fail to see what it has to do with Joe Biden.
Biden has unequivocally stated he hasn't talked business dealings with his son. One of the alleged supposed emails has one of Hunter's business partners saying thank you for getting a meeting with Joe.
If this was at all credible it would be a big deal.
Anyone think that there might be some Govt thinking that favours making the economic effect of Covid-19 as bad as possible (which people en masse don't seem to be blaming the Govt for) to hide the economic catastrophe of a no-deal brexit?
Nope, the medicines shortages alone caused by No Deal would be amplified a lot during a really bad pandemic.
Even if we weren't in the midst of a pandemic, the medicines shortages would lead to some avoidable deaths.
It's something the NHS Trusts are really worried about.
You're assuming their motivation is to limit economic and health damage. As opposed to load as much damage as possible on Covid and not Brexit. Regardless of the actual level of damage itself.
Of course Robert, if you're suspicions about Trafalgar are correct one would be justified in eliminating their results from all the polling averages. That would cause a significant increase in Biden's poll lead.
I really am beginning to wonder what is holding up Trump's price. It is ressembling the Leadsome puzzle, for those that remember the strange behaviour of her price during the Tory Leadership contest.
May be a surprise to (elderly) PBers and others, but my guess is that most of the Putinists cavorting to "YMCA" are NOT aware that it was once (a couple of generations ago) a gay anthem.
For most people, YMCA is simply a fun old pop song from the days when disco was king.
M-A-G-A fitting well with the chorus seems to be the main reason it's been picked. Perhaps the cop/military/cowboy/construction worker/biker mix also appeals.
What that mix got up to in their downtime less so.
I'm sure they appreciate real men who know how to use their fists.
Wise to keep strangers at arm's length these days.
Apart from it being none of his *** business, of course Scottish fishermen need to develop businesses fishing the waters off Scotland. He might have been shooting for edgy, but it seems like a statement of the *** obvious to me.
Based on national data using 5 days as the infectious time during the incubation period I can say we were at R=1.2 and London was at R=1.1 last week when using the week on week comparison (which is fair as it smooths out daily data), using modelled data the R is currently 1.1 nationally and 1.0 in London. I don't think we're out of the woods though. I can't be fucked to write a script to automate this process so I'll probably just do it sporadically.
Other interesting stats, the R peaked nationally at over 2 in the middle of September and tracks the start of school and then it goes up again around a week to ten days after the start of uni. It fell in between those two period and it looks like it's falling again.
There has been a lot of analysis of this issue, as you'd expect, on the TV here in the US. But no-one ever seems to address what pollsters are doing differently this time to avoid that mis-sampling of the white vote.
Is there somewhere that explains the changes made by pollsters? About 3 months ago I read one article from one pollster saying that they had corrected for the Midwest Mistake (I forget how, and no longer have the reference), but I have seen nothing else.
This article (from the day I wrote mine, I now genuinely can't remember if I read it before doing mine) from 538 goes into good detail. The key section (at least as far as my article goes, the whole thing is a good summary) is:
"But one thing came up again and again in our interviews: Pollsters told us they were now weighting their samples by education, because one key takeaway from 2016 was just how important someone’s level of educational attainment was in predicting their vote. “In mid-2016, we changed our weights by education, moving the percentage of high school or less respondents up while dropping the college-plus down,” said Jeff Horwitt, a senior vice president at Hart Research, one of the pollsters for the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. It was the middle of the election cycle, but already Horwitt and his team were concerned that they might be underestimating the share of the electorate who didn’t have a four-year college degree, and therefore, missing some of Trump’s support. They were right to be concerned, too. A real problem for the polling industry writ large was the underrepresentation of voters with little or no college education.
Some pollsters such as Ipsos and the Pew Research Center have taken weighting by education a step further by weighting for educational attainment within racial groups. This change could be especially important in state-level polling in 2020, as Trump primarily outperformed polls in states that had large populations of white Americans who didn’t have a bachelor’s degree. “This year we are ensuring that we include the combination of education and race/ethnicity in our sampling,” said Cliff Young, president of U.S. public affairs at Ipsos.
Monmouth University Polling Institute director Patrick Murray cautioned, however, that weighting by education isn’t a silver bullet. He noted that weighting by education in a postmortem analysis of their own polling in 2016 had only “a small impact on accuracy and on its own [did] not explain the supposed polling miss in 2016.” Still, weighting by education was, by far, the most common methodology change pollsters reported."
On thing that I had to cut out of my article was that pollster error is still very possible, and I worry the final article is a tad over-bullish. I'm trying to say that a repeat error isn't that likely due to adjustments, and a double error would be needed for Trump to win. So he probably can't win the same way as last time, but he could still win due to polling error.
My point is that we shouldn't expect such an error just because there was one last time, and that a double error is very unlikely due to Biden's lead in varied states.
Can someone explain to me what the GOP have to gain by Trafalgar posting polls that favour them? Surely in this election they are helping the Dem GOTV by posting narrow Biden leads/Trump leads?
Anyone think that there might be some Govt thinking that favours making the economic effect of Covid-19 as bad as possible (which people en masse don't seem to be blaming the Govt for) to hide the economic catastrophe of a no-deal brexit?
Nope, the medicines shortages alone caused by No Deal would be amplified a lot during a really bad pandemic.
Even if we weren't in the midst of a pandemic, the medicines shortages would lead to some avoidable deaths.
