So now cases are still out of control due to Government failure, we've now resorted to lying about the cases and making faulty graphs. Goodness me.
There getting rather out of control everywhere. France, the Netherlands, Eastern Europe, and my very local area has an incidence, I learnt this morning, of over 1000 (one thousand) per 100,000.
Given Drakeford’s in charge here, who’s Government is failing?
In fairness it’s a shit show everywhere.
Oh and if my kettle blows up and I venture out to the plague ridden shops of Cardiff post 18.00 today I can’t buy one, because Drakeford’s banned the sale of them.
This is very hard to watch. Not very illuminating. Jumbled sentences from both of them. I don't think it will change many votes. I don't think Trump will actually lose votes this time, but nor will he gain them. It is not the game changer that Trump needs.
If you believe Trafalgar or Rasmussen and IBID/TIPP he does not need a game changer, just not to lose any support tonight
If you believe the poll modellers like The Economist or Nate Silver, he most certainly does need a game changer.
If Nate Silver was right in 2016 Hillary Clinton would have won over 300 EC votes and now be President
How many times.....? Nate Silver's group was 28% right, which was more pro Trump than any of the other groups giving probability predictions for the 2016 election.
Or to put it another way, Biden is in a much better position in the polling than Clinton was 4 years ago and has been for months. If HYUFD really believes Trump should be favorite it's not based on any evidence.
Experience. Few predicted 2016 result.
Experience should teach you not to fall into the normalcy bias mistake. It happened with me in 2019 when I assumed Corbyn would repeat 2015.
The circumstances this time around are vastly, viscerally, different from 2016. The polls don't lie. They didn't in 2019 and they're not in 2020. But it's much more than that. The GOP have distanced themselves from their President. They know they've lost.
And lost big.
I'm going to use 538 and compare Trump's popular vote forecast lead with that of the Republican candidate in the closest Senate races. IA Trump +0.3 GOP -1.0 GA Trump 0.0 GOP +2.6 NC Trump -2.3 GOP -2.9 MT Trump +10.2 GOP +3.0 ME Trump -12.1 GOP -3.0 KS Trump +10.6 GOP +4.9 SC Trump +7.9 GOP +5.2 AZ Trump -2.9 GOP -6.0 AL Trump +19.2 GOP +6.2 AK Trump +7.4 GOP +6.3 MI Trump -7.9 GOP -6.4 CO Trump -11.7 GOP -7.7 TX Trump +2.1 GOP +8.1 MS Trump +13.2 GOP +9.1 MN Trump -7.7 GOP -12.0 KY Trump +19.1 GOP +13.4 ---- Mean Trump +2.8 GOP +1.2
I don't want this to be true, but Trump still looks like he is an electoral asset for the Republicans. I want American voters to judge him so badly that he drags the whole GOP down with him. But the numbers don't show that story.
Otherwise Republican Senate candidates should be outperforming Trump.
Trump won the biggest electoral college victory for the Republicans since Bush Snr in 1988 and he won Wisconsin for the first time for a Republican presidential candidate since Reagan in 1984, in the rustbelt he is an electoral asset for the GOP compared to a generic Republican, in California he certainly is not (Hillary won California by an even bigger percentage than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 for example) but it is the former he needs for EC victory, he can afford to lose California heavily and the popular vote
There are only three Midwest states in the 16 that I looked at and Trump's advantage over the GOP was smaller in those (+1.0) than in the set as a whole (+1.6).
In Iowa Trump did better than the GOP candidate, in Michigan fractionally worse (though Trafalgar suggest the GOP will win both the Michigan presidential and Senate race) you provided no data for Wisconsin or Pennsylvania in the rustbelt both of which Trump won for the first time for a Republican since the 1980s and Trump won Ohio by more than even George W Bush did too
HYUFD - please don't reply to this post with Trafalgar did best last time because that is not going to be the question.
Do you believe Trafalgar is a pollster or pundit? I genuinely don't know, but @rcs1000 and @Alistair have both posted evidence that Trafalgar is not a pollster but a pundit. They may well be a very good pundit.
If Trafalgar is a pundit it should not be posting spoof polls. If it is a pollster how do you respond to @rcs1000 and @Alistair?
If Trump wins the EC again Trafalgar will definitely be a pollster and a goldstandard one at that, if Trump loses the EC it will just be a pundit, simple really!
Why would Trump winning or losing make them a pollster or not?
They are either engaging in legitimate polling or they are not.
If they get the correct result obviously a legitimate pollster, the whole point of polls is to forecast, correctly, election results and the views of the public otherwise they are worthless
There is a bet on the throw of an unbiased six-sided die. If it doesn't come with a six, you get evens. A good value bet - yes? You take it.
Someone in the crowd, - let's call them Trafalgar - says "It's going to be a six!" The die is thrown. It comes up six. You lose.
Four years later, a similar bet is offered. Evens that it won't be a six. Analysis shows that that the chances that is won't be a six are 5/6 so evens is still a value bet.
But someone on a blog points out that Trafalgar got it right last time and is still saying it will be a six. Do you listen to them or rely on the analysis?
Barnesian nails it
I'd suggest the difference is that you don't know if the die is weighted. You couldn't work it out last time and you are not so sure this time.
So Evens vs 5/6 might not be so great
You are stretching massively - Barnesian made it clear that it is an unbiased six-sided die.
Plus last time Trafalgar shouted "it will be a six" repeatedly and were generally wrong. They hit a six in a state and then are perceived as a sage by ignoring all the times it wasn't a six elsewhere.
Reminds me of a telephone tipster scam that I thought of years ago but never implemented. You get a bunch of people (say 80) to call a number for a racing tip. You pick , say, a 8 runner race where there ideally is no clear favourite. You split the 80 callers into 8 groups of 10 and give each group a different tip so that you have covered the field. You then start charging the 10 who were on the winner for future tips cus they think you are a genius.
That’s similar to what Derren Brown did for a show “The System” a few years back. He gave thousands of people random racing tips, and a handful of them ended up with half a dozen winners in a row and thought he was a genius tipster.
I thought that's an old one - sending out different tips to cover all the possibilities etc. Heard of it as a postal thing, though.
Come to think of it, email being free would make it easier. You could even auto-generate the emails based on the list of runners in the various races.
The Horace Batchelor method. He came from Keynsham spelled K E Y N S H A M.
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I am wondering if a load of polls for this election are just complete garbage.