WTW65: A Coin Flip from Fascism - Are the Polls Rigged?
We interrupt our Yale Law series because this election has us too stressed the f$#% out. It seemed like we'd be ok. It seemed like we were going to win. Now the polls do not look good. What changed? I wanted to talk about the very real possibility that in a few short days, MAGA fascists will have won control of... everything. Absolutely everything. The Presidency, Congress, and of course the Supreme Court is already in their hands. The polls are in their favor. Should we believe them? If you enjoy our work, please consider leaving a 5-star review! You can always email questions, comments, and leads to lydia@seriouspod.com. Please pretty please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/wherethereswoke!
What's so scary about the woke mob, how often you just don't see them coming.
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
The woke monster is here and it's coming for everything.
everything Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green M&M will now wear sneakers.
Well, hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
I'm Thomas.
That's Lydia.
How are you doing?
Hi, it's been a while.
Yeah, I'm in a constant state of anxiety until the election day and then probably thereafter.
Yeah.
How about you?
Yeah, it's a little worrisome, I would say.
Yeah, I know.
Look, what I'm trying to do is finally get rid of the last couple of people who listen to this show who don't have ADHD. They're finally going to be like, God, I was hanging on for a while, but I just can't do it anymore.
Once again, putting a pause on the other project, just because the election is mere days away and there's too much we want to talk about, and obviously it won't make any sense to do after the election.
I think that I've benefited a little bit from being so busy that I hadn't been thinking about it as much.
It hadn't been a constant stressor, and then...
Yeah.
What happened was I was keeping a general eye on the polling and the models and all that, which I know people have different thoughts on that.
But all of a sudden, it took a really Trumpian turn, I want to say a couple weeks ago.
And ever since then, I've been very worried and realizing that I don't know how people out there are feeling, but I just want to express how dire this is according to current polling.
Mm-hmm.
Now, I also want to talk about a bunch of reasons why maybe we shouldn't necessarily trust that.
I know that there's plenty of reasons, stuff that I'm sure people have heard, but there's also a lot of stuff that probably people haven't heard that I've done a little research on that's interesting.
I also just want to talk about the reality we might be facing, because I just, I don't know, I feel like I need to express it.
And I think that if things go badly, I feel like I want to have been kind of mentally prepared and helped to maybe mentally prepare the listeners and Avoid 2016.
Yeah, and if they go, well, then we can all just forget this ever happened.
It'll be great.
I would love to forget that I had this level of concern, or at least feel like it was not warranted.
Yeah, it would be great to be wrong.
It would be great to be wrong.
There's a lot to talk about here, and then because of how dire this looks, there's also a lot we want to talk about in terms of Trump and the clowns around him.
It's people we already cover for the show, but we want to cover the New York rally after this.
All six hours.
Yeah, all six hours.
We're all going to sit through it.
Lydia did watch the entire six hours.
And if I know you, you don't really do much plus speed.
I mean, you do some, right?
No, not on this.
No, I watched at one.
One?
Oh my, not since Charlie's in the Chocolate Factory, or Willy Wonka, I never remember which.
He's like, two?
You can't, you know, whatever.
You opened one chocolate?
There's no, you can't have watched it at one, I'm sorry.
I did.
I don't accept that.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
That's not possible.
Why would you?
I don't, I told you, it had to do with the timestamps, I was worried I would get them wrong.
It's YouTube, they won't be wrong.
But I didn't know that.
I hear you when it's a podcast, that is a problem with YouTube.
Okay, we're going to save this argument for later.
But who would, who Like, that's such a high-stakes thing to just, like, I'm a little worried, so I'm going to put myself through the worst possible experience.
Potentially be indoctrinated?
Yeah.
No, just having to sit through six hours of bullshit.
Yeah, it was pretty bad.
Oh, my God.
Okay, just don't be afraid to ask next time.
No.
No, I don't know.
You tend to not like stuff on high speed as much as I do anyway.
It's hard to process.
Point is, lots to talk about, and we're getting it out ASAP right immediately as you're hearing this, obviously, so there may be the usual end-of-the-month deluge, but I don't know.
I guess some people might not want to hear Doom and Gloom, and I don't know...
My thing has never been doom and gloom, and my thing has never been optimism for no reason.
It's been, I want to just be in reality.
I sort of don't understand how other people do things in this way.
I just want to, as best I can, be in reality.
And some people, if the reality is going to be negative, then some people are like, oh, don't focus on too doom.
It's like, no, if the reality is going to be a bad thing, I want to know about it.
I want to be thinking about it.
I want to know.
So some people I think are maybe not going to want to listen to this.
And that's obviously up to them.
But it's not doom and gloom for no reason.
I really want to get a handle on what is happening with polling.
Where are we?
Like, what is going on?
It's really alarming, actually.
It's more alarming.
The more I think about it, the more alarming it is.
Because either possibility is scary.
So I guess we'll take our usual little break.
And please support the show at patreon.com slash wheretheswoke.
In a few short months, it may be helping to pay for our legal fees for the gulag we're in.
We'll see.
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One thing that gets really frustrating for me is, and I noticed this with a lot of people that I otherwise listened to, that once the polls turned in the middle of September, it was rosy as could be.
Just using 538, not that they're the be all end all.
And if people don't know, Nate Silver's not with 538 anymore.
So Nate Silver has his own thing going on.
So this is a separate different thing.
Affiliated with ABC.
Yeah, ABC bought it.
But just using them as a general indicator for the moment to talk about this polling shift more than anything.
So middle of September, it couldn't have looked better.
It could have.
But it was, you know, 64-36 was what they had it at for probability of Harris winning.
64-36.
Felt pretty great then, not going to lie.
Felt good.
Made sense.
Comported with my view of the world.
You know, I was like, well, yeah, Kamala's great.
