Bullish on Bernie: The Bernie Sanders 2016 Thread

[Belz...]

People don't vote AGAINST a candidate -- they vote FOR a candidate.

Actually, they do both. All the time.

 

[varwoche]

And so what, I like Bernie Sanders but that doesn't mean I have to agree with about everything.

According to your tortured "logic", MLK tolerated bigotry; your candidate Bernie Sanders tolerates bigotry.

<grabs a bag of popcorn pretzels awaiting Tony Stark's whimsical and deeply insightful take on things>

 

[Manopolus]

I see, you are going by single polls, no matter their historical accuracy, whereas I'm going by polling aggregates.

Doesn't matter. The average of multiple flawed assumptions has a tendency to still give you flawed assumptions. Averaging them out doesn't help.

 

[Manopolus]

Actually, they do both. All the time.

Nope... I've never heard of "nobody" winning an election. There are plenty of situations where that's the only alternative to a single candidate running for a particular position in local elections though.

You pretty much have to vote "FOR" somebody for the other side to lose. I wasn't even talking about motivations per se. It was a statement of fact.

 

[wareyin]

Nope... I've never heard of "nobody" winning an election. There are plenty of situations where that's the only alternative to a single candidate running for a particular position in local elections though.

You pretty much have to vote "FOR" somebody for the other side to lose.

Plenty of people (myself included) have voted against a presidential candidate. Candidates for POTUS don't run unopposed, after all.

 

[wareyin]

Doesn't matter. The average of multiple flawed assumptions has a tendency to still give you flawed assumptions. Averaging them out doesn't help.

Your assumptions are flawed. Not all polls are flawed, even polls that are flawed are flawed to different degrees, and fivethirtyeight assigns more weight to less (historically) flawed polls.

 

[Manopolus]

Your assumptions are flawed. Not all polls are flawed, even polls that are flawed are flawed to different degrees, and fivethirtyeight assigns more weight to less (historically) flawed polls.

I'm sorry, but the assumption that you can assign a percentage to whether or not a certain demographic (voters that haven't voted in the past, etc.) will show up is just plain wrong. All the polls do that, and it's quite simply not a constant.

Political polling has never been particularly accurate except, perhaps, as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, people may look at the poll and think something like: "okay, my candidate has no chance of winning, so why bother?" That's pretty much the only way that they attain any resemblance of accuracy as to who wins or loses.

Even that dynamic doesn't work when people don't trust the press though.

How the hell are you going to attain any sort of accuracy by polling when only 10% of the registered party members show up, and in an unpredictable and non-representative manner? The "showing up" factor is one that can't be quantified. It's purely a matter of how fired up a particular demographic happens to be compared to another, along with historical criteria as to who voted in the past. There's no polling method that can quantify that properly. I suppose you can ask directly, but that's not exactly going to give you the final answer either.

How the polls tend to do it is by using historical data combined with asking whether the person has ever voted in the primary before. In this -particular- election, that will slant the bias towards Hillary. Some use other questions as well, but I'm pretty sure that it's still not quantifiable in any predictable manner.

 

[Manopolus]

Plenty of people (myself included) have voted against a presidential candidate. Candidates for POTUS don't run unopposed, after all.

Oh? You've voted "no confidence" or something of the sort in the past? I'm pretty sure that those votes are tossed out. Like I eventually mentioned above (edited), it was a statement of fact, rather than anything relating to assumed motivation. It doesn't matter what your particular motivation happens to be -- you are still voting FOR a candidate. Voting against one would be writing "no" as a write-in candidate.

 

[wareyin]

I'm sorry, but the assumption that you can assign a percentage to whether or not a certain demographic (voters that haven't voted in the past, etc.) will show up is just plain wrong. All the polls do that, and it's quite simply not a constant.

Political polling has never been particularly accurate except, perhaps, as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, people may look at the poll and think something like: "okay, my candidate has no chance of winning, so why bother?" That's pretty much the only way that they attain any resemblance of accuracy as to who wins or loses.

Even that dynamic doesn't work when people don't trust the press though.

How the hell are you going to attain any sort of accuracy by polling when only 10% of the registered party members show up, and in an unpredictable and non-representative manner? The "showing up" factor is one that can't be quantified. It's purely a matter of how fired up a particular demographic happens to be compared to another, along with historical criteria as to who voted in the past. There's no polling method that can quantify that properly. I suppose you can ask directly, but that's not exactly going to give you the final answer either.

How the polls tend to do it is by using historical data combined with asking whether the person has ever voted in the primary before. In this -particular- election, that will slant the bias towards Hillary. Some use other questions as well, but I'm pretty sure that it's still not quantifiable in any predictable manner.

Ok, but none of this explains fivethirtyeight's remarkable accuracy with poll predictions. Yes, they got Michigan wrong, but they've been pretty good everywhere else so far. I understand why a Sanders supporter (or a Cruz, or a Rubio supporter, etc) would want them to be wrong, but that doesn't mean they are, or will be.

 

[wareyin]

Oh? You've voted "no confidence" or something of the sort in the past? I'm pretty sure that those votes are tossed out. Like I eventually mentioned above (edited), it was a statement of fact, rather than anything relating to motivation.