It's something the NHS Trusts are really worried about.
You're assuming their motivation is to limit economic and health damage. As opposed to load as much damage as possible on Covid and not Brexit. Regardless of the actual level of damage itself.
I believe the government is breathtakingly incompetent, not malevolent.
Of course Robert, if you're suspicions about Trafalgar are correct one would be justified in eliminating their results from all the polling averages. That would cause a significant increase in Biden's poll lead.
I really am beginning to wonder what is holding up Trump's price. It is ressembling the Leadsome puzzle, for those that remember the strange behaviour of her price during the Tory Leadership contest.
On what basis would you possibly exclude the only pollster to correctly get Michigan and Pennsylvania right in 2016? I am astonished so many on here have still learnt nothing from 2016
Can someone explain to me what the GOP have to gain by Trafalgar posting polls that favour them? Surely in this election they are helping the Dem GOTV by posting narrow Biden leads/Trump leads?
Hope that GOPers who were planning on sitting out the election are motivated to turn out by the closeness of the polls.
The bit I'm loving is where either Biden supplied a hard drive to the shop to get the data backed up and after failing to collect the hard drive still decided to register the warrenty card for the drive a week later orrrrr the repair shop threw in a hard disk that cost more than what was charged for the backup process as a freebie.
Either makes sense to me.
Whatever Hunter Biden has allegedly done, I fail to see what it has to do with Joe Biden.
It was a stupid thing of Twitter and Facebook to block the story because it has just fuelled it and kept it in the headlines.
It is also stupid of the Biden camp not to just issue a clear cut denial they ever met this Ukrainian if they are absolutely sure that he didn’t meet him. Saying it wasn’t in the official diary and then saying the official diary had long gaps just increases the questions.
The NY Post are continuing to hammer on this. For a story that apparently has many holes in it, the NYP definitely seem very keen to play double or quits
There has been a lot of analysis of this issue, as you'd expect, on the TV here in the US. But no-one ever seems to address what pollsters are doing differently this time to avoid that mis-sampling of the white vote.
Is there somewhere that explains the changes made by pollsters? About 3 months ago I read one article from one pollster saying that they had corrected for the Midwest Mistake (I forget how, and no longer have the reference), but I have seen nothing else.
This article (from the day I wrote mine, I now genuinely can't remember if I read it before doing mine) from 538 goes into good detail. The key section (at least as far as my article goes, the whole thing is a good summary) is:
"But one thing came up again and again in our interviews: Pollsters told us they were now weighting their samples by education, because one key takeaway from 2016 was just how important someone’s level of educational attainment was in predicting their vote. “In mid-2016, we changed our weights by education, moving the percentage of high school or less respondents up while dropping the college-plus down,” said Jeff Horwitt, a senior vice president at Hart Research, one of the pollsters for the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. It was the middle of the election cycle, but already Horwitt and his team were concerned that they might be underestimating the share of the electorate who didn’t have a four-year college degree, and therefore, missing some of Trump’s support. They were right to be concerned, too. A real problem for the polling industry writ large was the underrepresentation of voters with little or no college education.
Some pollsters such as Ipsos and the Pew Research Center have taken weighting by education a step further by weighting for educational attainment within racial groups. This change could be especially important in state-level polling in 2020, as Trump primarily outperformed polls in states that had large populations of white Americans who didn’t have a bachelor’s degree. “This year we are ensuring that we include the combination of education and race/ethnicity in our sampling,” said Cliff Young, president of U.S. public affairs at Ipsos.
Monmouth University Polling Institute director Patrick Murray cautioned, however, that weighting by education isn’t a silver bullet. He noted that weighting by education in a postmortem analysis of their own polling in 2016 had only “a small impact on accuracy and on its own [did] not explain the supposed polling miss in 2016.” Still, weighting by education was, by far, the most common methodology change pollsters reported."
On thing that I had to cut out of my article was that pollster error is still very possible, and I worry the final article is a tad over-bullish. I'm trying to say that a repeat error isn't that likely due to adjustments, and a double error would be needed for Trump to win. So he probably can't win the same way as last time, but he could still win due to polling error.
My point is that we shouldn't expect such an error just because there was one last time, and that a double error is very unlikely due to Biden's lead in varied states.
The bit I'm loving is where either Biden supplied a hard drive to the shop to get the data backed up and after failing to collect the hard drive still decided to register the warrenty card for the drive a week later orrrrr the repair shop threw in a hard disk that cost more than what was charged for the backup process as a freebie.
Either makes sense to me.
Whatever Hunter Biden has allegedly done, I fail to see what it has to do with Joe Biden.
It was a stupid thing of Twitter and Facebook to block the story because it has just fuelled it and kept it in the headlines.
It is also stupid of the Biden camp not to just issue a clear cut denial they ever met this Ukrainian if they are absolutely sure that he didn’t meet him. Saying it wasn’t in the official diary and then saying the official diary had long gaps just increases the questions.
The NY Post are continuing to hammer on this. For a story that apparently has many holes in it, the NYP definitely seem very keen to play double or quits
Wouldn't Biden have met loads of people as VP ? Judging by right wing twitter and Trump himself his base is beyond any and all reasonable explanations mind.
Election night in New Zealand should be interesting. I've never watched one from there before. I don't even know whether they have declarations or not.
