Seems a bit odd

JD Vance compared Trump to Hitler.
How can anyone vote for Vance and Trump?

Don’t worry, I don’t think they’re going to bum you.

I have visions of woke Swedish Goblin types stopping people on the street and sneeringly asking them if they will be voting for Trump. There will be a portion of Trump supporters that would rather avoid the aggravation and just walk on by. It’s not surprising that Trump outperforms his polls.

I do wonder whether the polling companies are weighting their current results in Trump’s favour, just to make up for the fact that their raw numbers have been inaccurate in the same direction twice in a row. You know, simply add a couple of percentage points to his numbers, if their numbers turned out to be a couple of points too low in 2016 and 2020. It’s what I would do, if my business depended on my headline prediction being correct.

I’m not saying he’s not ahead in the polls in any case; but be wary of assuming that any lead might really be bigger than the headline numbers.

I compared myself to Hitler once. I concluded Hitler had killed a lot more people than I did, started a bigger war than I ever had, hated Jews, which I don’t, and unlike me didn’t drink beer.

But obviously, as I once compared myself to Hitler I must be a bit like him. After all we also have some similarities, like two legs, two arms, at least one gonad, and we are both naturalized German citizens. I must even confess to having been vegetarian for quite some time.

So perhaps I am quite a lot like Hitler, despite my protestations.

Don’t Vote Trump – have you tried Anusol?

BiG – I must even confess to having been vegetarian for quite some time.

Was this your idea or her idea?

I know a guy who was forced into veganism for a while on account of how attractive his girlfriend was.

So perhaps I am quite a lot like Hitler, despite my protestations.

Maybe the real Hitler is the friends we made along the way.

I bet they have trouble getting a good sample of Democrat voters as well, given that a lot of them are dead.

Don’t Vote Trump – have you tried Anusol?

That (trademark non sequitur) made me laugh, Steve. Preparation H wouldn’t have the same (anal) ring…

All rather meaningless, since I doubt few here are even part of Trump’s electorate.

Not everyone lives in the US you know. I live in Scotland, FFS!

As with 2016 and 2020 it’s going to come down to how much the Democrats cheat and how much each voter hates the obnoxiousness of Trump or the incompetence of Harris.

The polls have very little to do with that and their methods of deciphering that conundrum are both biased and antiquated. Not going to be much help there.

I’m sure we’ll find out who won the election sometime in 2025.

I reckon The Donald is going to sneak it. I think going on Joe Rogan, serving fries, he gets out there and Kamala hasn’t.

Expect much gnashing and wailing.

John Galt,

how much each voter hates the obnoxiousness of Trump

He is a lot less obnoxious this time around. He has clearly mellowed as a person. The McDonalds stunt made him seem very likeable and, in British terms, the kind of politician with whom one might like to have a pint. (Presumably the American version is a burger?)

Theo – thank you.

It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Hitler – It was Adolfool Trump’s own VP pick who compared him to Hitler.
I win the argument by pointing that out.

Congratulations, here is your prize:

8======D (‿ˠ‿)

Jim – they also accused General Douglas MacArthur of being Hitler.

It’s all so tiresome. Maybe accuse people of being Stalin for a change? Or Dracula maybe. I’m going to accuse Kemi Badenoch of being Baron Samedi. Why not?

I see that “real man” is back.

– I reckon The Donald is going to sneak it.

I just can’t read it. We have a very similar situation to 2020, with a ridiculously dimwit Democrat candidate that is being hidden from (and by) the media; and a very visible Trump holding big rallies everywhere. I thought Trump would walk it then but apparently (leaving aside fraud theories) the Dems really concentrated on just getting out the vote where it mattered. What worries me is that I haven’t seen anything about the Republicans getting their local “ground games” together this time to get their voters to the polling stations, which was their supposed failing previously.

New this time we have less censored social media; a massive invasion of the border; Trump’s iconic and heroic assassination defiance; a bitter Biden undermining Harris, and a big government paramilitary bureaucracy invading an American home and killing a popular cuddly squirrel.

So I’m going with:
If Kamala it’ll be like last time – close where it counts.
If Trump it’ll be a landslide.

