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Nov 2023 Mod notice:


There may be other, more specific, threads about some aspects of US politics, but this one tends to act as a hub for all sorts of related news and information, so it's usually one of the busiest OTC threads.

If you're new to OTC, it's worth reading the Introduction to On-Topic Conversations and the On-Topic Conversations debate guidelines before posting here.

Rumor-based, fear-mongering and/or inflammatory statements that damage the quality of the thread will be thumped. Off-topic posts will also be thumped. Repeat offenders may be suspended.

If time spent moderating this thread remains a distraction from moderation of the wiki itself, the thread will need to be locked. We want to avoid that, so please follow the forum rules when posting here.


In line with the general forum rules, 'gravedancing' is prohibited here. If you're celebrating someone's death or hoping that they die, your post will get thumped. This rule applies regardless of what the person you're discussing has said or done.

Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM

RainehDaze Nero Fangirl (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
Nero Fangirl
#339676: Nov 17th 2020 at 12:20:57 AM

No, your argument's absurd and I'm going to keep calling it absurd. There's no evidence of insufficient Democrat turnout for a start.

Also, polls have an average error of ~3%, even in aggregate. If you take that one polling error and put it in Trump's favour (which describes the broad trends, and the why is something that pollsters are going to be spending a while working out, especially with the pandemic as a confounding variable) then that fits our observed variations. Pushing a simplistic "it's enthusiasm" narrative is amateur hour punditry.

Jman543 Since: Dec, 2014
#339677: Nov 17th 2020 at 12:22:37 AM
Thumped: for switching the discussion from the topic to a person. Doesn't take many of this kind of thump to bring a suspension. Stay on the topic, not the people in the discussion.
nova92 Since: Apr, 2020
#339678: Nov 17th 2020 at 12:23:15 AM

The second link is to a Google Scholar search. And the first article is inaccessible.

M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#339679: Nov 17th 2020 at 12:23:55 AM

Calling an argument absurd isn't a personal insult, especially if you make a case for why it's absurd.

Conversely, accusing someone of having issues with being kind is getting personal.

Disgusted, but not surprised
Jman543 Since: Dec, 2014
#339680: Nov 17th 2020 at 12:24:24 AM

I will have to disagree with you, M84. That argument is absurd, but please don't take that the wrong way.

Edited by Jman543 on Nov 17th 2020 at 12:25:29 PM

M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#339681: Nov 17th 2020 at 12:25:52 AM

[up]Was that second sentence really necessary? Especially since you haven't presented an argument for why it's absurd to claim that calling someone unkind is getting personal.

Edited by M84 on Nov 18th 2020 at 4:27:12 AM

Disgusted, but not surprised
Jman543 Since: Dec, 2014
#339682: Nov 17th 2020 at 12:27:54 AM

Apparently it is not wrong to call an argument absurd, especially if you give reasons. Here is a reason. People cannot easily separate themselves from their ideas, because we are not robots. So when you harshly criticize someone's ideas, you know that they are likely to take it as a harsh criticism of themself as well. When you do so despite knowing that, you arguably are being intentionally unkind.

RainehDaze Nero Fangirl (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
Nero Fangirl
#339683: Nov 17th 2020 at 12:28:19 AM

Yes, the 3% error comes about from the fact that individual polls come with their own margins of error, and gathering as many polls together as possible does not reduce this error. What it does is give you a more-or-less normally distributed set of samples, and if we allow ourselves an assumption that the errors will be broadly correlated, then the entire error transfers approximately to the final polling average. That's a quick and pretty lazy explanation of it, but the other one is "538 employs statisticians and they described the polling error as about 3%, so I can probably go with that".

Also, a 3% margin of error would mean overestimating Biden by 3% and therefore needing to redistribute that 3% to the other candidate. So you get a 2% split. Of course, take a 2% error and you get a 4% margin instead.

Or if the error is describing the final vote margin, then it's a 4% error, which is outside the ~66% range of a single standard deviation and will therefore crop up in 1/3 of cases. Basic stats isn't that weird.

[up] I'm getting the feeling politics threads aren't for you if a flawed premise being called out is such a problem.

