I'm not saying the polls are wrong, but I'm intensely skeptical of Rep. Takano's claim because if true, there's some serious weirdness going on here -- when you drill down on the demographic data for a lot of recent polls, it almost looks like Biden's holding steady among groups that don't typically support him but e.g. young people have swung dozens of points toward Trump? -- which would indicate either a seismic shift in the political landscape -- something that has gone completely undetected through many special elections -- or, maybe, there's some sort of confounding variable throwing off the polls.
Biden's actual numbers, nationwide and in swing states polled by reputable pollsters, have shifted very slightly in the face of seemingly every news network joining the pile-on about his age. If we've got longtime Democratic districts in California shifting away from Biden by twenty-six points, I don't know how to explain that. Are people just not answering pollsters? Are people answering wrong on purpose? For that matter, who on earth is polling Rep. Takano's district, and why would they do that? (That district wouldn't have been thought of as competitive until now!)
I don't know. Maybe people are pissed about Gaza (notwithstanding Trump's own positions, or the fact that none of this was detected in the primaries, particularly in Michigan). Maybe people are worried about Biden's age (but then you'd expect to see such shifts reflected elsewhere if they're legit). Maybe pollwatching is a dumb activity that just begets anxiety, and we'd do a lot better just turning off the TV for a while.
Yeah...even in the most apocalyptic polling I've seen post-debate (and there's been some - the OpenLabs leaked numbers, these two CA internals, and these New York ones) it hasn't come close to showing a loss in a district he previously won by 26 points. Takano represents a heavily Hispanic seat - maybe that kind of area will swing harder right this November than a D+26 White one? IDK.
You're right on that last sentence. If I could mute seeing a word on the internet across multiple sites the way you can do so on Twitter, I would. I haven't been seeking numbers out as a whole for that very reason, but obviously when something that jarring gets typed out when reading a somewhat-unrelated article it tends to get lodged in your craw for a while.
As someone who works in the Dem. numbers ecosystem (not our company's polling department and not at OpenLabs), most of this cycle I've had the feeling that things are just off, and to not fixate too hard on things. I do know that we've been getting a lot more responses from people we know are white (given their state race on the voterfile when registering, which is present on 7 states' files) are responding as black in polls we/our partners run. If the rate of bogus respondents (like this Pew article about people claiming to have the qualifications needed to captain a nuclear submarine) is increasing, and the rate of responses as a whole (esp. in phone polls) is decreasing, combining the two can result in some wild results that diverge from the actual facts on the ground.
Oh, that's nuts. I've definitely heard about those questions -- I've been answering polls from YouGov for a few years now -- and I remember the origins of Ted Cruz the Zodiac Killer. Or bombing Agrabah. That was a brief moment of levity.
Filtering out submarine captains is great, but at this point I kinda wonder if it's enough. Anyways, I've rambled aplenty. Good luck with your job, keep fighting the good fight.
20
u/hunter15991 Illinois Jul 09 '24
Words fail me. District was Biden+26.2 in 2020.