I now have a vision of thousands of men standing on a hillside with little improvised moustaches shouting “I’m Hitler !”

And Lawrence Olivier dressed as Simon Wiesnthal, with his head in his hands.

Battleground state polling shows former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris locked in an extremely tight race

If this was true, you’d expect to see some energy and hustle about the Kamala campaign, but there’s nothing there, and no discernible enthusiasm for her. She can’t even get a token nomination from shitlib newspapers. All the signs suggest a DOA Democratic campaign, far limper than 2020.

The immediate aftermath of Biden being couped by DNC insiders was the most blatant media astroturfing since Covid. They were pushing Kamala hard as some kind of cool funny aunt and tried to reframe her retarded guffawing as “joy”. That didn’t work, so they tried the Clinton 2016 playbook of muh vagina. That didn’t work, so their final message to the American people is that Trump is a mean ol’ Hitler.

But I looked this Hitler guy up on Wikipedia. Hitler was a relatively youthful 50 when he started WW2, and only 56 when he was tragically killed by Hitler. Drumph is nearly 80. Also, Hitler was quite racist. Trump is probably the least racist man on Earth. He probably would have shagged Grace Jones back in the day. I wouldn’t have, mind.

Steve – If I wanted the opinion of an old fa*t. I would have broken wind.

Vance has raised significant concerns. This unease is amplified by the fact that Vance, in the past, made a controversial comparison between Trump and Adolf Hitler. Such an analogy, even if made years ago, is profoundly alarming when evaluating the potential future leadership of the United States.

Vance’s prior comparison suggests that he once viewed Trump as a dangerous figure whose influence and rhetoric could parallel that of one of history’s most infamous demagogues. The characterization of Trump as a potential authoritarian leader who manipulates populist anger to consolidate power is not new, but when this sentiment comes from an individual now aligned with him, it is particularly worrisome. It raises the question of whether Vance’s current support represents a change of heart or a pragmatic political alignment that ignores his initial fears.

Trump’s history of erratic and unpredictable foreign policy decisions adds another layer of concern. During his first term, he repeatedly criticized NATO and threatened to reduce USA involvement in the defence. Of Europe.
The possibility of Trump returning to the White House, potentially with Vance as vice president, stokes fears that such policies might resurface, leading to a reduction in support for NATO. This could create a power vacuum, emboldening adversarial nations like Russia to pursue aggressive strategies with less resistance. The consequences of such a shift could be chaos:
Europe could be vulnerable to increased destabilization, economic coercion, or even military confrontations that go unchallenged by a disengaged U.S.

The broad concern is that under leadership fueled by nationalist and isolationist ideologies, the USA commitment to global stability could erode. A USA. president who embodies the characteristics of a demagogue, prioritizing domestic and personal power over international alliances, may decide to withdraw crucial support from our ally NATO and the EU, and other partnerships. This would embolden leaders like Vladimir Putin, who has long sought to weaken Western alliances and expand Russia’s unchecked power.

Don’t. Vote Hitler – Then why did JD Vance compare Trump to your Dictator Hitler?

Hmm…

Vance once questioned whether Trump could be “America’s Hitler” in a private Facebook message in 2016 to one of his former roommates.

It was that or a “cynical asshole like Nixon,” Vance wrote in messages to former Yale Law School classmate Josh McLaurin, now a Democratic state senator in Georgia.

How embarrassing (for you). It appears Mr JD was shit talking in a private conversation eight years ago and this is making your Tena Lady soggy.

Steve – If I wanted the opinion of an old fa*t. I would have broken wind.

I assume you can play it like a brass band, since that bumming you keep mentioning. I don’t think you’re going to convince anyone to vote Hitler with these childish shenanigans.

Vance has said that he made that comment about Trump because he listened to what people were saying and hadn’t investigated for himself. Make of that what you will.

However, one big difference between Trump and his Democratic opponents is that he has no inclination to engage in lawful to criminalise, bankrupt and imprison them.

It is very much looking like a major Trump victory with most – or even all – the critical swing states going red.