Anyone think that there might be some Govt thinking that favours making the economic effect of Covid-19 as bad as possible (which people en masse don't seem to be blaming the Govt for) to hide the economic catastrophe of a no-deal brexit?
Nope, the medicines shortages alone caused by No Deal would be amplified a lot during a really bad pandemic.
Even if we weren't in the midst of a pandemic, the medicines shortages would lead to some avoidable deaths.
It's something the NHS Trusts are really worried about.
You're assuming their motivation is to limit economic and health damage. As opposed to load as much damage as possible on Covid and not Brexit. Regardless of the actual level of damage itself.
I believe the government is breathtakingly incompetent, not malevolent.
And of course it is worth stating the obvious - any such polling error could just as easily be in favour of Biden as Trump.
Anyone for an underestimate of Shy-Bidens?
I've been pondering this for a while, and haven't gone back over the data to check, but I wonder if polling errors aren't more commonly in favour of Republicans. If so, I wonder if they aren't entirely polling error and partially the result of vote suppression meaning voters who intended to vote Democrat were more likely then Republicans to end up not voting due to long lines etc.
Like I say, I've not checked the numbers to even see if polling error isn't entirely random. So I may be barking up the wrong tree. Obama clearly outperformed in 2012, and as you say Biden would crush Trump if he did that again (and, perhaps more to the point, even a small Democrat overperformance may hand them 2-4 more Senators).
“ What I understand about the QAnon program is that the military is going to need to intervene eventually,” Redmond said. Asked what he meant by “military intervention,” he explained: “Nazis never lost World War II. [Nazism] was dissolved, they were consumed into the U.S.A., and the rich, cultist, Satanist families continued to utilize this Nazi force. “The end of World War III will end with Donald Trump,” he continued. “It’s already happening with the crushing of ISIS. There will be another Nuremberg trial, some of these icons of American industry and business will be held accountable at Gitmo [the military detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba].”
Redmond said QAnon has caused him to question the very nature of his nation. “I always look at two sides of the coin on this stuff and think, ‘Have I been deceived? … Has [traditional patriotism] really been a trick to expose us patriots, so we are the first on the trains to the FEMA camps? … I’m ready to go to the camps if necessary. That’s why I’m fighting and putting my life on the line. I have faith.” Redmond is challenging Democrat David McCrea, a retired teacher...
The bit I'm loving is where either Biden supplied a hard drive to the shop to get the data backed up and after failing to collect the hard drive still decided to register the warrenty card for the drive a week later orrrrr the repair shop threw in a hard disk that cost more than what was charged for the backup process as a freebie.
Either makes sense to me.
Whatever Hunter Biden has allegedly done, I fail to see what it has to do with Joe Biden.
It was a stupid thing of Twitter and Facebook to block the story because it has just fuelled it and kept it in the headlines.
It is also stupid of the Biden camp not to just issue a clear cut denial they ever met this Ukrainian if they are absolutely sure that he didn’t meet him. Saying it wasn’t in the official diary and then saying the official diary had long gaps just increases the questions.
The NY Post are continuing to hammer on this. For a story that apparently has many holes in it, the NYP definitely seem very keen to play double or quits
Wouldn't Biden have met loads of people as VP ? Judging by right wing twitter and Trump himself his base is beyond any and all reasonable explanations mind.
So he gets impeached after his election and the Democrat Senators ignore all the evidence and back him 100%.
Anyone think that there might be some Govt thinking that favours making the economic effect of Covid-19 as bad as possible (which people en masse don't seem to be blaming the Govt for) to hide the economic catastrophe of a no-deal brexit?
Nope, the medicines shortages alone caused by No Deal would be amplified a lot during a really bad pandemic.
Even if we weren't in the midst of a pandemic, the medicines shortages would lead to some avoidable deaths.
It's something the NHS Trusts are really worried about.
You're assuming their motivation is to limit economic and health damage. As opposed to load as much damage as possible on Covid and not Brexit. Regardless of the actual level of damage itself.
I believe the government is breathtakingly incompetent, not malevolent.
Perhaps I'm just naive.
Throwing London to the dogs so that the North doesn't feel bad seems malevolent to me.
Can someone explain to me what the GOP have to gain by Trafalgar posting polls that favour them? Surely in this election they are helping the Dem GOTV by posting narrow Biden leads/Trump leads?
Stopping Trump from ordering the nuking of Delaware in a fit of rage?
Of course Robert, if you're suspicions about Trafalgar are correct one would be justified in eliminating their results from all the polling averages. That would cause a significant increase in Biden's poll lead.
I really am beginning to wonder what is holding up Trump's price. It is ressembling the Leadsome puzzle, for those that remember the strange behaviour of her price during the Tory Leadership contest.
Personally I think we risk overthinking the market. The simplest answer is just that most punters aren't that well versed in the numbers and so on, and are being overly affected by 2016. That's my conclusion, anyway.
Anyone think that there might be some Govt thinking that favours making the economic effect of Covid-19 as bad as possible (which people en masse don't seem to be blaming the Govt for) to hide the economic catastrophe of a no-deal brexit?
Nope, the medicines shortages alone caused by No Deal would be amplified a lot during a really bad pandemic.
Even if we weren't in the midst of a pandemic, the medicines shortages would lead to some avoidable deaths.
It's something the NHS Trusts are really worried about.
You're assuming their motivation is to limit economic and health damage. As opposed to load as much damage as possible on Covid and not Brexit. Regardless of the actual level of damage itself.