And by the way, Tim Walz, too.
He's great.
Like you would hope that would factor in to people's decision.
But as time went on, it kind of started shrinking a little bit, shrinking a little bit until all of a sudden, like it was 54, 53, 47.
And then it almost did switch kind of on a dime to Trump 53, 47 in October 20th.
And then it went up as high as 55, 45 Trump four days ago.
55-45 Trump all of a sudden.
And I'm just like, what is happening?
Now, the first time I was alarmed was actually a lot earlier than this, and I mentioned it on Facebook.
I might have mentioned it quickly on something.
The New York Times poll that came out that really just was very shocking.
It was extremely shocking because it was a real pollster.
Well-regarded.
Yeah, it was New York Times-Siena.
It was a major one that showed Trump with a national lead, which is like, here's the complicated thing going on that I'm sure everybody knows by now.
Because we have the stupidest fucking system in the world, we can't just look at who's the more popular candidate.
It can't just be like, who's the better candidate?
Who do more people like?
Oh, it's Harris.
Great.
Looking good.
Awesome.
The popular vote number, the overall who's more popular number, basically barely matters.
Like, it...
It does in a sense, but it also can totally not matter.
Yeah.
Because obviously, the swing states are what matters.
The stupid electoral college is what matters.
And the rest of us don't.
Yeah, pretty much.
Except for local races.
Please vote.
Yeah, definitely.
Definitely vote.
Everybody vote.
The message of this, I hope is clear, is vote and get everybody you know to vote if you haven't already.
Please.
This is not a doomer.
This is not inevitable.
This is something...
There's still time to change.
I'm hoping everyone who listens to this would already have done everything they can.
So for now, it's sort of like, I feel like we're a bit in a huddle now, me, you, and the listeners.
We've all done everything we can, and we're sort of just waiting.
And some people process that waiting differently.
I want to talk about it.
I also think there may be people who are sleepwalking into this who might not be aware of like how bad the polls have gotten in this.
And it doesn't mean they're showing Trump landslide, but it does mean they're showing Trump's going to win.
And anyway, that New York Times Santa College poll showed Trump with a plus one nationally, which is just like in order to win at all, odds are that Harris has to be up by like, I don't know, what, two nationally minimum, like in the popular votes.
So that felt rough.
And that was big news.
And a lot of people were like, what is the New York Times doing?
A lot of people had theories about...
Because I have strong critiques of the New York Times in their coverage of certain things, especially trans issues.
A lot of people said, oh, they're just in the bag for Trump, blah, blah, blah.
I was like, that doesn't actually...
We're just trying to keep people enticed through the election and readership.
Maybe, but that doesn't make sense to me.
Yeah, I agree.
So right around then, I started to notice something that bothered me, which is that a lot of people, right when the polls switched, were like, well, you know polls.
You can't listen to polls.
You can't listen to polls.
They were fine with it when Harris was on top.
And then once it switched, then they can't listen to polls.
Yeah.
And it's not like they're wrong per se.
There may be reasons that we shouldn't be listening to polls broadly, but it was just the convenience of the argument that bothered me.
And every time, I had like four people that I was like, well, I don't really like this because nobody said this a week ago or whatever it was, a month ago, whatever at the time.
And now everybody's like, yeah, but you can't trust polls.
Like nobody, look, all these reasons.
And it's like, that feels too convenient for me.
It's like psychological protection really is what it is.
And that's something that I don't do.
And so therefore I've always been depressed.
Yeah.
I don't do that.
And I can't.
Lydia knows this about me.
I can't do it.
Like, I have to be in reality.
It's really hard.
And so I am really good at being in the reality as I see it.
And that could be wrong.
But I don't delude myself.
Like, if I've made a mistake, I've made a mistake.
I don't sit around looking for reasons why the thing I want to believe is true.
I just don't do that.
I almost do the opposite.
I look for reasons that it's not true.
It can be tempting to be like, all right, what are the reasons why now the polls are wrong?
And it's really tempting to do that.
And I almost want to do that just because it's so like comforting in this moment where we can't really do anything about it.
I guess I'll pull back and just say, step one, I want to tell you what the polls are showing.
Step one.
And then we can get into like why we should or shouldn't listen to them.
Tell me two, because I have not been looking at them.
Yep.
Right now, just for funsies, 538 is at 5248 for Trump.
So it's come back a little since the high earlier of 5545.
But here's the more important thing.
The Senate, it has an 8911 Republican.
Ah!
Yeah, and that's to be expected because the map is terrible.
I I feel like the map is terrible every single time.
No, it's not.
It feels that way.
So here's why it feels that way.
It was good in 2016.
And we did so badly that it was bad.
So that wiped out one of the good times where it was like, oh, that was actually a good map for us.
And it wasn't good because we didn't do well because, you know, it was kind of a wave election for Republicans, really.
They had all three.
I always want to say all three.
What's the better word?
The presidency and Congress.
But it's not all three branches, although they do because they also have the Supreme Court.
An absolute stranglehold on the Supreme Court, which is something we do need to talk about.
It is very important when it comes to all this.
because that's the unknown.
The unknown being just how much they can fuck with us and will fuck with us.
It's not unknown that they are gonna help Trump, but it's more like in what way and what way will they be able to?
And that depends on how close things are and where.
But anyway, point is, we have very little chance of winning the Senate.
It's possible.
Here's the thing.
It's possible, but I'll get to that.
So just as the polls are, it's not looking good.
Like, so each two years, 33 are up, they're on that cycle.
And it just so happens that this time more Democratic seats are up than Republicans.
so that just by numbers makes it harder for us to hang on.
We badly needed my best friend Joe Manchin.
We're going to badly miss Joe Manchin.
I won't go too hard on this because, you know, I said it on OA already, but Joe Manchin is a big loss, a big loss.
