Wandering the information superhighway, he came upon the last refuge of civilization, PoFo, the only forum on the internet ...
Moderator: PoFo North America Mods
Pants-of-dog wrote:Provide evidence for this claim.
SpecialOlympian wrote:Everything to do with the laptop, which has been thoroughly debunked.
SpecialOlympian wrote:The computer repair guy who supposedly got it appears to have severe mental issues and couldn't give a straight answer to reporters.
SpecialOlympian wrote:The rest is just the strongly right leaning Washington Times (the Moonies newspaper) taking shots at Adam Schiff.
SpecialOlympian wrote:The second Rudy Giuliani got his stink on it it should have been apparent to everyone that this is Veritas level bullshit.
JohnRawls wrote:Trump is surreal: Shit on the top pandemic/infectious expert in the country while a pandemic is raging while at the same time saying nothing is wrong with Qid Pro Quo arrengements for big business as long as they give him money to get re-elected.
Sivad wrote:Welcome to Social Government
https://www.spinquark.com/welcome-to-social-government/
50 Cent endorsed Trump, because he's smart enough to realise Biden's tax plan is going to kill New York's Covid recovery.
Drlee wrote::lol:
Troll much?
You explain what a tax plan that could not even go into effect for almost two years is going to "kill New York's Covid recovery".
Give me a fucking break.
Really @colliric If you are going to just troll at least do it in such a manner that you don't just look like a blithering idiot.
SpecialOlympian wrote:Everything to do with the laptop, which has been thoroughly debunked.
The computer repair guy who supposedly got it appears to have severe mental issues and couldn't give a straight answer to reporters.
The rest is just the strongly right leaning Washington Times (the Moonies newspaper) taking shots at Adam Schiff.
I quoted an article about it a few pages back. The second Rudy Giuliani got his stink on it it should have been apparent to everyone that this is Veritas level bullshit. Rudy is legitimately stupid and is somehow less competent than Veritas, which is a real fucking achievement.
Wulfschilde wrote:Does anyone (and in this case, anyone basically means @Doug64) know when data like party affiliation becomes available for in-person early voting in Florida?
T he polling aggregator on the website RealClearPolitics shows the margin in polls led by Joe Biden in a blue font and the ones led by Donald Trump in red. For a while, the battleground states have tended to be uniformly blue, except for polls conducted by the Trafalgar Group.
If you are a firm believer only in polling averages, this isn’t particularly meaningful, but if you are familiar with Trafalgar’s successes in 2016, when (unlike other pollsters) it had Trump leading in Michigan and Pennsylvania and, in 2018, Ron DeSantis winning his gubernatorial race, it is notable. Regardless, it’s worth knowing why one pollster is departing from nearly everyone else.
To this end, I checked in with Robert Cahaly, who is predicting a Trump victory, on the latest edition of The Editors podcast. This piece is based on our conversation.
Cahaly was born in Georgia and got involved in politics going door-to-door as a kid. He started a political-consulting firm with some others in the late 1990s. Around 2008, he says, they realized that the polling they were getting wasn’t very good, so they started doing their own. He says they got good, accurate results in the races they were working.
In the 2016 primaries, they started putting out some of their own polls. “Our polls ended up being the best ones in South Carolina and Georgia,” Cahaly says. “So we started studying what it was that made those so different.”
Then there was the breakthrough in the 2016 general election. “We ended up having an incredible year,” he says. “I mean, we got Pennsylvania right. We got Michigan right. We had the best poll in five of the battleground states in 2016. And I actually predicted 306 to 232 on the electoral college. And we went from doing a little bit of polling on the side to that [being] our primary business in about 24 hours. And since then, that’s what we’ve been doing.”
Much of Trafalgar’s approach focuses on accounting for the so-called social-desirability bias. As Cahaly puts it, that’s when a respondent gives you “an answer that is designed to make the person asking the question be less judgmental of the person who answers it.” Cahaly notes that this phenomenon showed up as long ago as the 1980s, in the so-called Bradley effect, when the African-American mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, underperformed his polling in a gubernatorial race. It has been a hallmark of the Trump era and is one reason other pollsters missed the impending victory of Ron DeSantis over Andrew Gillum in the 2018 Florida gubernatorial race.