@Paul

“I do wonder whether the polling companies are weighting their current results in Trump’s favour, just to make up for the fact that their raw numbers have been inaccurate in the same direction twice in a row. You know, simply add a couple of percentage points to his numbers, if their numbers turned out to be a couple of points too low in 2016 and 2020. It’s what I would do, if my business depended on my headline prediction being correct.”

Yeah they don’t do it as blatantly as banging a few extra percent on the candidate they think they’re underestimating, but they do effectively do it by messing around with parameters underlying their statistical models, principally the “likelihood to vote” factor. So if you cocked up in the past by downweighting a demographic group of likely Trump voters because you don’t think they’re going to turn out and in the last election it turns out they did, then now you start upweighting them more.

Obvs would be nicer if polling companies didn’t have to do mess with the data like this, but truth is they’ve got to or we’d be complaining about polls constantly being absolutely miles off from the election results when relatively simple adjustments would fix them. Not everyone who says they’re going to turn out to vote for a given candidate actually does so, and there are lots of tells about who’s likely to follow through with it and who isn’t. Age being a famously good predictor – pensioners vote.

Also goes to explain why a lot of election campaigning is really about differential turnout, getting your folk to cast their votes – especially in toss-up states – and surprisingly little is about swaying undecided voters. Unfortunately if differential turnout between demographic groups changes substantially between elections, then in a tight race this can utterly screw over the polling companies. Using likelihood to vote weightings based on the previous election will fail bigly this time.

What is really hard to pick up on is when a whole bunch of previous non-voters decide to (re)join the voting pool for once. Someone not having voted in previous elections is, like age, a good way to gauge that they won’t vote this time either. But if they defy that expectation, then downweighting them turns out to be a big mistake. This is one of the reason so many of the Brexit polls were wrong: lots of Leave voters were not your traditional kind of voter, and turnout at the referendum was much higher than in recent general elections, so millions of non-traditional voters must have taken part.

The bad news for Trump is that the differential turnout figures based on early voting patterns suggest a big surge in women voting. News from the Trump camp suggests they’re genuinely concerned about this. It may not matter in the final analysis, but women are a weak spot in his polling and he’s undeniably had a very “bro” campaign. If he completely crashes and burns, that will be a big part of the story. A recent poll in Iowa by Ann Selzer, who have an excellent record predicting that state, puts Trump 3% behind despite winning by 8% last time out. Other polls still put Trump ahead in Iowa, but what’s interesting about the Ann Selzer poll is that they don’t see Trump losing existing voters to the independent/undecided category, rather the shift is entirely driven by modelled changes in turn-out. People who previously weren’t likely to vote have become likely to vote, and that camp of new voters entering the pool leans heavily pro-Harris. That’s an interesting finding because, if true, it’s exactly the kind of change most polling companies will struggle to predict. My guess is the overall result from that poll is an outlier, but Trump may win Iowa by a narrower margin than currently expected, and if the pattern seen in that data emerges elsewhere he’s in a lot of trouble.

After tomorrow’s election I vill be heading for Stalingrad with my old friend, Ron Ribbentrop.

Mr H @ 7.42, will that nice Mr McGoring from the Bell and Compasses be joining you?

I think DVH should go and have a lie down in a darkened room for a bit……

Anon: Thank you for taking the time to provide that detailed explanation of how and why US pollsters adjust their raw numbers, particularly the explanation for the apparently anomalous Iowa poll. Very enlightening.

Nein Jim.
Via Dachau to visit an old friend.

Steve. – Would you force rape victims to give birth to their abuser’s child?

I think it is evil to force woman to give birth to rapist’s children.

Pollsters in the UK are regulated by British Polling Council rules which hold them to a pretty high standard – it largely eliminates leading questions and means pollsters must be transparent about their data. Being able to see the raw data is helpful when checking if pollsters have failed to get enough respondents from different demographic groups, and makes it clearer just how much the final result has been massaged by their differential turnout models. You don’t need a very big sample size to get the margin of error down to +/-3% on the assumption you’ve taken a perfectly random sample and can trust what people tell you at face value. Just a few thousand people will do, mathematically. And the maths says you have to quadruple the sample size to halve the margin of error, which is a pointless expense when your pure sampling error pales into insignificance compared to your other problems.