I know people don't want to hear it, but that's massive.
I mean, if we end up losing by one seat, it's because Joe Manchin retired.
And if we had that one seat, hey, you know what?
We wouldn't get a whole bunch of stuff.
We wouldn't get the filibuster gone.
We wouldn't get a bunch of reforms.
Yeah, we're so mad.
Oh, fucking Joe Manchin, blah, blah, blah.
You know what?
We would get Supreme Court justices, federal bench, you know, all that stuff.
That's what we would get.
Lifetime appointments.
Lifetime appointments.
And give the man some fucking credit.
Give the devil his due.
He allowed Biden to pass some pretty progressive stuff.
Major COVID funding, other stuff, the fucking What's-A-Face Act, you know, that did all the shit.
I don't know.
I'm tired.
His major signature legislation.
Biden actually accomplished a lot with exactly the fucking What-A-Face Act, you know.
I know.
Well, you're the one who remembers names of things.
You tell me.
Reduction Act?
Reduction Act.
But anyway, because we had exactly enough with Joe Manchin that everyone hates and wanted to, like, cast into the sun, it was good that we had him.
The replacement for Joe Manchin was the literal fucking devil.
We would have had nothing.
We wouldn't have had the majority.
So at least we got those two years.
It's nice that we got those two years.
Good things were done.
Lives were probably saved.
Lots of them.
Programs were saved.
Funding was saved.
Lots of stuff was saved in that time.
And now we don't have that.
And guess what?
The person replacing that asshole, who I don't...
It's not like I like him.
He's...
I'm not a fan of Joe Manchin.
I'm just realistic about what's going on.
The person replacing him is going to be the literal fucking devil.
It's going to be horrible.
It's going to be absolutely horrible.
He's going to vote Trump all the way, and the race is not close.
It's not close.
Joe Manchin might have lost anyway.
It's possible.
But it's by no means a sure thing.
Like, he might have hung on to it.
People...
Long-time incumbent.
Yeah.
Incumbency is a big thing.
Oh, here, let's see.
What's our chances that, you know, our Democratic candidate will win in West Virginia?
Hmm.
Well, it's 99 to 1 against.
Oh, God.
So I think what we're getting is somebody who is exactly Trump.
So that's what happens now.
The only reason I'm just so upset about it is because I just get tired of people not fucking thinking critically about things.
So much spent ink or yelling or anger on the left was mad about Joe Manchin.
We shouldn't even let him be a Democrat.
It's insane.
Anyway, okay, I'll stop talking about that.
So that's a big reason.
We're losing that one.
So that's lost.
To not go into too much detail, it is still possible.
We could win.
We could get pretty lucky in a bunch of seats.
We would have to do quite well, actually.
I mean, it's Ohio.
We got to win, and that's very close.
We would have to win.
We'd have to beat Ted Cruz, which I would love to.
That'd be super cool.
If only.
And then does that get us 50 based on where I'm looking at in order?
It would be great.
The next one is Florida, you know, Rick Scott.
And like, that's not that close.
You know, it's right now polling showing 51-46.
That's just not that close.
Like it just isn't.
I mean, it's within possibility.
If there's something wrong with polls, like if there's a reason why Democrats show up a lot and Republicans don't as much, like, it's within reach.
But I believe to get to the exactly 50, we at least have to beat Ted Cruz.
And Ted Cruz, cockroach that he is, just somehow always keeps surviving.
You know, he just somehow.
I don't get it.
I don't understand it.
I'm not betting on Ted Cruz.
I'm beating Ted Cruz.
I'm just not super confident on that.
And the models show they've got about a 90% chance of winning the Senate.
Now, that's bad enough.
But right now, the modeling is showing they're 53-47 to win the House.
It's crazy.
So they are right now just going by modeling.
And again, we'll talk about whether or not we can trust this.
But just to know what it is that we may or may not trust, Republicans are favored to win everything.
It's a coin flip, but it's a, you know, a slightly unfair coin.
They are, by the odds, very overwhelmingly favorites to win the Senate.
They are a little bit favorites to win the House and a little bit favorites to win presidency for Trump to beat Harris.
That's what we're looking at.
We are looking at...
If you're just betting by the numbers, by the information we have available by polling, you would be betting for Republicans to control the presidency, the House, Congress, oh yeah, and six of nine Supreme Court justices.
This is what's killing me.
I just have to talk about it, and I don't know what to do, per se, but there's a possibility.
Right now, full disclosure, it's Wednesday night.
There's a possibility we go to sleep one, two, three, four, five, six, seven nights, like basically exactly seven nights sleep and wake up to an entirely Republican-dominated government at every step.
In this day and age, where Trump is who he is, And he has the people around him he has.
Blind loyalists.
Yeah.
This is not 2016.
I know people probably know this, but I just want to emphasize, this is what we're looking at right now.
And yeah, I guess it's not helpful to panic, but I guess I'm just maybe preparing myself and everybody else for what may be happening Tuesday night.
I am genuinely scared.
I was less scared when I thought it was going to be, oh, probably Harris and probably the House, but they'll probably win the Senate.
That sucks.
It's not great.
It's bad.
It's a bad outcome.
And things will stay the same.
And everyone who's an idiot who doesn't know anything will blame Harris and the Democrats.
They promised this, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah.
And we have to go through this every fucking four years, whatever it is, because nobody understands how anything works.
That was bad enough.
Now we're looking at possibly catastrophe.
Like, I don't know what the limit of how scared we should be is on this.
Yeah.
I actually don't know.
Camps are not out of the question.
That feeling that I'm sure most of us remember, but maybe not everybody.
I don't know.
It's been a while, I guess.
That first year or two of Trump, where I kept having the feeling that surely there's a line.
And then what I saw was no matter what awful thing happened, whether it was him saying something or whether it was...
