Harris Leads 2 to 1 With Early Voters

This is great news. Trust me folks, she is going to win.

GOOD NEWS

Woo-hooooooooo!!!!

My sister and I early-voted this past Friday; one of the poll workers told my sis they have NEVER seen such a turnout on the first day of early voting. And apparently it happened all over my state... which unfortunately is deep red outside the largest cities. But I live in hope.

My old Dad mailed in his ballot ten days ago; like his fellow Navy vet Jimmy Carter he was so proud to vote for Kamala!

Fingers crossed for MASSIVE Black turnout in every Southern and Midwestern states which will definitely flip some Red seats down ballot.

Yes! Let's fucking go!

Wait, I thought it was all doom and gloom.

I can’t keep up.

Trump discouraged early voting for years. Plus Democrats have always voted early more. Can’t really read much from this. Sorry.

Additionally, Harris has double digit leads in all the states she should win, I.e. West Coast, Northeast. Trump only leads by 5-7 in states he SHOULD have double digit leads like Texas and Florida.

Keep an eye on the states which don’t count the absentee ballots until Election Day. They’re the ones saying vote counting should stop at midnight or some bs and then, because day-of voting tends to be Republican and the shift to Democrats when all the mail-in votes are counted later is evidence of voter fraud!!! /s. Thank god Georgia’s court stopped the “all ballots must be counted by hand” crap.

R8 All that shit is hoopla. They cannot stop counting the votes just because they have run out of time. It’s never happen before in America and won’t be happening in 24.

I beez blatino, mafuckers!!!! Ole!!! 🌯 🫏 🌮

R10 I’m from St. Louis now? Boy bye. You are a joke.

I’m cautiously optimistic but memories of 2016 are still keeping me up at night. Don’t let up on GOTV efforts. We can do this but we have to keep a foot on the gas pedal.

r8 ahem

R12 you just have PTSD. Everything will be alright.

We gonna smoke his orange ass, y'all!

Sane Americans are sick of Trump's shit. This will end in tears...for Trump.

Today is the first day of early voting here in FL. I'm going to ride by my early voting polling place (different than the regular polling place) and see if there's a line, and if there's not, I'll pop in and vote.

If there's a line, I'll be shocked -- but ya never know.

In 2016, the undecideds broke big for Trump in the final days. He was an unknown to them, and they thought “let’s try a business leader.”

Hard to imagine that happening again. Indeed, given his increasingly erratic behavior, one might predict the opposite.

Nice summary

The GOP are pushing early voting.

Don't let ANYONE think we have it in the bag. Remember 2016.

More evidence.

Which tells us nothing, r22. That’s all over the place. We don’t know who’s voted or when or how many are left that are undecided and swinging in her direction.

It tells us that people who were undecided late are breaking for Harris, as one would expect given Trump’s behavior. That suggests that if there is a polling surprise, it will be a pro-Harris surprise.

Shit like this report does a disservice to the election. Now many voters who thought about voting for Harris but were on the fence, will stay at home, just as in 2016.

R25 calm down you nervous Mary.

Right. Because undecided voters are closely tracking polling analyses for signs that they can just stay home because the candidate that they sort of support has it in the bag. Makes perfect sense.

This isn't 2016. Most people understand what's at stake.

In 2016 Democrats thought Hillary would beat the orange clown in a landslide.

In 2020 Republicans thought The Donald would beat that "senile old man" in a landslide.

People do stay home or opt-out.

I def have PTSD from 2016 and refuse to be as hopeful as I was that November 5th - I've never felt so psychologically sick in my life as I did that night -- but I still have to admit that under that terror of repeating that I don't believe the polls and I think it will be a wipeout for Harris. They're flooding the models with nonsense Republican polls -- I simply cannot compute it being close when Trump's maniac behavior is doubling even his 2016 nonsense

People who don’t really give a shit stay home or opt out. Always have; always will.

<- My mom's neighbor has always been supermaga, but she was taken aback one day he told her he didn't vote. Supposedly his wife was raised Jehovah's Witness, so...

And many people don't want The Gov't, exes., etc. finding out their private information, under the delusion that they are living off the grid or some shit.

We need to be at 500k early votes in PA by election day in order for Dems to be in good shape. Currently at 325,118 votes.