Edited by RainehDaze on Nov 17th 2020 at 8:29:32 PM

M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#339684: Nov 17th 2020 at 12:28:59 AM

[up][up]If you can't take criticism of your arguments without feeling personally offended by said criticism, that's an issue you need to work past. At the very least, don't respond by accusing said critic of being unkind.

Edited by M84 on Nov 18th 2020 at 4:29:32 AM

Disgusted, but not surprised
Jman543 Since: Dec, 2014
#339685: Nov 17th 2020 at 12:30:10 AM

Nova 92 Unfortunately much of the good research is behind a paywall. As for the other link, here it is. Probably also a paywall, unfortunately. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-018-9488-y

Jman543 Since: Dec, 2014
#339686: Nov 17th 2020 at 12:31:31 AM

M84 I think we have incompatible opinions here. I welcome people pointing out where I have gone wrong in my arguments. That's the kind of discussion I am here to have. But when someone has been told that their language is hurtful, and they continue to use it anyway, you know what? That's a problem.

Edited by Jman543 on Nov 17th 2020 at 12:38:53 PM

Perseus Since: Nov, 2009
#339687: Nov 17th 2020 at 12:32:19 AM

Please stop double posting. The edit button exists for a reason.

Edited by Perseus on Nov 18th 2020 at 7:32:32 AM

RainehDaze Nero Fangirl (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
Nero Fangirl
#339688: Nov 17th 2020 at 12:32:39 AM

Yes, it's paywalled. Any publisher's site is going to be; don't know if there's much open publishing in the political science sphere.

Also, there's an edit button. Stop double posting. If you haven't found it, it's under the ... menu to the right of a post.

[up] [nja]

Edited by RainehDaze on Nov 17th 2020 at 8:33:08 PM

Jman543 Since: Dec, 2014
#339689: Nov 17th 2020 at 12:39:31 AM

Perseus Thanks for telling me. Should I try to keep everything in one post, or only if it is a related topic?

RainehDaze Nero Fangirl (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
Nero Fangirl
#339690: Nov 17th 2020 at 12:42:28 AM

Forum etiquette around here is to not double post unless it's been a day or something and nobody's responded, but that tends to only be relevant for less-trafficked threads.

Wryte Since: Jul, 2010
#339691: Nov 17th 2020 at 1:02:24 AM

Or if the second post is a noteworthy news item that's worth alerting anyone watching the thread to having come up right away.

RainehDaze Nero Fangirl (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
Nero Fangirl
#339692: Nov 17th 2020 at 1:04:21 AM

Though that still relies on the thread being slow moving enough you expect people to not see the edit. [lol]

Silasw A procrastination in of itself from A handcart to hell (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
A procrastination in of itself
#339693: Nov 17th 2020 at 1:12:26 AM

538 did a few articles on enthusiasm amongst voters, if memory serves they did show that while Democrats were less enthusiastic about voting for Biden than Republicans for Trump, Democrats were more enthusiastic about voting against Trump than Republicans against Biden.

To touch on the lesser evil argument, I stand that part of what cost Democrats 2016 was a lot of people going “It doesn’t matter if Hillary is Nixon 2.0, Trump is a threat to democracy” and low information voters only hearing “Hillary is Nixon 2.0”. Avoiding the phrase doesn’t meant not using it in a personal discussion with a leftist friend with a strange perspective, it means not perpetuating the idea as part of the cultural osmosis that often determines how low information voters vote.

Oh and to briefly touch on Libya as it got bought up, Obama had minimal involvement in Libya (it was really a British-French operation) and like other inventions to save people for being killed by a dictator trying to slaughter then during a pre-existing war (Kosovo and Kuwait being big ones), it remains popular with the local population. We in the West may wring our hands over if it was worth it to save said people, but they tend to be very heavily on the side of us helping them not die being a good thing.

Edited by Silasw on Nov 17th 2020 at 9:12:56 AM

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
Jman543 Since: Dec, 2014
#339694: Nov 17th 2020 at 1:12:49 AM

Raineh Daze

I took some time to consider the question, since I did make some mistakes in what I said before. So I actually agree with one part. The error of a correlated difference of population proportions is (The Margin of Error for Differences in Polls, Charles Franklin):

CI(p1-p2) = 1.96*sqrt(((p1+p2)^2 + (p1-p2))/n

This approaches twice the individual margin of error as p1 + p2 approaches 1. So, sure. If the margin of error is 3% in the aggregate polling and Biden's lead was 8%, then the 95% confidence interval is around 2%<p1-p2<14%. Fair enough.