I believe the government is breathtakingly incompetent, not malevolent.
Perhaps I'm just naive.
I used to think "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence" was a self-evidently correct rule. But I no longer see what is self-evident about it.
And of course it is worth stating the obvious - any such polling error could just as easily be in favour of Biden as Trump.
Anyone for an underestimate of Shy-Bidens?
I've been pondering this for a while, and haven't gone back over the data to check, but I wonder if polling errors aren't more commonly in favour of Republicans. If so, I wonder if they aren't entirely polling error and partially the result of vote suppression meaning voters who intended to vote Democrat were more likely then Republicans to end up not voting due to long lines etc.
Like I say, I've not checked the numbers to even see if polling error isn't entirely random. So I may be barking up the wrong tree. Obama clearly outperformed in 2012, and as you say Biden would crush Trump if he did that again (and, perhaps more to the point, even a small Democrat overperformance may hand them 2-4 more Senators).
If there were serious voter suppression and other form of cheating going on I think you would expect the Dems to do relatively well in non-competitive contests, i.e. the heavily red and heavily blue States, where cheating is pointless or unnecessary. Not sure there is any evidence for this.
Anyone think that there might be some Govt thinking that favours making the economic effect of Covid-19 as bad as possible (which people en masse don't seem to be blaming the Govt for) to hide the economic catastrophe of a no-deal brexit?
Nope, the medicines shortages alone caused by No Deal would be amplified a lot during a really bad pandemic.
Even if we weren't in the midst of a pandemic, the medicines shortages would lead to some avoidable deaths.
It's something the NHS Trusts are really worried about.
You're assuming their motivation is to limit economic and health damage. As opposed to load as much damage as possible on Covid and not Brexit. Regardless of the actual level of damage itself.
I believe the government is breathtakingly incompetent, not malevolent.
Perhaps I'm just naive.
Throwing London to the dogs so that the North doesn't feel bad seems malevolent to me.
Wrong timeline, the North was thrown to the dogs in the summer to let London out of lockdown in the summer.
Anyone think that there might be some Govt thinking that favours making the economic effect of Covid-19 as bad as possible (which people en masse don't seem to be blaming the Govt for) to hide the economic catastrophe of a no-deal brexit?
Nope, the medicines shortages alone caused by No Deal would be amplified a lot during a really bad pandemic.
Even if we weren't in the midst of a pandemic, the medicines shortages would lead to some avoidable deaths.
It's something the NHS Trusts are really worried about.
You're assuming their motivation is to limit economic and health damage. As opposed to load as much damage as possible on Covid and not Brexit. Regardless of the actual level of damage itself.
I believe the government is breathtakingly incompetent, not malevolent.
Perhaps I'm just naive.
I used to think "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence" was a self-evidently correct rule. But I no longer see what is self-evident about it.
That's because you strongly dislike those to whom the rule would have you give the benefit of the doubt. Lots of principles don't survive personal bias.
Election night in New Zealand should be interesting. I've never watched one from there before. I don't even know whether they have declarations or not.
I don't care who wins the election. I just want to know if they legalise da herb
Election night in New Zealand should be interesting. I've never watched one from there before. I don't even know whether they have declarations or not.
Anyone think that there might be some Govt thinking that favours making the economic effect of Covid-19 as bad as possible (which people en masse don't seem to be blaming the Govt for) to hide the economic catastrophe of a no-deal brexit?
Nope, the medicines shortages alone caused by No Deal would be amplified a lot during a really bad pandemic.
Even if we weren't in the midst of a pandemic, the medicines shortages would lead to some avoidable deaths.
It's something the NHS Trusts are really worried about.
You're assuming their motivation is to limit economic and health damage. As opposed to load as much damage as possible on Covid and not Brexit. Regardless of the actual level of damage itself.
I believe the government is breathtakingly incompetent, not malevolent.
Perhaps I'm just naive.
Throwing London to the dogs so that the North doesn't feel bad seems malevolent to me.
Wrong timeline, the North was thrown to the dogs in the summer to let London out of lockdown in the summer.
North's been thrown to the dogs for the convenience of London about as far back as I can remember.
Would you Adam an eve it. In their Michigan poll the most Democratic District in the state CD-13, Rashida Tlaib's, is the Congressional District with the lowest number of respondents in the Trafalgar poll.
Anyone think that there might be some Govt thinking that favours making the economic effect of Covid-19 as bad as possible (which people en masse don't seem to be blaming the Govt for) to hide the economic catastrophe of a no-deal brexit?
Nope, the medicines shortages alone caused by No Deal would be amplified a lot during a really bad pandemic.
Even if we weren't in the midst of a pandemic, the medicines shortages would lead to some avoidable deaths.
It's something the NHS Trusts are really worried about.
You're assuming their motivation is to limit economic and health damage. As opposed to load as much damage as possible on Covid and not Brexit. Regardless of the actual level of damage itself.
I believe the government is breathtakingly incompetent, not malevolent.
Perhaps I'm just naive.
I used to think "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence" was a self-evidently correct rule. But I no longer see what is self-evident about it.
That's because you strongly dislike those to whom the rule would have you give the benefit of the doubt. Lots of principles don't survive personal bias.
Not really. Apart from anything I regard incompetence in people whose competence matters critically to others, to be as big a flaw as malice, so there's no scope for bias one way or the other.