No, I voted to try to make sure that a candidate did not win. I did not particularly like the person who got my vote, I did not want the other person to win. Thus, I didn't vote for Kerry, I voted against Bush, for instance.

 

[Belz...]

Nope... I've never heard of "nobody" winning an election. There are plenty of situations where that's the only alternative to a single candidate running for a particular position in local elections though.

You pretty much have to vote "FOR" somebody for the other side to lose. I wasn't even talking about motivations per se. It was a statement of fact.

You're just arguing semantics, here. People do vote "against" the candidate they dislike the most very frequently.

 

[Manopolus]

No, I voted to try to make sure that a candidate did not win. I did not particularly like the person who got my vote, I did not want the other person to win. Thus, I didn't vote for Kerry, I voted against Bush, for instance.

You're just arguing semantics, here. People do vote "against" the candidate they dislike the most very frequently.

You don't see how people are less likely to do this than they are to vote for a candidate which they fully support? It's not merely semantic -- if "not this person" was a legitimate option, we might see more people showing up to vote "not this person" than we see voting for the other candidate.

 

[Foolmewunz]

You don't see how people are less likely to do this than they are to vote for a candidate which they fully support? It's not merely semantic -- if "not this person" was a legitimate option, we might see more people showing up to vote "not this person" than we see voting for the other candidate.

Oh, stop it. People vote FOR a candidate by pulling that lever. But they're often voting against someone. I went through a lot of trouble to register as an overseas voter in '72 just to vote against Nixon. Look at the conservative support for Not Obama. I don't particularly like or trust Hillary Clinton, but I'll vote against the GOP.

Yes, people are more likely (well, other than Trakar) to vote for the representative of the party that is closest to their ideals, but the original statement was not "more likely". The original statement was that people don't do that, and it's just plain incorrect.

 

[Belz...]

You don't see how people are less likely to do this than they are to vote for a candidate which they fully support?

Ok, here's an example: if your favoured candidate is Bernie, but he doesn't get the nomination, and you can't stomach Clinton, but Cruz ends up being the Republican nominee, can you not see that, in this scenario, you might just decide to vote _against_ cruz rather than _for_ Hillary?

 

[Manopolus]

Ok, here's an example: if your favoured candidate is Bernie, but he doesn't get the nomination, and you can't stomach Clinton, but Cruz ends up being the Republican nominee, can you not see that, in this scenario, you might just decide to vote _against_ cruz rather than _for_ Hillary?

It's pretty well established that the majority of eligible voters will choose not to vote for anybody at all, regardless of their motivations. It's also pretty well known that a large portion of both Sanders and, incidentally, Trump supporters have fallen into that demographic in the past.

 

[Belz...]

It's pretty well established that the majority of eligible voters will choose not to vote for anybody at all, regardless of their motivations.

You've now moved the goalposts. You said, and I quote:

People don't vote AGAINST a candidate -- they vote FOR a candidate.

You didn't say that most people didn't do it. You said that this isn't what people do. I am correcting that statement and not the one you've now substituted for it.

 

[Manopolus]

You've now moved the goalposts. You said, and I quote:



You didn't say that most people didn't do it. You said that this isn't what people do. I am correcting that statement and not the one you've now substituted for it.

Umm... like I said, it was a statement of fact. It wasn't a statement of motivations. It has -- as fact -- correlating conclusions that can be drawn, but I was not talking about motivations. I moved no goalposts. I merely added material to fix a miscomprehension.

 

[Belz...]

Umm... like I said, it was a statement of fact. It wasn't a statement of motivations. It has -- as fact -- correlating conclusions that can be drawn, but I was not talking about motivations. I moved no goalposts. I merely added material to fix a miscomprehension.

Are you saying that the quoted bit didn't mean what I thought it meant? Did you mean that people, as a rule, don't do it? If so it was poorly worded, as people DO vote against candidates all the time, even if it's not a majority of the time.

 

[Manopolus]

Are you saying that the quoted bit didn't mean what I thought it meant? Did you mean that people, as a rule, don't do it? If so it was poorly worded, as people DO vote against candidates all the time, even if it's not a majority of the time.

When people vote against a candidate rather than for one it is an invalid vote, as I mentioned before.

"NOT Donald Trump" as a write-in would not be a valid vote, and thus would have no impact on the election.

I meant exactly what I said, literally (not figuratively). To me, that factual information also implies conclusions which can be drawn. It was a statement of the obvious as support material. Whatever your stated motivations, any vote "against" one candidate is actually, in real terms, a vote for the other. It doesn't matter what the motivation is, your vote is quite literally FOR a particular candidate, because that's how elections work.

...unless, of course, you've just cast an invalid ballot. I suppose somebody could possibly do that, but there's no point.

 

[wareyin]

When people vote against a candidate rather than for one it is an invalid vote, as I mentioned before.

"NOT Donald Trump" as a write-in would not be a valid vote, and thus would have no impact on the election.

I meant exactly what I said, literally (not figuratively). To me, that factual information also implies conclusions which can be drawn.

No. Voting for Sanders (if he gets the nomination, which is pretty unlikely) would be voting against Trump. If one is not pro-Sanders, but is very anti-Trump, then one votes against Trump by selecting Sanders.