[quote] They cannot stop counting the votes just because they have run out of time. It’s never happen before in America and won’t be happening in 24.

This is literally EXACTLY what happened in 2000 in Bush v Gore.

I voted this morning, the first day of early voting in Texas.

What r34 said. That is exactly what happened.

Incorrect. They were recounting votes in Florida. The recount was halted not the original. And it boiled to one state. The chances of this all boiling down to one state are slim.

The thing that keeps coming back into my mind is the remembrance of before the 2016 election when Pres. Obama went on national TV and tried to quell the fears so many had of Trump winning. He said "don't worry, Donald Trump is not going to be the President of the United States". Talk about words that came back to haunt him.

I count nothing out. Back then no one really knew just how many hate filled, mentally diseased and completely insane people we have in this country. And unfortunately most of these people are voters.

We voted this morning in reliably blue Austin after checking the voting wait times. Our place wasn’t crowded at 745 but started filling up as we voted. The other location in my zip as well as two others around the city were showing wait times of over 50 minutes at 730 AM. 💙

Some of yall seem to lack common sense. Do you think they just gon say—shucks we ran out of time, we aren’t counting the rest of the votes THAT HAVEN'T BEEN COUNTED YET. The shit would go all the way to the mafuckin Supreme Court and all 9 justices would vote that they must be counted. The state of Georgia is going to do whatever they have to do to meet that deadline. And if they don’t the Supreme Court will trump the fucking governor. Trump ain’t God. Kamala is the fucking sitting Vice President. Some of yall have PTSD from 2016. Every vote will be counted.

I was listening to a podcast interview of a Get Out the Vote organizer in Wisconsin. Their Dem volunteer game was very strong vs Musk’s weak outsourcing for Reps. As in they rarely saw them out on the street. But what I didn’t understand was, the Dem volunteers rang the doorbells of registered Dem voters to remind them to vote and Reps went to registered Republican voters houses. Does that mean nobody is hitting up the unregistered?

[quote]many driven by abortion access: new poll

I definitely think there’s a hidden “abortion vote” this year that’s not showing up in polling. Many people who don’t vote regularly are going to show up for this, and many women who typically vote Republican are going to change their mind or plan to vote Harris but aren’t saying it out loud.

I would really like to think the election will be a blowout in early results, leading the news outlets to call it before midnight on Election Day.

R42 There are also a lot of Republican voters that are quietly voting for Harris/Walz that are afraid to publicly say that because of the MAGA bullies/crazies. Yamiche Alcindor was reporting on that going on in Michigan a couple of weeks ago.

[quote] They were recounting votes in Florida. The recount was halted not the original.

The recount was halted because SCOTUS specifically determined that they were out of time.

Idiot.

R45 who you think you talking 2. Like I said it was a recount. Not the original count. They’ve fixed fucked up ballots. Idiot.

Do you think America and the Supreme Court is going to halt an ORIGINAL VOTE COUNT. There would be a fucking civil war. Call names and get disrespected again bitch.

It’s important that the major swing states like PA, MI, and WI all have Democratic Governors, which will help tamp down some of the Republican election fuckery like what went on in Florida in 2000.

R46 for the win.

This is excellent news. Please vote early, especially in swing states. Note that dump has been asking people to vote early at his Shitler rallies and it's not getting them out.

[quote]This isn't 2016. Most people understand what's at stake.

r28 is correct, this isn't 2016 and cognitively unimpaired voters are aware of the dynamic by which Clinton lost in 2016, that dynamic being essentially not thinking they needed to vote because she was inevitable.

This is unqualified good news for Harris/Walz. If you look at the percentages of people who plan to vote on election day Dump has the lead there but not enough of a lead to address the delta of voters who have already commuted their votes to Harris/Walz.

Something else to be aware of and consider:This was a fucking LANDLINE poll. This indicates the likely voter pool of respondents were not young and probably over 65. I've long believed Dobbs/Abortion is much more of a driving factor than the polls are capturing and if people past childbearing age are voting for Harris with such enthusiasm and in these numbers, it is a strong bet younger women AND men who will pay the price for lack of abortion services are at least as motivated as their parents

R50 100%. I personally believe the Democrats are playing up how close it is to make sure people go vote. Democrats want us to be scared.

The best part is Dump is his own worst enemy. Just letting him talk loses votes.