Anyone think that there might be some Govt thinking that favours making the economic effect of Covid-19 as bad as possible (which people en masse don't seem to be blaming the Govt for) to hide the economic catastrophe of a no-deal brexit?
Nope, the medicines shortages alone caused by No Deal would be amplified a lot during a really bad pandemic.
Even if we weren't in the midst of a pandemic, the medicines shortages would lead to some avoidable deaths.
It's something the NHS Trusts are really worried about.
You're assuming their motivation is to limit economic and health damage. As opposed to load as much damage as possible on Covid and not Brexit. Regardless of the actual level of damage itself.
I believe the government is breathtakingly incompetent, not malevolent.
Perhaps I'm just naive.
Throwing London to the dogs so that the North doesn't feel bad seems malevolent to me.
Of course Robert, if you're suspicions about Trafalgar are correct one would be justified in eliminating their results from all the polling averages. That would cause a significant increase in Biden's poll lead.
I really am beginning to wonder what is holding up Trump's price. It is ressembling the Leadsome puzzle, for those that remember the strange behaviour of her price during the Tory Leadership contest.
On what basis would you possibly exclude the only pollster to correctly get Michigan and Pennsylvania right in 2016? I am astonished so many on here have still learnt nothing from 2016
Of course Robert, if you're suspicions about Trafalgar are correct one would be justified in eliminating their results from all the polling averages. That would cause a significant increase in Biden's poll lead.
I really am beginning to wonder what is holding up Trump's price. It is ressembling the Leadsome puzzle, for those that remember the strange behaviour of her price during the Tory Leadership contest.
On what basis would you possibly exclude the only pollster to correctly get Michigan and Pennsylvania right in 2016? I am astonished so many on here have still learnt nothing from 2016
On the grounds that they don't show their workings and may well be entirely bogus, for the many reasons given here this evening.
Little old ladies sometimes get the winner of the Grand National using all sorts of weird and hilarious selection methods. Trafalgar's overall record is no great shakes. There is more than a suspicion they just got lucky with some of their 2016 results. They could easily dispel suspicions by publishing their cross-tables. They don't. As a punter, I'd have to be a right mug to trust they didn't just fluke it in 2016.
But go ahead and back Trump if you are so sure they have the magic touch. No law against it.
Much as I hope Murdoch is right, do we know if he has a good track record or anything? Farage thought Leave had lost the referendum, half of Trump's campaign staff (some say including Trump) thought he'd lose in 2016.
Trump does not even necessarily need to come from behind now, according to some state polls from key swing states in the last few days he is ahead in enough swing states for a narrow re election, even if he is likely to lose the national popular vote again.
People should know this about Trafalgar's history - Robert Cahaly is the face of the company on twitter. https://www.wistv.com/story/13429729/gop-consultant-to-face-sled-arrest-for-illegal-robocalls/ 41-year-old Robert Cahaly faces charges that he purchased, then disseminated computer-generated calls from an automatically dialed announcing service to potential South Carolina voters on September 23.
According to SLED, the calls were political in nature and were allegedly made without properly disclosing the identity of the originating party to the call recipients, which is in violation of SC Code 16-17-446.
We previously reported that the Ken Ard's campaign manager was accused of robocalling and that there was a warrant issued for his arrest. In fact, the campaign manager is not accused of robocalling and is not in trouble with the law.
SLED has determined that the calls were made through a Richland County landline telephone number owned by Gadsden and Greene Strategies, a company owned by Cahaly.
The calls, according to SLED, were allegedly made to numerous voters in House Districts 26 (Greenville and Pickens), 78 (Richland County), 79 (Kershaw and Richland Counties), 98 (Dorchester County), 108 (Charleston and Georgetown Counties) and 115 (James Island and Folly Beach).
Who cares? They forecast Trump would win Michigan and Florida right in 2016 and that is all that matters
I think you have stated your philosophy rather nicely there, and it is clear why you do not bet. If you ever start betting, please let me know.
Meanwhile you can hardly contain your excitement that your orange turdbucket might just scrape home for four more years of glorious One Nation Conservatism.
If Trafalgar systematically take other polls and skew them to the Republicans/Trump by 6%, and last time the polls all had a systematic bias to the Democrats of 6% then last time they would have been very successful. If all the other pollsters have now updated their methodology to account for this bias then Trafalgar will look a bit stupid if they've based their assumptions on the same methodology.
Is that a serious suggestion? Is there any particular reason to suspect that's happening?
In principle opinion polling is one of the defences that a democracy has against an election being stolen by ballot-stuffing, fraudulent counts and similar means.
If a supposed polling company is intentionally producing poll results to be biased then the intention is to hide the blatant stealing of an election.
There's no evidence that Trafalgar is a real, commercial organisation.
It's not incorporated. It doesn't appear to have any employees or a business address. It claims on its PDFs to use a combination of calls and an on-line panel, yet there's no way to join the panel. It doesn't seem to have any customers (so where does the money come from to do these polls), and is dormant in between elections years. And it's run by a Republican operative.
That's certainly suspicious. Thanks to others for their comments.
For balance I do think they do polling: only peeps genuinely running a crappy polling outfit would have the gall to put this on their website
The Trafalgar Group delivers its polling questionnaires utilizing a mix of six different methods:
Live callers Integrated voice response Text messages Emails Two other proprietary digital methods they don’t share publicly.
