What is considered a bigger deal is that many of the other polls are herding or they are from companies that carry out low-quality polling.
Selzer is someone who long-term listeners of 538 may have heard of. She has been talked about on their podcast pretty often over the years, and Silver considers her to be one of the best, if not the actual best, pollster. She has a track record to back that up, it seems:
Sure. One poll in a non-swing state (or very unlikely to swing state) is not something that should massively sway anyone, but it is still interesting. I stand by that, and by the claim that it is not "no bigger a deal than any other poll".
Did I say Pennsylvania? Sorry, I meant Iowa.
So, of course, would an actual Harris lead of 9.6%.
What I don't understand is why so much stock is put into the latest poll, as if it supersedes all previous information, and especially when election forecasters, such as Nate Silver, do such a good job of integrating the poll with all that other information. The reporting on the Selzer poll borders on fraud. For example, the lead sentence in the Des Moines Register's article reporting the result was "Kamala Harris now leads Donald Trump in Iowa — a startling reversal for Democrats and Republicans who have all but written off the state’s presidential contest as a certain Trump victory."So, of course, would an actual Harris lead of 9.6%.
I've come to the conclusion that nothing any poll is telling us is particularly reliable. I guess we'll just have to wait three more days to know who is the winner. Possibly more.
Example: one Donald J Trump. Got spurious reason to get out of serving his country yet immediately turns to violence any time his will is thwarted.
I wonder what would happen to the relative volume of ads if you created a clean youtube account and started watching random videos from that. The ad choicess are part of the same algorithm as the video ones.
Funny the comparison to Milei, given how badly he's raping the Argentinian economy. "The only way to reduce the debt is to kill the economy!"
Because he won't have to do any actual fighting himself.
The national debt was never a problem until Ray-Gun came along (in fact you could argue that in some ways it was too low, restricting long term investments) and that was because under him the US turned from a country that taxed the rich to one that taxed the poor.
As I understand it, most of the stock comes from the pollster being historically right. Starting in 2012, she's gotten the presidential Iowa result within one or two points of the final tally. She focuses on Iowa, and ONLY Iowa, which is not in any way a swing state subject to constant electoral inundation, so she's got a unique handle on "low-information" voters. Also, it's IOWA. A state redder than Texas. Redder than Ohio. If Harris is even in consideration for that state, Trump is deeply screwed everywhere else.
As an aside, I just discovered that if you download the DuckDuckGo browser and use it to watch YT videos, you won't get ads at all. It's such an improvement now that YT ads are so frequent, obtrusive, and stupid, and so hard to block otherwise.
A lot of stock is put in this poll because, as Silver pointed out, most pollsters are herding meaning their polls are probably not that accurate. He showed recently how the polls in swing states being a point or two apart is not credible given the stated margin of error. For them to ALL be so close together suggests that they are putting their thumb on the scale or file-drawing those that don’t look right.