Now, I'm not so sure those votes will go to Kamala, but as long as they don't go to Dump, we win. We win bigly.

Some men with teenage daughters will be motivated by Dobbs enough to vote D as well.

Certainly Dobbs is motivating more Democrats than Republicans.

I rode my bike over to the early voting place around 11:30. It's a small parking lot, and every spot was taken -- about half of them by poll workers, so it's good that I can slide my motorcycle into most small spaces.

But there was no real line, and even though I had two people in front of me checking in, it went quickly. And if there were any Democrats (besides me) in the bunch, I'll eat my shoes.

What [bold]was[/bold] going slowly was these illiterate idiots trying to read their chock-full-of-long-amendments ballots. In the time it took me to get in there, vote, and leave, no one else of the (perhaps) 25 voters in the room had finished filling in their ballot. I joked to a black woman poll worker on the way out, "It's hard to vote when you can't read, hunh?" and she cracked up. I already knew "she ain't from 'round here."

So that's my report from Deplorable Haven, FL. More voters than I thought there would be, but not a crowd. And since I would guess that 99/100 were voting for the Dumpster Fire, I consider that a good thing.

I know the nation polls “don’t count” like the swing states, but bear with me.

In the US polls averages in DL fave NYT, they’re tied in 7 polls. 18 has Trump leading. Harris is leading in 45 NATIONAL POLLS.

That has to mean something.

I voted this morning around 11 in suburban Louisiana. The line was out into the parking lot of the library/polling place. This was day 3 of early voting. I didn't see a single black person, but that's not particularly unusual for this community

R28 - those under 25 maybe don’t (yet)

I am still figuring out who to vote for in all the local town elections…town council, school board. There’s not much info to identify them online.

The issue in 2016 was that so many people thought Clinton would win that some voters either didn't vote, or they voted 3rd party, or voted for Trump as even kind of a joke.

I don't think that's the case this year. And Biden won convincingly in 2020 - BEFORE Jan 6th and BEFORE Roe was overturned.

I almost don't want to talk about a victory because it feels like giving it air will somehow jinx it.

But I just don't see enthusiasm for Trump.

Straight Dem.

[quote]The issue in 2016 was that so many people thought Clinton would win that some voters either didn't vote, or they voted 3rd party, or voted for Trump as even kind of a joke

That’s why Kamala has been saying since day one that she’s the underdog in this race. It's a smart move.

Her team has definitely analyzed Hillary’s entire campaign and used it as a blueprint of what not to do.

I saw this funny segment on CNN yesterday where some right-wing fascist MAGA lunatic was trying to blend in with an anti-Israel protest outside the DNC when two young women clocked him from his social media live streaming. They approached him and loudly blew his cover.

Because those types always melt down when confronted by strong, scolding women his retort was "how many abortions have you had today." Without missing a beat one said "George Soros has paid me to have an abortion live on stage today!" I thought 'one or both of her parents must be Dataloungers.'

[quote] Trump discouraged early voting for years. Plus Democrats have always voted early more. Can’t really read much from this. Sorry.

What I read is that Dump has 15 days for his crazy, dementia antics to further discourage Election Day voters.

[quote][bold]Keep an eye on the states which don’t count the absentee ballots until Election Day. They’re the ones saying vote counting should stop at midnight or some bs[/bold] and then, because day-of voting tends to be Republican and the shift to Democrats when all the mail-in votes are counted later is evidence of voter fraud!!! /s. Thank god Georgia’s court stopped the “all ballots must be counted by hand” crap.

And if they do, R8, Lord help them, because veterans in red states like my old Dad will fucking FLIP their gotdamn lids.

And as the proud child of a proud double (Navy AND Army combat) veteran, I am fucking here for it.

[quote]The issue in 2016 was that so many people thought Clinton would win that some voters either didn't vote

The main issue with Hillary is that she was just as unpopular as Trump. That included a significant amount of Democrats. Don't forget that she was in a bitter battle with Bernie Sanders during the primary. Have we forgotten how contentious the convention was in 2016? Many of Bernie's supporters stayed home or voted for Jill Stein. Her unpopularity and poorly run campaign was why she lost.

I think it's Pennsylvania that can't even begin counting early and mail votes until after the polls close on 11/5. This is ridiculous and a waste of time. Why not count them as they come in, once a day like other, NORMAL, states do?