You are assuming that they are CURRENTLY using all of these methods. When it could be that they've used (how legitimately who knows?) them at some point in the PAST.
IMHO Trafalgar is just a robo-call chop-shop, that hit the jackpot in 2016 thanks to less-than-stellar polling (the real kind) plus the criminal incompetence of Robbie Mook ("a mook by name and nature) . Caveat emptor!
Even robo-call chop-shops are usually incorporated. Either that, or Mr Cahaly is paying for everything on his personal Amex card.
And of course it is worth stating the obvious - any such polling error could just as easily be in favour of Biden as Trump.
Anyone for an underestimate of Shy-Bidens?
I've been pondering this for a while, and haven't gone back over the data to check, but I wonder if polling errors aren't more commonly in favour of Republicans. If so, I wonder if they aren't entirely polling error and partially the result of vote suppression meaning voters who intended to vote Democrat were more likely then Republicans to end up not voting due to long lines etc.
Like I say, I've not checked the numbers to even see if polling error isn't entirely random. So I may be barking up the wrong tree. Obama clearly outperformed in 2012, and as you say Biden would crush Trump if he did that again (and, perhaps more to the point, even a small Democrat overperformance may hand them 2-4 more Senators).
If there were serious voter suppression and other form of cheating going on I think you would expect the Dems to do relatively well in non-competitive contests, i.e. the heavily red and heavily blue States, where cheating is pointless or unnecessary. Not sure there is any evidence for this.
Fair point. Though when I say voter suppression I'm not necessarily talking about nuclear options, but if closing polling stations in black districts and so on caused turnout to be lowered in those areas then it might be most voters wouldn't factor that in to their poll response on likely turnout filters - but it would affect their actual likelihood to turnout.
Nonetheless, you are probably right and as I say I've not checked the numbers to see if they give any credence to my ponderings.
Trump does not even necessarily need to come from behind now, according to some state polls from key swing states in the last few days he is ahead in enough swing states for a narrow re election, even if he is likely to lose the national popular vote again.
People should know this about Trafalgar's history - Robert Cahaly is the face of the company on twitter. https://www.wistv.com/story/13429729/gop-consultant-to-face-sled-arrest-for-illegal-robocalls/ 41-year-old Robert Cahaly faces charges that he purchased, then disseminated computer-generated calls from an automatically dialed announcing service to potential South Carolina voters on September 23.
According to SLED, the calls were political in nature and were allegedly made without properly disclosing the identity of the originating party to the call recipients, which is in violation of SC Code 16-17-446.
We previously reported that the Ken Ard's campaign manager was accused of robocalling and that there was a warrant issued for his arrest. In fact, the campaign manager is not accused of robocalling and is not in trouble with the law.
SLED has determined that the calls were made through a Richland County landline telephone number owned by Gadsden and Greene Strategies, a company owned by Cahaly.
The calls, according to SLED, were allegedly made to numerous voters in House Districts 26 (Greenville and Pickens), 78 (Richland County), 79 (Kershaw and Richland Counties), 98 (Dorchester County), 108 (Charleston and Georgetown Counties) and 115 (James Island and Folly Beach).
Who cares? They forecast Trump would win Michigan and Florida right in 2016 and that is all that matters
I think you have stated your philosophy rather nicely there, and it is clear why you do not bet. If you ever start betting, please let me know.
Meanwhile you can hardly contain your excitement that your orange turdbucket might just scrape home for four more years of glorious One Nation Conservatism.
After that Trafalgar poll I have made a small bet actually at 6/1 that Trump to get 270 to 299 EC votes, I don't bet often but do occasionally if good value
It's telling how many people seem to have been surprised by discovering that the face Trump presents to the world is actually who he is. It's not an act, it's not modulated at all.
Edit: And that it is pathetic, as he notes, is more important than that it is enraging.
And of course it is worth stating the obvious - any such polling error could just as easily be in favour of Biden as Trump.
Anyone for an underestimate of Shy-Bidens?
I've been pondering this for a while, and haven't gone back over the data to check, but I wonder if polling errors aren't more commonly in favour of Republicans. If so, I wonder if they aren't entirely polling error and partially the result of vote suppression meaning voters who intended to vote Democrat were more likely then Republicans to end up not voting due to long lines etc.
Like I say, I've not checked the numbers to even see if polling error isn't entirely random. So I may be barking up the wrong tree. Obama clearly outperformed in 2012, and as you say Biden would crush Trump if he did that again (and, perhaps more to the point, even a small Democrat overperformance may hand them 2-4 more Senators).
I don't believe that's the case. In 2016, Republicans were understated by about 1.5%. In 2012, it was Dems by 3% (the biggest Presidential polling error I've found). Then in '08, the polls were broadly right. While in 2004, the Republicans outperformed, and in 2000, it was Al Gore's Democrats.
Comments
However, a little over a year after his inauguration as LG, Ards was forced to resign due to his indictment and conviction for violation of state ethic laws.
Excerpt from story:
“In summary, the State Grand Jury charges Mr. Ard with a scheme, developed as part of his candidacy for Lt. Governor, to create the false appearance of a groundswell of political support through fictitious or bogus campaign contributions,” Wilson said in a statement. “These donations to Mr. Ard’s campaign were not a genuine demonstration of financial support. Instead, they represented cash in the amount of $75,000 which was funneled from Mr. Ard to others and ultimately back to his campaign as purported contributions from citizens in the community.”