Migrants dying, trying to cross a river to get to us.
Horrible things that I'll never forget burned into my memory.
No matter how bad, there are people cheering it.
There are people not caring.
There are people joking about it.
And there's just seemingly no line.
Then fast forward to January 6th.
We recently watched a few documentaries on that.
I finally felt like, okay, I can do this now because it genuinely is a disturbing thing.
We know that people don't care enough about it.
We know that polling shows people don't care, which is great.
It's awesome.
They're like, well, don't talk about the coup that the guy tried to do that resulted in the death of...
People and officers killed themselves and this was horrible.
Like, don't talk about it because nobody cares, I guess.
It's just the fucking insane world we live in.
And that was erased so quickly.
That was another level of just death.
Like, that was just like, okay, we know Biden won.
Back then, like, you know, let's say in the first couple days after January 6th, it was like, Biden won, we did this.
Not only that, we were hunting for the Senate.
It was amazing.
Georgia, I'll never forget it.
Like, we won the Senate because of winning two Georgia races that were runoffs after that.
Really cool.
We contributed fundraising to that, and it felt great to do that.
And it felt like now, finally, Republicans are the combination of Trump losing and being a loser, and the thing that happened being so extreme, Kevin McCarthy.
Yeah, he's in our fucking state, right?
Mm-hmm, yeah.
Was so mad at Trump, was yelling at Trump, was so mad on that day.
And then instantly, because of convenience, because of where the party is, just didn't seem to care anymore that his life was threatened and he felt in danger.
Minimized everything that he and his colleagues went through.
It still feels impossible every time.
And it's that feeling that there is no bottom, seemingly.
Anything can be justified.
That's the scary thing.
That is the fascism.
That is the thing.
Because the minute Trump wants it and does it, everyone in this fascist machine is incentivized to just be happy with it and go along with it and either lie about it or say it's great.
Every single thing.
There's no fucking line.
And if we're looking at a 2024, or 2025 I guess rather, Where not only is Trump back, but they have all three thingies, all three branches, Supreme Court, everything.
And instead of sort of normal people who are Republicans, obviously, around Trump, who now all are against him pretty much and come out and say like, hey, that guy's a fucking fascist, everyone.
Nobody cares, apparently.
Nobody seems to listen to them.
They're not there.
Instead, we have Stephen Miller.
We have truly the scum of the earth, Who have had eight years or whatever, how many years you want to say, anywhere from four to eight years to do nothing but think about how to get it right this time and how to get all the non-white immigrants out and how to get, you know, just stuff that's truly chilling.
I just don't know what stops it.
I don't know what stops it.
The only limiting factor is really just Trump.
Like Trump isn't Hitler.
He sucks in so many ways, but he mostly just wants to be worshipped in golf.
Yeah.
I don't think he wants to do a whole lot of things that are horrible.
I mean, he does, but, like, he's not out there.
Like, when you look at Hitler and other awful, horrible, genocidal maniacs, every day Hitler got up and ate and drank and fucking breathed in grievance against the Jews and hated them and explicitly wanted to kill all of them.
Like, there was no ifs, ands, or buts about that.
Yeah, I don't think Trump has a dog in the fight except for whatever is going to make him feel loved.
Yes.
And that's it.
He has, like, run-of-the-mill white old boomer Republican racism, which is awful, but, like, it's run-of-the-mill for that group, to be honest with you, for Republican old white men.
Doesn't want immigrants.
His view, when you look at what's happening around the world, is probably more in line with the average than my view on that.
The things they want to do are kick the immigrants out and not let, at the very least, not let any more in.
I think it's evil.
I think it's horrible.
I don't see him as somebody who's wanting to make death camps or some shit.
But if he did, I don't know what would stop him.
Like, I don't know.
In this world where he controls everything, I don't know what stops him if he does decide or if somebody in the administration decides to do something horrible.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think he's very unpredictable, or maybe it's even predictable, about, like, signing things, right?
Like, if it's someone who is loyal to him, I'm pretty sure he's just going to rubber stamp most things that they ask for, as long as it still makes him look good.
If they can, like, demonstrate, no, no, no, people will love you if you do this, then I think he'll just do it.
I think there's a lot he doesn't care about.
I think he picks things to care about at certain times.
Stephen Miller may be in charge of a lot of this stuff.
And that guy is the fucking devil.
How the fuck did we get here?
I don't know what to do.
Like, how did we get to a point?
I knew it was always going to be close.
But, like, I'll be honest.
I thought, how could Trump possibly win again?
How could he beat Harris?
Somebody who's a good candidate.
Waltz, who's amazing.
And after everything...
And after everything, after being a loser, after a debate that was horrible, after, you know, like just...
Being convicted of 34.
You really wonder, like, what's it going to take to fix this fucking thing?
You really wonder.
Anyway, to not go too broad on that, let's talk about polling.
So I think the first response that people might have on our side is like, yeah, but okay, there's been a deluge of right-wing polls.
There's a concerted effort to make it look like Trump has momentum.
Well, for one, I don't entirely know if that does that.
Like, I meant to mention this with the New York Times poll.
If the goal is helping Trump, almost you'd want it to show a landslide for Harris.
It just stops us from voting.
That's what happened with Hillary.
Everyone thought Hillary was going to win.
Polls showed a landslide.
538 showed 90% or whatever.
I guess they eventually showed 78% or whatever.
But for a while, it was just like 999.
It wasn't even close.
And a bunch of people on the left took it for granted, didn't bother, didn't organize.
So if you're trying to just help Trump, that's kind of what you would do.
Now, there's certain arguments to be made for momentum, maybe, or making races seem close where they weren't.
So maybe that, but like, I don't know, showing Trump a plus one nationally rather than let's say hypothetically, if they were fucking with a poll, it was, let's say it was plus three Harris and they're like, no, we want to show it plus one Trump, which was what that Sienna poll showed.