Bias in your sample itself: finding a pool of people willing to answer personal questions is hard, and without some form of adjustment they won’t match the demographics of the general population. Bias in their answers: there’s social desirability bias, like the “shy Tory” effect where people don’t like admitting they vote Conservative. And people just being wrong; people overestimate how likely they are to turn out to vote (possibly social desirability bias in action again, if you don’t want to admit you probably won’t be bothered), and a surprisingly high % of people misremember even basic facts like who they voted for in the last election. (Pollsters with a long-term pool of respondents ask them this question repeatedly over time, and often enough people change who they claim to have voted for based on who they actually prefer now!) Those are the deeper problems of polling, which is why you shouldn’t automatically assume the raw and “unmassaged” figures are a purer and more accurate truth than the pollster’s published findings after applying their proprietary weightings. But those weightings are open to bias and manipulation in their own right. Innovative pollsters are interesting and may spot things others miss, but pollsters with a solid track record are more trustworthy. Even they may still be horribly wrong if their old assumptions no longer hold up.

US pollsters are not regulated in the same way as UK ones and their quality and transparency is notoriously variable. It’s more common to see “push polls” commissioned with the aim of showing a particular candidate is capable of “winning here”. This can be used to get out the vote: if it looks like Iowa is in-play for the Dems, maybe more Dem voters will turn out and it actually will be in play, whereas if polls show it’s a lost cause then that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it’s an even bigger issue in crowded multi-candidate primaries. There even polling in the double-digits among primary voters can be enough to give a campaign momentum or keep it in the race. Another trick is commissioning a poll to show that you would do well among all voters, compared to your primary opponents, in a hypothetical run-off against your party’s likely opponent in the main election.

The Ann Selzer poll was a huge shock in Iowa because that’s a polling organisation that’s highly credible and has an outstanding record there. A lot of other US pollsters, of which there are many, would be far more easily dismissed. It’s also more unusual than it should be purely for being an outlier. Statistically, if you poll a random-ish sample of people, you statistically should be getting outliers every now and then. The analyst Nate Silver finds it odd there have been so few polling outliers this election.

This comes back to another way that pollsters sometimes massage the figures, other than “fighting the last war” by being too eager to base their likelihood to vote models on the previous election. Pollsters seem to be afraid of looking like the odd one out. Doing so is putting their neck on the line – rather than being spectacularly wrong (or indeed spectacularly right if it’s everyone else who fouled up) they prefer to succeed or fail with everyone else. Safer to have company in the middle of the pack, than back yourself and claim you’ve spotted a pattern in the data that everyone else has missed. This creates a kind of artificial consensus which analysts refer to as “herding”.

Silver’s contention is that it’s not only unlikely the election is as razor-tight as the polls are suggesting, with so many vital states with a lead of +/-1% so well within the margin of error, but that it’s even more massively unlikely that so many opinion polls in so many states are also in the +/-1% range. Even just by chance, more of them should be further out than that. Silver therefore concludes that pollsters being afraid to show the courage of their convictions have just herded their findings together, nullifying the predictive power of all these “knife-edge” polls. His conclusion is that whoever wins the election is likely to win by a far larger margin than is being suggested…. but he doesn’t know if it will be a big Trump win or a big Harris win. The Ann Selzer is a straw in the wind pointing to Harris. The consistently high female turnout stats among early voters, in states where this data is available, are an even bigger pointer to Harris. But who knows?

For what little its worth the betting has Trump as a slight, but only slight, favourite. Some of the polling analysis here is cribbed from http://www.politicalbetting.com which is worth a read.

Anon,

The late Richard Feynman described a similar issue with a famous experiment where Millikan calculated the charge of an electron using electrified oil drops in a magnetic field.

For some time afterward, students doing the experiment got slightly different results.

Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. Why didn’t they discover the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard.

Sounds like similar issues in play for polling – better to “all be wrong” than risk being an outlier in the wrong direction.

Steve, was my idea, not that of Mrs Bloke or any previous girlfriend. I used to be an even bigger idiot than I am now.

John, why would being Scottish stop you voting for Kamala?

Back OT, how many other serious candidates have ever stood for the office three times, let alone three consecutive times?