“I’ve got to get past what you want to say in public and get to what you really feel,” Cahaly says. “Because what’s in your heart is going to be what’s on that ballot.”
There are a number of methodological differences in how Trafalgar goes about its work.
One is the number of questions on its surveys. “I don’t believe in long questionnaires,” Cahaly says. “I think when you’re calling up Mom or Dad on a school night, and they’re trying to get the kids dinner and get them to bed, and that phone rings at seven o’clock — and they’re supposed to stop what they’re doing and take a 25- to 30-question poll? No way.”
Why does that matter? “You end up disproportionately representing the people who will like to talk about politics, which is going to skew toward the very, very conservative and the very, very liberal and the very, very bored, “Cahaly explains. “And the kind of people that win elections are the people in the middle. So I think they miss people in the middle when they do things that way.”
According to Cahaly, most polls are more than 25 questions. He keeps it between seven and nine, so respondents can answer in a matter of minutes.
Then there is how the questions are asked. “We do not like to do all live calls,” Cahaly says.
This goes back to the social-desirability bias. People with opinions that are unpopular “don’t want to be judged by somebody on the phone that they don’t know.” If this was always true, it’s particularly so now: “They’ve seen all this stuff of people being shamed for their opinion, people losing their jobs.”
So Trafalgar mixes up how it contacts people, and especially wants respondents to feel safe in responding. “We use collection methods of live calls, auto calls, texts, emails, and a couple that we call our proprietary digital technology that we don’t explain, but it’s also digital,” Cahaly says. The point, he continues, is to “really push the anonymous part — this is your anonymous say-so.”
Another factor, is that “conservatives are less likely to participate in polls in general,” he says. “We see a five-to-one refusal rate among conservatives.” That means “you’ve got to work very hard to get a fair representation of conservatives, when you do any kind of a survey.”
Trafalgar also goes about building its list differently. One thing the firm noticed in its polling in the Georgia and South Carolina primary in 2016, Cahaly says, is “people voting who didn’t know how to use the touch machines, people showing up who hadn’t voted in 15 years.”
It went out of its way to build a list including these kinds of low-propensity voters, “knowing,” per Cahaly, “that the other pollsters probably weren’t even reaching out to these people.” The firm has “a fingerprint” of characteristics meant to find these hard-to-identify voters.
Cahaly excoriates pollsters who use exit polls from the previous election to determine the demographics of the current electorate. “Exit polls can give you a sense of how people are voting,” he notes. “But how many people of a certain age, ethnicity, geography turned out? You ain’t got to guess at that. It’s a knowable number. And every single state maintains those statistics.”
He also has no use for relatively small sample sizes. “I think this is important,” he says. “We don’t do a state with less than a thousand. You see these polls, 400, 500, 600 people for a state. I don’t buy that. Your margin of error is far too high.”
Trafalgar tries to avoid so-called weighting to get the partisan mix of respondents right. A traditional pollster might want to get, say, 35 percent Republicans to have a balanced survey, but he comes up short because Republicans are less likely to respond. If only, say, 22 percent of Republicans answer, they are given additional weight to make up for the shortfall.
“The better you do at getting an even sample,” according to Cahaly, “the less weighting you have to do.”
One problem with weighting is that Republicans “who don’t like Trump can’t wait to answer a poll,” he says. “So immediately, within the 22 percent, they’ve probably overrepresented it, the anti-Trump Republicans, the Never Trumper types. Well, when you weight that up from 22 to 35, now you have skewed an already bad representation sample. So that’s kind of inherently how they can be so off.”
As a general matter, he discounts national polls. First, because the race for the presidency is won state by state, not on the basis of the national vote. Second, because all the methodological difficulties involved in getting a balanced, representative sample in a state poll of 1,000 people are magnified in a national survey. “It’s easily skewable at that point,” he says. “You start making assumptions.”