Like that doesn't, I don't know, that doesn't really do anything.
Like there's no reason, there's no like smoke filled room reason why that makes any sense to me.
Like it just doesn't, um, especially like Nate Cohn and some of the people that, um, Involved in this, like, they seem like reasonable people to me.
Their methodology they talk about seems pretty reasonable.
Like, it just doesn't...
I don't think it's a deliberate thing.
Now, it could be problems with waiting and response bias, of course, like, sure.
but in terms of just like smoke-filled room, let's rig the polls.
I don't think that's it.
Now, here's the something I didn't really remember is this happened in 2022.
So I don't know if you remember this.
It might not have been covered that much, but in 2022, I even have the article up by Nate Cohn from like election eve 2022, essentially.
And it was like, hey, you may have noticed our average seems to be just skewing way red for the last couple of days.
And he's saying this is the New York Times.
Nate Cohn is in charge of their polling average and stuff.
essentially.
And he's like, yeah, there's these weird Republican low-quality polls that everybody put out right at the end, and so we've kind of, like, stopped our thing, and we're not really...
So, like, that did happen.
And they flooded the zone with those, and that's part of the reason why my memory of why 2022 polls were so wrong was because, oh, it's Roe v.
Wade.
It's the response to that, is what I thought.
Yeah, to Dobbs.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
But it might have also been this.
It might have been that like they put out a bunch of these right wing polls that juiced up Republican numbers.
So if you look at the polling error in 2020, it was once again, the polling error was essentially it inflated Biden and Democrats in 2020.
Now, Biden still won and Democrats still won, but nowhere near what we thought.
It was way closer than we thought.
Way closer.
The final 538 prediction was basically 89% for Biden.
And he Biden won by just the skin of his teeth.
I mean, he really did.
When you look at the actual numbers of swing states and the Electoral College, he did not win by much.
It was very slim.
And so it was another polling miss in favor of Trump or yeah, again, I don't know how to say that another polling miss that didn't capture enough of Trump support, I guess.
And then in 2022, we had the opposite problem.
And so there are people who are saying, well, maybe that's happening for one, two theories for one, maybe it's happening again.
And there are, they do seem to be some right wing polls coming out now.
And that could explain the shift.
There does seem to be something about like right wingers manipulating betting markets because the betting markets show a big Trump win.
I don't really care about that because betting markets don't matter with this.
People betting on this outcome don't have access to any information that we don't.
It's not the same as like, oh, well, there's professionals who bet on stuff like sports and whatever, and they're just way more informed and they're blah, blah, blah.
This is like, no, we all have the same polls.
We all have the same stuff.
And so the betting market, in my opinion, is more a reflection of...
Who has money and wants to do a betting market thingy?
In which direction does that skew?
And it's not just how many people, it's how many people dollars.
And I think there are some rich assholes who want Trump to win who have made that market skew toward Trump quite a lot.
So I don't care about the betting market data.
So that is, I mean, the betting market's kind of scary.
It's like, oh, Trump's going to win.
But I don't really care about that because I just don't think that has access to information that you and I don't really, like if we want to.
The main problem with polling, and there's so many, there just aren't that many polls.
There's less, fewer than, I won't say ever, but fewer than the last, you know, it keeps getting less every single election for the past 20 years.
There are fewer polls, there are fewer good polls.
And I did a bunch of reading of some scientific papers here.
That I think is really interesting about this one is election polls are 95% confident, but only 60% accurate.
And you know this better than I do because I've just never been great with stats, but like the 95% confidence is a thing you strive for and that's the range.
And so it did a study, this thing did a study and it showed that the confidence rating is too high and the margins in the polls actually should be about double what they are.
So the plus or minus basically, the margin of error.
Right.
That should be, according to this paper anyway, that should be roughly double what it is.
But if we did that, polls would be meaningless.
Nobody would care about polls.
I mean, they probably would just ignore it, honestly.
But nobody who looked at the error margin would, like, it would be useless.
It's already a coin flip anyway to say, well, it's 5149 plus or minus 8.
What am I doing with that?
You know, like, that's nothing.
Did they speak about in the paper, like, why, any theories about, like, why there's such a discrepancy between the confidence rating and the accuracy?
I think there's just more error than they know how to handle.
And what was key about this paper was just comparing actual results.
And so I think that maybe the methodology that the pollsters are doing, or it's not like they're doing anything fraudulent.
I think it might be the case where they're using accuracy that isn't there anymore.
So what this paper says is they did an actual collection of real data and they found an analysis of polls for more than 6,000 contests.
We found that the actual vote total for a given candidate fell within the 95% confidence interval for just 60% of the polls.
Okay.
So that's sort of comparing.
I don't think that's anything you can do on like a one-to-one basis because for any given poll, you can always say like, well, I guess it was the 5% or I get, you know, it's like hard, but like as it taken as a whole, they can see like all these different polls, they tend to just 60% of them hit that 95%.
Confidence interval, which tells you that they shouldn't be 95% confident of it.
And what this paper says, again, I'm not the scientist, but it does say, like, either you need to adjust your confidence or you need to adjust your error margin.
And if instead of plus or minus three or whatever we have now, if it was plus or minus six or plus or minus eight, like, that would be so meaningless.
Like, if you said, well, either Harris is ahead 58-42 or whatever, or Trump is ahead 58-42, it's like, that's...
Nothing.
And so they're not going to do that because that isn't useful.
But we're stuck where it may just not be useful.
And so we're using a thing that isn't useful.
The other one I found really interesting was there was a paper I read about how since Nate Silver did his thing after Obama elections and he shifted the whole industry to instead of kind of these predictions, they would do this like percentage or like probability sort of thing.
Yeah.
And that was looked at as this, like, sensible adjustment.
