Nick wrote:"Unfavorable" is some soft metric, click bait horseshit that allows worthless articles like that to take up space on the Internet. He's comparing this election to those decades prior when that makes zero sense. Zero sense in terms of where we are economically, culturally and from a global perspective.
Of course Trump has high unfavorables. He's a dickhead and even his supporters acknowledge that. In fact, people voting for him are more than likely contributing to that high metric based on how the polling questions are phrased.
Neither leading candidate is likable. Even though Bernie talks the most sense I don't find him like able or inspiring in the way he presents himself like I did Obama during his first run. All these polls are taking a small sample size and trying to prove that percent out as some Truth when if this cycle has taught us anything we can't really predict what will happen based on these so called expert pollsters.
Even Nate Silver is stumped by what's happening.
Please don't read this as a personal attack, just launching into some thoughts here.
This is, quite simply, an anti-evidence perspective. I can't argue with you when you "feel" so strongly that you have a pulse on where the country is based on anecdotes and your own biases.
Unfavorability is not a fool proof metric. It's not the same question as "would you vote for this person?" But it is actual evidence. And it's the evidence that most strongly correlates to vote share throughout the entire history of political polling. That counts for so much more than "here's my read on it!" The data quite literally says that Americans dislike Trump more than Hillary. We can have a reasonable disagreement about how that will play out in actual voting. We can be concerned by the fact that it's even close because Hillary is so disliked. But to dismiss it is, in my view, unjustifiable. Furthermore, your assessment that "taking a small sample size and trying to prove that percent out" is literally what the science of polling and statistics is. There is no other way to do it. Are you against statistical principles? Is there nothing we can garner from this type of data?
I don't see where pollsters have been wrong on Trump. He's been in the lead nationally for months. He actually underperformed his polling in Iowa. He won NH and SC after polls said he would. Where is that wrong?
Certainly, many pundits have used polling and data to make further-reaching arguments that Trump was not viable or "unelectable" that haven't proven true thus far. I think the pundit class and many of us were wrong on that--several months ago we would've said Donald didn't have a chance of getting nominated, but we now have to concede that he is extremely viable in that regard. But that wasn't based on some poll that said he was unelectable. That was reading the tea leaves beyond "Donald Trump leads in national polls". Trump's lead in polls is actually central to his appeal! You want to get on board with a winner! He talks about polls endlessly and cherry picks his favorite ones to give him legitimacy and build his own mythology.
I follow Silver closely and wouldn't characterize him as "stumped" on Trump. His POV seems pretty nimble and he changed his tune very quickly after Trump started winning actual contests. But Silver is a modeler and that kind of analysis relies heavily on historical precedents and data. As you say, an election such as this that doesn't have many analogues from the past is hard to model in that way. It is actually
easier to poll than to model, though, because you can change your polling assumptions much more easily than you can change historical data.
The crux of Silver's bear view on Trump, early on, was that party elites (traditionally wielding a ton of power in political primaries) would do anything to stop Trump early on. They would consolidate around a single candidate, push other candidates out of the race, and pump resources into defeating Trump. Instead, they underestimated Trump and overestimated the organization of their own party. They waited and waited and continued to slice and dice up 66% of the vote among a slew of nincompoops, allowing the man with the high floor but (presumably) low ceiling to plurality his way to the top. Jeb should have been their guy, but the combination of anti-establishment voter sentiment and Jeb's own completely lackluster campaign sunk that ship. There is a big story here on how Republican elites diminished their power so completely over the last two election cycles that they couldn't even prevent John Kasich from gumming up the works of their own, convoluted nominating process.
Home
