You don’t need to make guesses based on your own experiences, a quick googling of “swing voters” will pull up a bunch of data-driven approaches at analyzing them.
Are these the same data-driven polling that have consistently screwed up election prediction for the past decade?
Nate Silver did a better job in this last one, but he said going in that they’d finally recognized that polling was broken, it they’d stopped relying on it so heavily and were considering other factors in their predictions.
Have you ever met a honestly “undecided” voter, who votes?
63.7% turn out in the 2024 general. Nearly 40% of Americans didn’t bother to vote. That was 66%, in 2020. There were an estimated 244M eligible voters in 2024; that means about 5½ million people who did vote in 2020 didn’t bother to get off their fat asses this time and vote. Trump won the popular vote by 2½ million votes. So there’s that.
Not that the popular vote means much; most Republican presidents who’ve won in the past quarter century did so while losing the popular vote, proving what a great system we have.
Anyway, I don’t believe in swing voters. Specifically, I don’t believe there are any significant numbers of people who actually vote who swing between the parties. The provable evidence of down-ballot voting speaks for itself. I have no doubt there undecideds; what I doubt is that many of them go to the polls.
There is one pretty clear data point that demonstrates their existence, that being people that voted for both Biden and Trump. And yes, I have met some swing voters, they’re folks that are usually not very into politics, but do vote. I find it silly to not believe in something that we have data on, at any rate. Nor do I think it’s very productive to focus in on any singular factor when multiple factors go into an equation.
I’m not sure that we’re living in rational times, though. There’s a concerted effort to divided the public, focusing discontent within the lower and middle class. I am increasingly skeptical of the idea that there’s a large group of people who listen both to Fox News and NPR and seriously haven’t formed a world view favoring one or the other.
And, again, time and again polling has proven unreliable. Lies, damned lies, and statistics? On the other hand, we have verifiable voting counts that show clearly that turnout was significantly - statistically significantly - low this election.
But now I’ve forgotten what we were originally disagreeing about.
Swing voters. And yeah, people that consume news probably aren’t going to be swing. It’s more often going to be people that don’t watch news, read articles, etc.
You don’t need to make guesses based on your own experiences, a quick googling of “swing voters” will pull up a bunch of data-driven approaches at analyzing them.
Are these the same data-driven polling that have consistently screwed up election prediction for the past decade?
Nate Silver did a better job in this last one, but he said going in that they’d finally recognized that polling was broken, it they’d stopped relying on it so heavily and were considering other factors in their predictions.
Have you ever met a honestly “undecided” voter, who votes?
63.7% turn out in the 2024 general. Nearly 40% of Americans didn’t bother to vote. That was 66%, in 2020. There were an estimated 244M eligible voters in 2024; that means about 5½ million people who did vote in 2020 didn’t bother to get off their fat asses this time and vote. Trump won the popular vote by 2½ million votes. So there’s that.
Not that the popular vote means much; most Republican presidents who’ve won in the past quarter century did so while losing the popular vote, proving what a great system we have.
Anyway, I don’t believe in swing voters. Specifically, I don’t believe there are any significant numbers of people who actually vote who swing between the parties. The provable evidence of down-ballot voting speaks for itself. I have no doubt there undecideds; what I doubt is that many of them go to the polls.
There is one pretty clear data point that demonstrates their existence, that being people that voted for both Biden and Trump. And yes, I have met some swing voters, they’re folks that are usually not very into politics, but do vote. I find it silly to not believe in something that we have data on, at any rate. Nor do I think it’s very productive to focus in on any singular factor when multiple factors go into an equation.
I’m not sure that we’re living in rational times, though. There’s a concerted effort to divided the public, focusing discontent within the lower and middle class. I am increasingly skeptical of the idea that there’s a large group of people who listen both to Fox News and NPR and seriously haven’t formed a world view favoring one or the other.
And, again, time and again polling has proven unreliable. Lies, damned lies, and statistics? On the other hand, we have verifiable voting counts that show clearly that turnout was significantly - statistically significantly - low this election.
But now I’ve forgotten what we were originally disagreeing about.
Swing voters. And yeah, people that consume news probably aren’t going to be swing. It’s more often going to be people that don’t watch news, read articles, etc.