There’s been a fair bit of chatter around lately about momentum in favour of Donald Trump, but by any reasonable metric the situation remains as it’s been since the dust settled a few weeks after Joe Biden’s withdrawal. Namely, poll aggregates have Kamala Harris up by three points nationally, which translates into an effective dead heat from election forecasts. A narrowing in Nate Silver’s probability forecast from around 56-44 to 50-50 has no doubt been influential, but the fundamental calculus is unchanged: the polls will very likely prove to have been out in one direction or another, and whoever they are underselling will take home the prize. For what it’s worth, The Economist’s and FiveThirtyEight’s models have ticked back a little to Harris over the past few days after narrowing to almost dead level a week ago, respectively putting her at 54% and 56%.
Considerably more depth on all this is available from Adrian Beaumont’s latest for The Conversation. The monthly Resolve Strategic polls for Nine Newspapers have been asking their Australian respondents who they would vote for if they could or would, consistently finding the fifty-first state to be deep blue: the latest has Kamala Harris at 52%, up two on last month, with Donald Trump down four to 21%.
Centre,
You are beyond the pale. The comment regarding “pussy” was words fail me.
You are a grub. No ifs, no buts.
And no, well adjusted blokes don’t say that at all.
Does anyone subscribe to the Nate Silver newsletter? I get the free version and I’m dead curious about the answer to the question the writer leaves dangling at the (truncated) end of the free version today. (I would never wish to undermine a business model and I’m not suggesting the wholesale cutting and pasting of the answer, however I think Nate is in reasonable financial shape — in his latest podcast he mentioned that he wagered US$1.8 million on sports betting for research for his latest book, all reaping a net gain of just US$5,000 though black ink nevertheless). Anyway, here is the question left dangling:
Part of Nate Silver’s newsletter today:
We carefully track the differences between likely voter (LV) and registered voter (RV) polls because this is one factor our model accounts for. Because LV polls are theoretically more accurate than RV polls, we treat them a little differently. When a firm releases two versions of a poll, we use the LV version instead of the RV version. And we weight polls of likely voters higher than polls of registered voters in our polling average and forecast.
Furthermore, when a poll only publishes RV numbers, we adjust it to essentially transform it to an LV basis. The adjustment is based on polls that release both likely-voter and registered-voter versions of the same survey, e.g. in this Washington Post poll of North Carolina, Trump leads Kamala Harris by 4 points among registered voters, but his lead shrinks slightly to 3 points in the LV version.²
Is this typical? Does Harris generally do better when these likely voter screens are applied? The answer is pretty weird — in reviewing the data for this story, we found something we weren’t expecting…