So how does he see the 2020 race? Fundamentally, as a motivation race, rather than a persuasion race, with perhaps 1.5 percent, at most, of the electorate undecided in battleground states.
The likeliest Trump electoral path to victory involves winning the battlegrounds of North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, and either Michigan or Pennsylvania among the former Blue Wall states (assuming he doesn’t lose states such as Iowa or Ohio).
This is Cahaly’s breakdown: He believes Trump will win North Carolina and Florida and discounts Biden’s chances in Georgia because the Republican-base vote is too big there (the same is true in Texas).
As for Arizona, “I think Trump has the lead,” Cahaly says. “I think [Republican senator Martha] McSally has some ground to make up. I see her about five points behind Trump, but I think Trump will probably win the state. And win it by a couple of points or more. And if he wins it big enough, McSally has a shot.”
Trump isn’t there yet in Pennsylvania, according to Cahaly. “Right now, we’ve got him down in Pennsylvania,” he says, “I think if it were held today, the undecided would break toward Trump and there’d be some hidden vote. He’d probably win Pennsylvania. But I’m going to give a caveat on only Pennsylvania. I believe Pennsylvania to be the No. 1 state that Trump could win and have stolen due to voter fraud.”
In Michigan, Trafalgar has Trump ahead. “I think he will win Michigan,” Cahaly says, citing fear of the Democratic economic agenda.
352
Overall, Cahaly sees another Trump win. “If it all happened right now,” he maintains, “my best guess would be an Electoral College victory in the high to 270s, low 280s.”
There it is. Among pollsters, you heard it from Cahaly first, and perhaps exclusively — a position he’s been in before.
Drlee wrote:You explain what a tax plan that could not even go into effect for almost two years is going to "kill New York's Covid recovery".
colliric wrote:50 Cent endorsed Trump, because he's smart enough to realise Biden's tax plan is going to kill New York's Covid recovery.
colliric wrote:Nearly 63% in California. Democrats think NYS, NYC, NJ and CA are their forever bitches....
Drlee wrote:Troll much?
Doug64 wrote:The closest Joe Biden has come is to state that he didn't officially meet with the Burisma rep.
@colliric Your country is in massive recession and on the brink of a Great Depression, you need to cut taxes to stimulate long term economic recovery.
“Don't forget, I'm not bad at that stuff anyway, and I'm president. So I call some guy, the head of Exxon. I call the head of Exxon. I don't know,” Trump said before playing out a conversation.
“How are you doing? How’s energy coming? When are you doing the exploration? Oh, you need a couple of permits?” he said. “When I call the head of Exxon I say, ‘You know, I'd love [for you] to send me $25 million for the campaign.’ ‘Absolutely sir.’”
“I will hit a home run every single call. I would raise a billion dollars in one day if I wanted to. I don't want to do that,” he said.
JohnRawls wrote:@blackjack21 @Wulfschilde
It is kinda fun that Trump does so much shit that even you guys can't keep track.
Wulfschilde wrote:He literally said in your quote that he didn't do that?
Rancid wrote:Voted earlier today. I was looking out for fraudsters and illegals. I did not see any.
I will be more vigilant next time and stand next to people that are voting.
Black Consequense wrote:Who you voted for?
Rancid wrote:Voted earlier today. I was looking out for fraudsters and illegals. I did not see any.
Who you voted for?
Black Consequense wrote:
Oh come on, you don't announce people you voted and not expect people to ask who you voted for. I mean I'll tell you who I'm going to vote by fairness.
Black Consequense wrote:Oh come on, you don't announce people you voted and not expect people to ask who you voted for. I mean I'll tell you who I'm going to vote by fairness.
- By Pants-of-dog
THere's lots of giddy-ness and support around it.[…]
Not well. The point was that achieving "equ[…]
Were the guys in the video supporting or opposing […]
- By Fasces
Watch what happens if you fly into Singapore with […]
- By Puffer Fish