The fat loud mouthed red neck down the street has 2 Harris Walz signs in his front yard. Also a Lucas Kunce and vote yes on amendment 3, the amendment to overturn Missouri's abortion ban. Some people are waking up.

[quote] I count nothing out. Back then no one really knew just how many hate filled, mentally diseased and completely insane people we have in this country. And unfortunately most of these people are voters.

In 2016, Dems did not vote in the numbers needed to win. They fixed that in 2020.

2016 was anomalous.

[quote]I think it's Pennsylvania that can't even begin counting early and mail votes until after the polls close on 11/5. This is ridiculous and a waste of time. Why not count them as they come in, once a day like other, NORMAL, states do?

You can blame PA state Republicans for that, of course.

[quote]But the state legislature and governor have yet to agree on a bill that would give workers more time to process ballots — with Republicans insisting that such a policy be tied to expanded voter ID requirements, and Democrats so far balking at that deal.

Alabama, District of Columbia, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wisconsin are the seven states (plus DC) that can’t begin counting mail-in ballots until Election Day.

In PA, they can start counting them at 7am on Election Day.

Even if I knew 100% that Harris was going to win, I would still make sure to vote for her. It's my personal "Fuck you." to Donald Trump and his enablers. From me, especially to them.

I'm not going to pass that up even if I know MVP is going to beat that fat bastard like a drum.

What's great about this poll is that these are actual BANKED votes, not an estimation of potential votes that may or may not happen.

Anyone who voted for Trump as a joke in 2016 with the hopes that Hill would still win is fucking retarded and should just stay home. Hell, they might do anything. They might join Al Qada.

North Carolina can start counting BEFORE Election Day. If Harris flips NC that's the end of Dump, and we will know shortly after polls close on east coast.

There are quite a few in 2016 who voted Dump as sort of a “protest”. They thought, he’ll never win, so who cares?

[quote] Some of yall seem to lack common sense. Do you think they just gon say—shucks we ran out of time, we aren’t counting the rest of the votes THAT HAVEN'T BEEN COUNTED YET.

YES! The MAGA cultists running the states are gearing up to do just that.

Anyone who doesn’t vote is a fucking moron and I know a ton of gay men in Austin who are liberal but simply don’t vote. It boggles the mind. They’re all into politics and current events too.

R41, the time to register to vote in red states has passed, so unregistered voters are out of luck in red states.

I can only speak for Ohio's deadline, which was October 7th. If you weren't registered to vote by then, you don't get to vote in this election. Most red states have restrictions like that. Only blue states allow "late" or election day registration.

The voter registration push was over the summer and discussed here on and off.

If you are an "unaffiliated voter", you may get a visit from BOTH campaigns, if they have the time, but the traitor's ground game is shit, so I doubt they can slap their own dicks.

You know, he's never going away, but after we cunt punts him, he's going to drag the thugs down with him. ALL the way down. They will have to PAY him to go away.

I'm so tired of state laws when it comes to federal elections. If you guys want to do your local elections one way - that's fine.

But federal elections should be uniform across the country.

We do so much stupid shit because of states rights and the size of this country.

Too much fuckery can be done locally. And it's ALWAYS REPUBLICANS. Every God Damn Time.

R80 yep.

IRA FLATOW: Both sides say that turnout is going to be a key in this election. What are some of the ways that people can be motivated to go to the polls?

JON KROSNICK: Campaign professionals and political scientists decades ago used to think that turnout and candidate choice were kind of two separate decisions, turnout coming first and candidate choice coming second. In other words, you decide whether you’re going to vote or not. And then once you decide that you’re going to vote, then you decide who you’re going to vote for. And what we’ve come to realize very clearly now through really terrific data is that those decisions are intimately linked, that there are some people who vote all the time no matter what. There are some people who never vote no matter what, but there are other people who slide in and out of the participating electorate.

And those decisions about whether to vote or not are sometimes influenced by their attitudes toward the candidates. What can the campaigns do to affect turnout. Some of the most important work that we know in our literature comes from a guy named Don Green, who is a professor at Columbia University. And when he was at Yale, he was doing really revolutionary studies that were large field experiments where he randomly assigned households either to get poked in one way or another to inspire them to vote or not.