The charges against Ard include four counts of unlawful reimbursement of campaign contributions; two counts of falsely filing campaign reports; and one count encompassing multiple acts of personal use of campaign funds.
In court, the attorney general’s office detailed how Ard had conducted a campaign finance scheme in which he paid people to donate to his campaign. One woman, a prosecutor said, would meet others in a parking lot with a bag full of cash that totaled up to $20,000. One witness, the prosecutor said, likened the behavior to feeling like a drug-dealing transaction.
Re: Cahaly, story note that
Speaking to an acquaintance, Cahaly once described the State Ethics Commission as being like a wide-open cow pasture with a string of barbed wire around it. Candidates, he’d reportedly said, can do pretty much whatever they want inside the pasture — and if they brush up against the boundaries it might sting a little, but not much more than that. (Conversely, he’d apparently likened the Federal Election Commission to a small prison yard with armed guards with machine guns on the towers ready to fire on anyone who made a wrong move.)
In taking on Ard as client, Cahaly shook up the staff and moved the campaign headquarters from the little hometown real estate office to the big city of Columbia. The move apparently infuriated some of Ard’s merry band of local staffers.
With a more professionalized operation, Ard kicked off his campaign by announcing that he’d raised $127,000 in a single day with an accompanying photograph of him holding an oversized check. (As it turns out, his exit from political life can be tied to that same picture -- prosecutors mentioned it to the judge as evidence prior to Ard’s sentencing at court.)
The Trafalgar Group delivers its polling questionnaires utilizing a mix of six different methods:
Live callers
Integrated voice response
Text messages
Emails
Two other proprietary digital methods they don’t share publicly.
So, which is it Trafalgar?
1) Do you have many other examples of a specific pollster being a "Gold Standard" pollster in repeated Presidential elections
2) Are you surprised that many supposed respected pollsters who called it wrong in 2016 haven't adjusted their methodology to counter mistakes from last time and/or that the polling gap between them and Trafalgar hasn't narrowed as a result?
Turns out this "gold standard" pollster is a GOP super-hack up to his eyeballs in dirty tricks and worse.
South Carolina politics is an infamously tough league, thanks to bean-ball pitchers like Cahaly. For whom (based on evidence) manipulating some polling would seem to be the LEAST of his demerits.
https://twitter.com/dantoujours/status/1316844679783223297
So the Tories do not really need SLAB or SLD tactical votes to hold most of their MSPs and make 1 or 2 gains, however SLab who only won 1 Scottish Westminster constituency and the LDs who only won 3 Westminster constituencies desperately need Tory tactical votes to beat the SNP in the central belt constituencies and the Highlands and Edinburgh
Trafalgar are now the gold standard with Trump on the ballot for as 2016 showed they are the best pollster at identifying the shy Trump vote, especially in the rustbelt swing states, hence I am now also of the view it is more likely than not Trump will be re elected even if he loses the popular vote again
IMHO Trafalgar is just a robo-call chop-shop, that hit the jackpot in 2016 thanks to less-than-stellar polling (the real kind) plus the criminal incompetence of Robbie Mook ("a mook by name and nature) . Caveat emptor!
There has been a lot of analysis of this issue, as you'd expect, on the TV here in the US. But no-one ever seems to address what pollsters are doing differently this time to avoid that mis-sampling of the white vote.
Is there somewhere that explains the changes made by pollsters? About 3 months ago I read one article from one pollster saying that they had corrected for the Midwest Mistake (I forget how, and no longer have the reference), but I have seen nothing else.
Been ages since I was personally involved in a letters rogatory .
Either makes sense to me.
From what we’ve seen of various Republicans getting up to in their downtime, the appeal is not implausible.
https://twitter.com/jaketapper/status/1317188482251608066?s=20
Even if we weren't in the midst of a pandemic, the medicines shortages would lead to some avoidable deaths.
It's something the NHS Trusts are really worried about.
They list the percentage of response by Congressional district. Arizona has 9. By Amazing coincidence the 5 held by Dems make up only 49% of the respondents and 51% come from the 4 Rep held seats.
Gonna go check some of their other polls.
"As leader of The Trafalgar Group, Cahaly oversees a group of allied companies. Together with his team he works with federal, state, and local candidates as well as business and industry groups. Cahaly has particular experience and expertise in strategy, polling, and data analytics. He is also regarded as a specialist of issue advocacy and independent expenditure campaigns."
Note that the whole Trafalgar "polling" operation -actually a species of push polling - is straight (or rather crooked) right out of the Lee Atwater playbook.
Other interesting stats, the R peaked nationally at over 2 in the middle of September and tracks the start of school and then it goes up again around a week to ten days after the start of uni. It fell in between those two period and it looks like it's falling again.
If this was at all credible it would be a big deal.
Of course Robert, if you're suspicions about Trafalgar are correct one would be justified in eliminating their results from all the polling averages. That would cause a significant increase in Biden's poll lead.
I really am beginning to wonder what is holding up Trump's price. It is ressembling the Leadsome puzzle, for those that remember the strange behaviour of her price during the Tory Leadership contest.
