• banneryear1868@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    As of November 5th “Unnamed Democrat” polls up to 8 points higher than Biden with Trump leading in 5/6 swing states. They’re both historically unpopular candidates with Biden trending downward. Best thing Biden could do at this point is withdrawal set up another Democrat candidate to run. Downvoting these simple polling facts doesn’t make them go away and make everything okay, cause it’s very much not okay right now.

    • breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      I get being concerned but it’s way too early to panic. Historically, polling isn’t predictive until June of the election year. A year out from the 2012 election, Obama’s numbers were worse than Biden’s and he still won in a landslide. In modern presidential elections, incumbents have won about 75% of the time. Abandoning the benefit of incumbency is almost always the worst thing you could do.

      • Serinus@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I do think if we had a decent dem candidate in the wings, now would be a good time to abandon the incumbency. Having incumbency might be more valuable in 2028 than 2024. The Republican party isn’t getting better any time soon. At least Trump’s an idiot who will often shoot himself in the foot (even if he does have a surprising immunity to foot lead.)

    • cmhe@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The question is who is the other Democrat candidate? I have the impression that putting fourth a popular candidate goes against everything the DNC stands for.

      • banneryear1868@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Exactly the Democrat Superdelegates made it clear in 2016 they would choose the party stalwarts over someone who had a certain chance of winning against the opponent. The reason for that is simply the finances that support the party benefit from the current economic arrangement, and most of those big donors aren’t exclusively Democrat donors.

        This is why the position where we ought not to protest the Democrats, yet also consider them the party for change and progress, is irreconcilable with reality. If Democrats are the party of change and progress then it’s necessary to protest and agitate to sway them, if that’s a futile effort then it proves they aren’t the party for the job.

        The argument to vote Democrats now is they aren’t Trump, which is valid of course, but it gives Trump incredible power as the locus this hinges on. The Democrat PACs funding ad campaigns for the fascist GOP primary candidates is this strategy in plain view. It works in the election cycle because it coerces votes out of fear, but it’s a losing downward spiral because it actively shifts politics to the right.

    • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Last time I mentioned that poll, people tried to come up with all kinds of reasons to discredit it. Reasons that the poll explicitly stated how it accounted for them.

        • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The point of the poll is to see how things are tending, not to see how the election will happen 10 months from now. You’re just another person trying to discredit what you don’t understand.

          • hydrospanner@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            That’s a bold statement for someone putting so much stock in the implications of 11 month pre-election polling.

            You should really comment less on shit you don’t know about, you’re embarrassing yourself.

            • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Okay, feel free to ignore the polls and reap the consequences of that. Remember when the trends of polling was ignored in 2016 and how that turned out?

              You should really comment less on shit you don’t know about, you’re embarrassing yourself.

              Projection

      • banneryear1868@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yup and they just disagree with arbitrary opinions they think are factual and downvote without consideration of how statistics work. If they respond with data it’s some very niche thing extrapolated way beyond it’s significance. Ultimately it’s downvoting what they don’t want to be true as what happens on all social media.

        • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Have you seen people taking statistics classes? It’s almost universally hated because, for some reason, people struggle with it. I really enjoyed it because it’s probably the most practical form of math you can take. I was only one class away from getting a minor in statistics, but wasn’t going to take an additional semester just for that minor.

          • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I really enjoyed my stats classes. It was a lot of really great information and general knowledge.

            I do think having that background makes me simultaneously more and less trusting of polls. The recent performance of polls in the midterms and across various races this year are quite surprising to me. They haven’t done a good job of capturing the abortion backlash trend against Republicans.

            There would have to be a reason however for their deficiency, and that’s where the stats background is helpful. I’m not going to baselessly dismiss polls because I dislike the results, I need reasons. And the best explanation I can think of is the simple random sample. The people they’re polling don’t constitute a true SRS, because I wager there’s some conflating factor skewing results. Landlines are going to favor older populations. Texting people to take polls is going to have the bias of who actually goes on to take them.

            The biggest enemy to statistics is that there’s no law forcing people to answer questions if they’re chosen for a poll.

            • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Landlines are going to favor older populations

              Sure, but look at the polling method. They used landlines and cellular.

    • SkepticalButOpenMinded@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Alas, “generic Democrats” don’t exist. All the ones we can actually vote for have pesky details, like names and histories. Generic candidates pretty much always outperform specific named candidates. That’s true of Biden, sure, but it’s also true of alternatives to Biden.

      Instead, name a specific Democrat that you think will do better, and we can compare their performance to Biden. Who specifically do you propose?

      • banneryear1868@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        This captures public sentiment towards the party itself not those towards a specific candidate, so really what you’ve said is the point of that poll. The question of why the Democrats, and Republicans for that matter, can’t appeal to popular sentiment is to identify a problem with politics in this era. What if no candidate can fulfill the hyperreal brand that the party’s construct? What if these politics no longer affect economic arrangements, which are consented to by both parties, and are merely a post-political spectacle to choose the aesthetic of the consenting economic arrangement.

        Obama really committed the party to the policy-first thing, which requires inventing a popular politics, and he was very good at this and I think is the best the Democrats could offer in this political era. Convincing people something is right after policies that appeal to the party donors are formulated takes someone like Obama. You see this all the time from the former Obama admin Pod Save America guys where they’re always desperately pleading with the audience about why a policy is reasonable, and of course from current Democrat hopefuls.

        The exception is obviously Sanders who was polling well against Trump, but Democrat superdelegates and Democrats campaigned against him, because he appealed to popular politics and threatened the economic arrangement of party donors, most of which don’t really care which party is in power. That’s ultimately what has to happen, popular politics has to override the economic interests of the parties. Unfortunately every time that’s appearing to happen in America’s history the powerful manage to divide everyone. That’s largely what Jim Crow did was impose an order to divide the Populists, who were black and white workers demanding better treatment and less corporate financial power driving policy.

        So “specific Democrat” here isn’t a who, it’s a different mode of politics.

      • cmhe@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        If you every played XCOM, you would know that 85% chance to hit is rather low.

        Or about the chance of not rolling a 1 on a d6. And I have rolled too many ones in DnD and that was on d20s.

        • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Video games are a great teacher in why to fear probability.

          A 1/20 chance to miss? Well fuck, I better make figure out what I’m going to do when (not if) I miss.

          A rare weapon that’s 1/100? Time to prepare for ~300 runs/kills to get it.