Instead of saying, well, we think Trump's going to win, we're saying, well, 6-10 for Trump and 4-10 for Kamala or whatever.
And that's looked at as like, well, that's the more reasonable, sensible thing.
And this one paper I looked at was like, well, actually, that's even...
Worse, because like, if you do the calculations of what it would take to know which model is getting that right, it would take like a thousand years of data.
Because the problem is, it's so few observations.
You know, when you talk about any of this stuff, it's...
You're setting up expectations or whatever, and then ideally you have observations, and those can help bring whatever your predictions are to reality.
Like, the more observations you have, the easier it is to, like, actually gear your model toward reality.
That's just how things work.
It was saying there's also a further problem that people don't realize, which is that, yes, observations only happen every two years or every four years for presidential elections.
It's every two years, but it's all these state contests.
It's all these other contests.
Some people might think that, okay, but there's a bunch of different contests.
You know, like those are a bunch of different observations.
they do some math that I don't totally understand that show that like, well, yeah, but because these errors are systematic, because like when the polls are off, they tend to be off in the same ways in a given year, mostly.
It means it reduces the value of those observations.
So instead of like, oh, well, there's 3,000 observations because we look at all these counties and we look at all, you know, whatever.
Like there's so many chances to actually observe reality and to try to train our models on reality.
Actually, it counts essentially for way less than that because the errors are related.
Yeah, that makes sense.
I mean, like, instead of being able to count every single individual race as a distinct N, you're basically saying, no, the ballot that goes out is your N. Yeah, and it's more like they're not independent.
It's not like the people who, especially because everything is national now, you know, like it might be one thing if you had two individual universes of populations, and you're trying to evaluate just conceptually, what are the variables involved in voting in this way, you know?
Because that's what models are trying to do.
They're trying to say some amount of fundamentals, some amount of polling.
You know, they're trying to weight these different things.
You could go crazy and be like, what's the weather?
You know, who's the candidate?
Like, you could find all these variables you want to find, and then there's going to be some amount of it that's just random, you know, because like...
Maybe someone meant to vote, but they lost their ballot.
Maybe, you know, like, there's just chaos theory stuff.
And in an ideal setting where you had, like, access to completely independent populations that they're not in lockstep, they're voting for different reasons for different people, and you get to observe kind of that process a bunch of times, that's one thing.
But when the people in Ohio vote and the people in Pennsylvania vote, like, a lot of that is in common.
Not all of the reasons, but a lot of the reasons are the same.
And so anyway, it was interesting because they did all the math in their mind and showed that like, they set for fun, they set 538 as like, okay, we'll set this as our oracle, they call it, where it's like, they're doing these simulations.
And they said, okay, for this one, we're going to just assume that 538 is gospel.
Like, that's just correct.
And they ran simulations that were based on the assumptions of 538.
They're still going to have the randomness, but it's within the constraints of that specific model.
So essentially...
What that's saying is, if you were trying to pick the best election model, in this simulation they're running, 538 should be it because it's 100%.
And again, it doesn't mean it predicts it every time.
It means that its confidence intervals are right.
And it means that it's like setting the correct parameters, essentially, if that makes sense.
Just to make that clear, 538 might say 80% Trump, 20% Kamala, let's say.
Kamala winning doesn't mean the model was wrong, per se.
It could mean that the 20% happened or that the model's wrong.
And so what this simulation did...
Was it set whatever parameters that 538 said, it set that as like, that's the realm of possibilities that's going to happen.
Meaning that that model is as good as you could get in this fake universe we're doing.
And then what it did is it took other models and it like set some different accuracy parameters for them.
Essentially, the point of the experiment, the point of simulation is to say, if one model was way better than another, how long would it take for us to be able to tell?
And the answer is hundreds of years.
Wow.
And it makes sense when you think about it, because every single time if this model says 60-40 and the 40 percent happens, you cannot know by a sample of one there whether the model is wrong or whether the 40 percent happened.
It's just really hard.
Like you need a bunch of observations.
And because these elections, especially for president, happen every four years.
Right.
It's like at a minimum.
And this was...
They set a pretty extreme one.
They set one where 538 is 100% perfect and other models are like terrible.
And even to tell the difference between like a perfect model and a terrible model or just a random chance model.
Actually, that's what it was.
Yeah, that's usually what they do.
To tell the difference because it would actually be as hard to be perfectly wrong as it would be to be perfectly right.
So just to tell the difference between a perfect 100% model based on their simulation, like they're setting the constraints here and like a 50-50 coin toss takes...
That one was at least like 24 years or something.
And obviously we're not dealing with that level of accuracy.
We're not dealing with a 100% to 50-50.
We're dealing with shades of accuracy with these models.
And so knowing which of these models is right that are doing this 4 and 10, 6 and 10, that kind of thing...
Is basically impossible with our current level of understanding of the universe.
Like, it just...
It would take hundreds of years of data.
And in that time, assumptions would probably change.
Like, you probably couldn't even do that.
Because, like, think of how much would change in that time about how elections work, about how voting works, about how...
You know, there's just no way to know which model is more accurate.
There's absolutely no way to know.
And it's very interesting.
But does any of that mean...
That once the polls all switch, you know, kind of favoring Trump, that there's some reason we can then and only then think they're wrong.
Right.
There are some theories about how these polls might be wrong.
I've already talked about, like, right-wing polls kind of flooding the zone a little bit.
And that might seem comforting for the moment.
There's some people who posted on my Facebook, they posted a few people who are doing something.
Like one guy is on threads adjusting polls because he thinks there's like some sort of bias that's being thrown in there from 2022 being off in Democrats' favor.
And they're like, hey, here's the polls if you look for it non-adjusted.
And I think they have some plausible reasoning.
And it looks more like what I would expect reality to be, like Harris plus three nationally, Harris up in Pennsylvania, which is huge.