Biden's current share of the vote falls pretty exactly at where he was projected by polling in the days leading up to the election, so Biden did not underperform. However, it is important to note that individually, Trump's share of the vote falls outside of the 95% confidence interval based on an aggregation of polls in the days leading up to the election. So I think perhaps it would be legitimate to say that Trump did overperform.

With regard to polling errors being correlated, resulting in an aggregate polling error that is larger than would be predicted based on uncorrelated errors, that is certainly a real phenomenon, although I don't know if you can assume that aggregation has no effect. The problem is one of intepretation. If the polling errors were uncorrelated, aggregation of polls would increase the sample size significantly and modestly decrease the margin of error. What correlated polling errors—precisely what renders the preceding statement inapplicable—represent are precisely non-chance factors. Factors like a difference in enthusiasm, for instance.

Edited by Jman543 on Nov 17th 2020 at 1:31:47 AM

Silasw A procrastination in of itself from A handcart to hell (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
A procrastination in of itself
#339695: Nov 17th 2020 at 1:14:11 AM

I would suggest waiting for votes to finish being counted before trying to extrapolate useful data for the vote totals.

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
Jman543 Since: Dec, 2014
#339696: Nov 17th 2020 at 1:17:25 AM

Fair point with respect to Libya.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/156539/opinion-briefing-libyans-eye-new-relations-west.aspx

Although I don't think it is handwringing to be skeptical of foreign interventions. The invasion of Iraq led to a lot of problems, and Libya is not without them. US military policy tends to have a serious element of "we know what's best for you whether you like it or not." In this case, perhaps, it was "you like it" but a lot of the time it is "not." And most of the forces were from other countries, but there was significant US involvement, even commanding some states of the operation.

I have seen some persuasive arguments that the Libyan intervention was necessary, but I have also seen some arguments suggesting that it worsened the civil war.

Edited by Jman543 on Nov 17th 2020 at 1:25:19 AM

M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#339697: Nov 17th 2020 at 1:23:15 AM

But it wasn't really a USA operation. As Silasw pointed out, it was a British-French one.

Disgusted, but not surprised
RainehDaze Nero Fangirl (4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
Nero Fangirl
#339698: Nov 17th 2020 at 1:24:41 AM

Stop thinking about enthusiasm as an explanation for a second. It's convoluted and evidence for its relevance here is flimsy.

Biden performed as expected, or perhaps beyond expected—record turnout levels are unusual. Trump overperformed based on the polling. Enthusiasm is a secondary variable which has no bearing here because what we're trying to answer is why did one person get more votes than expected based on the data we have?

State-by-state there's some easy breakdowns; Trump did much better amongst latino men, especially in Florida with its high Cuban population. Across the midwest, though, that obviously isn't the case. So, why are Trump voters under-represented in a broad polling error? One that isn't universal between states.

What's the simpler explanation: trying to correlate enthusiasm to turnout in a way that somehow preserves the less enthusiastic candidate's popular vote margin and would require all polls to be off (Pennsylvania, as I mentioned earlier, was pretty on point; so was Georgia) or that getting an accurate estimation of Trump voters may have been more difficult?

Edited by RainehDaze on Nov 17th 2020 at 9:25:42 AM

SeptimusHeap from Switzerland (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Mu
#339699: Nov 17th 2020 at 1:28:24 AM

Actually, I've seen some polling analysts saying that Trump did perform better than expected while Biden was in line with expectations. Reasons are unknown yet but circumstantial evidence says that it wasn't the Shy Trump effect.

Rather, there might be a set of hard-to poll people who seldom partake in presidential elections but are at least Trump-curious. Their existence gives the turnout-vote share curve an U-shape: Both very low and very high turnout favour Republicans.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Jman543 Since: Dec, 2014
#339700: Nov 17th 2020 at 1:28:45 AM

M84 France and Britain have had issues as well. ;) But the US had a greater role than some might think. In Operation Odyssey Dawn, they initially had responsibility for enforcing the no-fly zone, and there was a lot of materiel and not a small number of personnel involved over the course of the conflict.


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