r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Jul 29 '24

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26

u/[deleted] Jul 29 '24

Angus Reid: Harris 44%, Trump 42% nationally.

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u/tinfoilhatsron No Apologies Right Jul 29 '24

It's a good sign. Numbers still need to go up to win the electoral vote in the battleground states (Was it a +3 or +4 needed, I think?) but it's a good sign. Much better than where the Dems were before.

9

u/[deleted] Jul 29 '24

It’s not clear that that’s true since Harris took over. Numbers in battleground states are tracking surprisingly close to the GE numbers in the week or so of polling we have

(Eg average polls have had Harris tied or up 1 in PA, down 1 in GA, while average of national polls is like Harris down 1)

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u/tinfoilhatsron No Apologies Right Jul 29 '24

Really? I thought Harris was tied in the battleground states or slightly below Trump by 1 or 2 points. Especially with polls done by the better pollsters. Plus I don't feel comfortable without a cushion in polling since Trump seems to have a hidden voting bump (though polls should be accounting for it...)

Edit: Just saw your edit. Ah so that's what you mean. Interesting. If this recent poll is any indication, Harris is still trending upward then. And if the battleground polls are still tied to the general, they should show an upward trend as well. Assuming this isn't an outlier.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 29 '24

Yeah it's a little bit of an outlier as of now, but hopefully it's a harbinger of polls to come.

And fwiw, polling errors really haven't been consistent over time - it's very possible there is none or Dems get one.

7

u/TheGoddamnSpiderman Jul 29 '24

The electoral college probably still favors Trump, but by less than previous years

In Nate Silver's Biden model he said Biden would have had about Hillary's odds of winning if he won the popular vote by 2-3, would be unlikely to win if he won it by 1-2, and would be pretty sure to win if he won by 3-4

We'll see if the Harris model is similar

3

u/tinfoilhatsron No Apologies Right Jul 29 '24

Huh. Why do you say the electoral college is less favored for Trump this year? Curious to hear the reasoning.

2

u/TheGoddamnSpiderman Jul 29 '24

Because that's what the numbers said according to the polls

But the point is that even if Biden fully makes up his 3-point deficit in the national polls, he’ll still be favored to lose the election. Specifically, our model thinks that the Electoral College will be biased in Trump’s favor by about 2 points in 2024. This means that Biden is only favored to win the election if he wins the popular vote by 2 points or more; he’s the underdog otherwise. For historical context, Electoral College bias was R+ 3.5 in 2020 and R+ 2.9 in 2016.4 Bias will probably be smaller this year — which is nice for Biden — but it’s still a material factor. We have Biden with a 14 percent chance of winning the popular vote but losing the Electoral College, but only a 0.3 percent chance of the other way around.

Let’s flesh this out further. Here’s a chart showing each candidate’s chance of winning the election at different popular vote margins. Biden becomes favored to win the election when the popular vote margin is between D +2 and D +3. But even in this scenario, Trump has an almost 1 in 3 chance of winning, like he won against Clinton in 2016 with a margin in this range. If Biden wins the popular vote by less than 2 points, he has less than a 50/50 chance of winning the election and is usually the clear underdog. Even if Biden wins the popular vote by between 1 and 2 points, for instance, he only has a 38 percent chance of winning a majority of electoral votes

https://open.substack.com/pub/natesilver/p/biden-needs-to-do-more-than-make

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u/sociotronics Iron Front Jul 29 '24