Pennsylvania is massive.
That really matters a lot.
Up three in Pennsylvania, up three in Michigan, 1.5 in Wisconsin.
It shows roughly what I would hope was true, but I just don't know.
Yeah, you'd have to be making some assumptions to accept something like that, yeah.
And the thing is, I worry that one polling company might be making that mistake, or maybe a couple.
But I don't think that I or this person on Threads is necessarily that much smarter than Nate Cohn and the people doing it in the New York Times.
And I think that we may all be wrong, but I don't know if I can confidently sit here and think like, no, I and this guy in Threads is right and the New York Times is wrong.
I just don't...
I don't feel like I have that kind of information.
I just don't.
Especially because, you know, the trend is when Trump is on the ballot, he's always underestimated.
He's always underestimated on the polls.
Now, when he's not on the ballot, Republicans have been overestimated in the past, like 2018, 2022.
Weirdly, the midterms is when Democrats have been overperforming for various reasons.
But when Trump's on the ballot, he's overperformed.
Even in 2020, when he lost, he overperformed his polls by a lot.
So when it comes to the modeling, Nate Cohn wrote about this right-wing problem where he's like, hey, look, all these polls have come in in 2022.
And just the other day, some people were saying, hey, is this happening again?
Let me read this part.
Is this just a red polling wave is what he says.
To some, it's starting to feel as if the polls might err in the same way they did in 2022.
Over the last few weeks, there's been a deluge of polls from Republican-leaning firms, including firms polling for the Trump campaign.
And this was interesting.
Actually, sorry, I want to pull away.
There was something pretty crazy.
This isn't a crazy theory.
I want to be very clear.
This is not a crazy theory.
This is a thing that is happening.
But it's about what it's actually doing to the models.
Because here's a different article I read, New Republic.
Sorry to go in and out here.
But this said, Last month, a GOP-friendly polling firm presented itself and its data in a highly unusual way.
Rather than maintain a nominally neutral public-facing profile, this pollster acted more like the cavalry brigade for Donald Trump's campaign.
And the firm did so explicitly, openly, and proudly.
It all went down in mid-September at a time when the 538 polling averages showed the slightest of leads for Kamala Harris in North Carolina, a must-win state for Trump.
Her edge was short-lived.
The averages moved back to favoring Trump.
And Qantas Insights, a GOP-friendly polling firm, took credit for this development, and When a MAGA influencer celebrated the pro-Trump shift on X, formerly Twitter, Qantas' account responded, you're welcome.
The implication was clear.
Qantas poll had not only pushed the averages back to Trump, this was nakedly the whole point of releasing the poll in the first place.
So that right there would be like, ah, okay, maybe this bullshit is happening.
And a reminder, this is from this election, not 2022.
This did just happen.
However, back to that Nate Cohn New York Times article.
But so far, the Republican polling wave isn't responsible for any major movement in the polling averages.
One simple test, what our polling averages would look like if we excluded every poll sponsored by Republicans or conducted by Republican polling firms, along with surveys by any pollsters that I've seen being accused of trying to flood the zone for Republicans.
Hmm.
Here's how times polling averages would change without just taking all those polls out.
None at all.
There's nothing that changes with this.
Michigan changes from like slightly ahead to 1% ahead, you know, one point ahead for Harris.
Same with Wisconsin.
So virtually no change.
Right.
That scares me.
Nate Cohn is here saying, here, I went into the fucking back end of the system here, took out anything that could possibly be looked at as Republicans flooding the zone.
It's just not changing his model.
Now, his model, their model, it's not that it looks terrible for Harris.
It actually looks okay.
But that's still scary.
Like, I don't want it to just be, okay, it's a 51-49 that we don't descend into fascism, you know?
And unfortunately, it's just, honestly, it's a coin toss for fascism.
It really is right now.
I mean, these states, like, I did my own map just for fun, like the thing, you know, the 270 to win kind of stuff.
Yeah.
When I filled out based on what I was thinking based on polling, I had Trump winning, like, 283 or something.
Was that what he got to?
Mm-hmm.
Because based on how the polling is, like if he wins, it's basically Pennsylvania is very significant right now.
Arizona, it looks like Trump's going to win Arizona, which sucks.
That sucks, yeah.
Nevada is just 50-50.
Now that's a small state.
But Arizona, 11 electoral votes matters quite a bit.
Even if we give Harris, you know, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, like those states, the problem is Georgia is looking pretty bad.
And Georgia is 16 votes.
That's bad.
North Carolina, yeah, that's not really that close.
It's also 16.
But like, losing Georgia and Pennsylvania, I mean, that's just murder.
Like, it's gonna be really hard to come back from that.
I mean, a lot of these states are within one and it just comes down to like, well, we have to hope either there's a systematic reason, which there could be, that the polls are wrong in our favor, I guess.
And I just think it's important to note that that's where we are.
We are at the point where if we're super lucky, something's seriously wrong with all these polls, which will be very significant.
And actually, Kamala is going to win easily and all that stuff.
But in line with that study, right?
I mean, that's not completely unrealistic.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
But that's another thing I wanted to say.
The polls are so close that within the margin of error is a landslide in either direction.
And I mean that literally, like that's mathematically true.
So for the polling and the plus or minus, you know, the margin of error, when you do the electoral math of the electoral college votes, either way, like if the polls are within their own margins for error, but, you know, they slightly go one way versus the other, Those differences are landslide in either direction.
We are 50-50, meaning it could be a landslide for Trump, it could be a landslide for Kamala, or it could be very, very, very close.
And I know that's basically useless.
I was going to say.
It's important to know that that's where we are because, like, if the polls were slightly better, then we wouldn't necessarily be there.
We'd be like, well, a big miss would be a narrow win for Trump, but most likely it'll be either a narrow win for Kamala or a big win for Kamala.