"But one thing came up again and again in our interviews: Pollsters told us they were now weighting their samples by education, because one key takeaway from 2016 was just how important someone’s level of educational attainment was in predicting their vote. “In mid-2016, we changed our weights by education, moving the percentage of high school or less respondents up while dropping the college-plus down,” said Jeff Horwitt, a senior vice president at Hart Research, one of the pollsters for the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. It was the middle of the election cycle, but already Horwitt and his team were concerned that they might be underestimating the share of the electorate who didn’t have a four-year college degree, and therefore, missing some of Trump’s support. They were right to be concerned, too. A real problem for the polling industry writ large was the underrepresentation of voters with little or no college education.
Some pollsters such as Ipsos and the Pew Research Center have taken weighting by education a step further by weighting for educational attainment within racial groups. This change could be especially important in state-level polling in 2020, as Trump primarily outperformed polls in states that had large populations of white Americans who didn’t have a bachelor’s degree. “This year we are ensuring that we include the combination of education and race/ethnicity in our sampling,” said Cliff Young, president of U.S. public affairs at Ipsos.
Monmouth University Polling Institute director Patrick Murray cautioned, however, that weighting by education isn’t a silver bullet. He noted that weighting by education in a postmortem analysis of their own polling in 2016 had only “a small impact on accuracy and on its own [did] not explain the supposed polling miss in 2016.” Still, weighting by education was, by far, the most common methodology change pollsters reported."
On thing that I had to cut out of my article was that pollster error is still very possible, and I worry the final article is a tad over-bullish. I'm trying to say that a repeat error isn't that likely due to adjustments, and a double error would be needed for Trump to win. So he probably can't win the same way as last time, but he could still win due to polling error.
My point is that we shouldn't expect such an error just because there was one last time, and that a double error is very unlikely due to Biden's lead in varied states.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-pollsters-have-changed-since-2016-and-what-still-worries-them-about-2020/
Perhaps I'm just naive.
https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1317194591435657217
It is also stupid of the Biden camp not to just issue a clear cut denial they ever met this Ukrainian if they are absolutely sure that he didn’t meet him. Saying it wasn’t in the official diary and then saying the official diary had long gaps just increases the questions.
The NY Post are continuing to hammer on this. For a story that apparently has many holes in it, the NYP definitely seem very keen to play double or quits
And of course it is worth stating the obvious - any such polling error could just as easily be in favour of Biden as Trump.
Anyone for an underestimate of Shy-Bidens?
Judging by right wing twitter and Trump himself his base is beyond any and all reasonable explanations mind.
Arizona
Biden 49
Trump 47
Florida
Biden 50
Trump 47
Michigan
Biden 51
Trump 44
North Carolina
Biden 48
Trump 48
Pennsylvania
Biden 51
Trump 45
Wisconsin
Biden 52
Trump 45
Like I say, I've not checked the numbers to even see if polling error isn't entirely random. So I may be barking up the wrong tree. Obama clearly outperformed in 2012, and as you say Biden would crush Trump if he did that again (and, perhaps more to the point, even a small Democrat overperformance may hand them 2-4 more Senators).
https://mainernews.com/susan-collins-backs-qanon-believers-for-maine-legislature/
“ What I understand about the QAnon program is that the military is going to need to intervene eventually,” Redmond said. Asked what he meant by “military intervention,” he explained: “Nazis never lost World War II. [Nazism] was dissolved, they were consumed into the U.S.A., and the rich, cultist, Satanist families continued to utilize this Nazi force.
“The end of World War III will end with Donald Trump,” he continued. “It’s already happening with the crushing of ISIS. There will be another Nuremberg trial, some of these icons of American industry and business will be held accountable at Gitmo [the military detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba].”
Redmond said QAnon has caused him to question the very nature of his nation. “I always look at two sides of the coin on this stuff and think, ‘Have I been deceived? … Has [traditional patriotism] really been a trick to expose us patriots, so we are the first on the trains to the FEMA camps? … I’m ready to go to the camps if necessary. That’s why I’m fighting and putting my life on the line. I have faith.”
Redmond is challenging Democrat David McCrea, a retired teacher...
The other guy is even more demented.
What's new?
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/finland-prime-minister-sanna-marin-photo-low-cut-blazer-a4571806.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_New_Zealand_cannabis_referendum
https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1317172589782065154?s=20
https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1317171645614870529?s=20
The GOP didn't even put up a candidate in 2018
Little old ladies sometimes get the winner of the Grand National using all sorts of weird and hilarious selection methods. Trafalgar's overall record is no great shakes. There is more than a suspicion they just got lucky with some of their 2016 results. They could easily dispel suspicions by publishing their cross-tables. They don't. As a punter, I'd have to be a right mug to trust they didn't just fluke it in 2016.
But go ahead and back Trump if you are so sure they have the magic touch. No law against it.
https://www.betfair.com.au/exchange/plus/en/politics/new-zealand-general-election-betting-29674007
Meanwhile you can hardly contain your excitement that your orange turdbucket might just scrape home for four more years of glorious One Nation Conservatism.
Today's ES editorial.
https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/evening-standard-comment-enough-there-must-be-no-further-restrictions-feeding-the-hungry-a4571898.html
Nonetheless, you are probably right and as I say I've not checked the numbers to see if they give any credence to my ponderings.
Edit: And that it is pathetic, as he notes, is more important than that it is enraging.
https://www.youtube.com/onenewsnz/live
No declarations, count at polling stations, whole country should be counted in 5 hours or so.
MMP electoral system (similar to Germany, Scotland, Wales).
Fwiw I think Labour will be just short of a majority and will form a coalition with the Greens.
Thanks!
DC