You know what I mean?
Like, the polls could still be pretty close but be shifted enough to where, like, you're more confident of a win for Kamala, you know?
So, like, there's shades of difference there.
Mm-hmm.
But that's the important thing.
This isn't doom and gloom as in this is inevitable.
It's not me saying we're definitely losing.
It's all over.
I'm not saying that.
But I am saying that based on the current polling averages that have been pretty consistent now for a few weeks, it's looking probable that Trump's going to win and that the Senate is looking real bad.
And it's looking probable that they're going to win the House.
I think it's important that we all know that.
And if you want to have your reasons, and I'm happy to hear them, please, by all means, hey, send me your copium.
I'm in.
I'm excited.
If you have, oh no, I know, Thomas, you're wrong.
There's this systematic reason why blah, blah, blah.
Hey, I want to hear it.
I really do.
The thing I always say about who answers their phone and nobody answers the phone, like that actually is not as big of a deal as I had hoped.
I actually want to point out a patron comment on our OA Patreon said, I work in polling.
It is a part-time job I do because of the, whatever.
I work in polling.
The talk about polling younger people is bull sugar.
No, I don't know what that means, but depending on industry standards and regulation, we use random digit dialing and give quotas for each age, not age group.
When calling, we expressly ask for 15 to 32-year-olds if available or possible schedules.
Another vital piece of information that nobody talks about is that women are rarely available to poll.
They are always caring for children or working and too busy, busier than men to participate.
Look it up if you don't believe me.
That's interesting.
Well, that gives me some of them, I hope.
If your polling methods are appropriately adjusted, you close the poll by eliminating by age, not age group, and you ensure you have a wide cross-section of well-defined demographics.
From my limited experience, certain age or gender quotas fill faster, but a supervisor closes an age or gender as they fill to focus our calls on others and reinstates them to fill that quota.
So I guess I didn't even really think of that.
So we need X number of responses from people who are 35.
Right.
And then they call until they get that number of responses.
And there's still problems with that.
Obviously, if it's still really hard to get 18-year-olds and it takes forever to fill them, that still may mean you're not getting necessarily a good random sample.
It could be that you're, I don't know, you're getting a very particular kind of 18-year-old.
Yeah, like...
So it doesn't cure all, but it does make that a little bit more accurate seeming.
It's more about filling age and gender quotas they're looking for to where they say, okay, we have enough of this exact age and gender that we can say we have a sample of them.
And by that method, they kind of make it so this no one answers their phone thing doesn't really have as much an effect as that I might have thought.
So that scares me a little.
But in the end, they do still have to make assumptions about who's going to vote.
They do still have to make assumptions about turnout.
Here's another thing that I found interesting that you might find interesting.
They try to calibrate by asking people who they voted for.
So therefore, if they know, OK, 60 percent of people voted for Trump in this state and our responses say that like 50 percent of them voted for Trump, they know like, OK, we need to control for that.
But people misremember who they vote for, believe it or not.
They're called idiots.
No, I don't.
Somehow people misremember who they vote for or they misrepresent who they vote for.
Like they're it's not perfect.
There definitely are assumptions built in.
There's reasons why polling is going to be wrong.
And it could be.
I just have to hope that maybe the youths or maybe women, my hope is in youths or in women, that they are being underrepresented or under projected or whatever in terms of turnout.
I mean, it doesn't take much for that to give us a systematic kind of under pulling, like I said, you know, but it can just as easily go the other way.
It can just as easily be, well, actually, there's that many more angry old white dudes that were motivated than we thought.
And they actually turned out more like that's what happened in 2016, 2020.
There isn't any particular reason I can find to expect that, which makes sense because if there were the smartest people in polling would probably factor that in to the extent they could.
So I don't know.
Here's where we are.
I'm very scared of what's going to happen.
It's not looking great.
Many outcomes are still within our reach.
It is still entirely possible that we win all three things.
It's possible.
I'm really fucking hoping for it.
I'm really hoping there's a big polling miss.
But will it be systematic or will it be kind of different ones off for different reasons, but they sort of offset?
So anyway, that's what's going on.
I'm terrified.
Any last words from you?
My last words are hug your loved ones, go vote, and hang in there and reach out if you need us in the meantime.
We're too busy, but yeah.
I don't know, man.
Send us your copium.
I'm all ears for it.
I know there's stuff I meant to talk about that I didn't, but that's okay.
I talked about a ton of stuff.
So this feeling of absolute dread in my mind has made me want to focus on what might be the next fascist regime coming in.
Mm-hmm.
And for that reason, next time on Where There's Woke, Lydia watched as I hope I didn't hallucinate or maybe I hope I did hallucinate about an hour ago when you said you watched the entire fucking Trump rally from New York.
Yeah, that's real.
So that we didn't have to.
I tracked down audio from the 1939 German Bund rally in New York in Madison Square in the same place because there's so many comparisons to that.
I actually found the audio.
It took me a while.
It was kind of hard to find.
I have some very interesting stuff that we're going to do, I guess, after talking about the rally that happened in 2024.
But next time on Where There's Woke, Lydia's going to take us through the evil ghouls that...
I mean, you've probably seen some...
Here's the thing.
You've probably seen a lot of it.
You've seen the guy and his bad jokes, his awful racist jokes.
You've probably seen a few things.
You haven't seen the half of it.
Like, there's so much in that rally that is fucking batshit insane.
And these are the people who might be in charge of us in like five seconds.
Tune in for the evil highlights.
We're going to get to know them a little bit.
Yep.
Oh, boy.
So this fucking sucks.
Sorry.
That's what we're doing.
And then hopefully we'll get good news on Tuesday night and Wednesday.
And then we can go back to just making fun of stupid college kids gone crazy stuff.