And what’s interesting is that Dawn’s work actually followed work by a prior scholar, social psychologist, Tony Greenwald, who is now at the University of Washington. And what Tony did were very simple studies. He did telephone surveys where undergraduates at the University of Washington called a set of people registered to vote and told them one of two things.

They said hi, calling from the University of Washington psychology Department. We’re doing a survey, just one question today are you going to vote in the election on Tuesday or not? Or other randomly chosen people were asked Psychology Department at the University of Washington calling, we’re doing a one question survey, who do you think is going to win the Seattle Seahawks game on Sunday? So the idea here is the first group got a treatment. The treatment was simply asking them if they’re going to vote.

And the second group was the control group who didn’t get that treatment. And it turns out the people who were asked if they’re going to vote, voted significantly more often. I think at least 10 percentage points more often from one question in one interview a few days before the election. What happened there? Well, what happened was everybody kind of knew that the socially admirable thing to say was that they’re going to vote. And people who merely hadn’t made the decision, who were undecided about whether they were going to vote or not, heard themselves saying, I’m going to vote. And it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There are various different ways to get people to do things, to create self-fulfilling prophecies like that, which actually do affect their subsequent behavior. And Tony just implemented one version of that. And so what Don then did was to do these kinds of treatments in three different ways, by mailing postcards to people, by making phone calls to people, or by having people go to the doorstep of their home and engage them in a conversation about the election.

Obviously, a postcard doesn’t ask you a question, but a phone call and a conversation on the doorstep had the potential to engage that same kind of self-fulfilling prophecy logic. And what Don found is that, in general, the phone calls didn’t work. And lots of people are making phone calls on behalf of candidates these days. And it might make them feel good to make those phone calls. But the reality is his work suggested probably not going to have much effect.

On the other hand, the face to face mobilization worked remarkably well. And now it’s critical that the conversation on the doorstep do the right things and not do the wrong things. It’s also critical for a campaign that wants to mobilize supporters that it not send people to knock on the doors of households of people who are going to vote for their opposing candidate.

IRA FLATOW: Is there any evidence that there are people who go into the polls, look at the candidates up there on the board, and they then– that’s at the point, they make their mind up?

JON KROSNICK: Absolutely. I’m sorry to tell you that we have decades of research showing that there are some people who walk into a voting booth or sit down with an absentee ballot. And when they look at the names on that ballot, those names are in a particular order because, of course, candidate names are always presented visually. And that order of names nudges voters in a particular direction.

In fact, more than 1,000 published tests have now shown that in 85% of elections, approximately, the candidate listed first on the ballot gets an advantage that is about an average of two to three percentage points of votes as a result simply of being first. And that results from two psychological processes. One, is again, ambivalence. So if you’re torn, Clinton, Trump, Clinton, Trump, I don’t know what to do. And one of those names is above, people tend to lean in the direction of the name above.

But secondly, there are people who vote who don’t actually know that much about all the candidates. And so those that lack of information makes them nudgeable also. So if you want to think about a two to three percentage point effect as not that important. I mean, in 2000, George W Bush was elected president as a result of a vote count in Florida that gave him a margin of victory of much less than one percentage point. And guess what. George W Bush’s name was listed first on every ballot in Florida that year, because the law in Florida is that it’s the party of the governor who has all their candidates listed first on every ballot. And George W Bush’s brother, Jeb Bush, was the governor that year.

In 2016, in nearly all of the battleground states where Donald Trump won by a tiny margin, his name was listed first on every ballot. And you might say oh, come on, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton. How could name order possibly matter? Well, it turns out New Hampshire rotated name order across the state. And so we can actually look at whether Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton got more votes when they were listed first. And what we found was about a point and a half, a percentage point and a half advantage for each of them when they were listed first as compared to when they weren’t in that election, which involved, as you know, a lot of ambivalence for Americans.

It’s really hard to make elections fair. But the important question at this point is who’s going to be first in those battleground states. And if you want to be horrified a little bit more, I’ll tell you that as far as I know, none of the polls that are being done are taking into account the bias that will be created by candidate names.

IRA FLATOW: So is there– does that mean there’s a flaw in the polling?

JON KROSNICK: Absolutely, the good news is that scientists know how to do accurate surveys. Even today, you say, well, nobody answers the phone and that everybody’s got cell phones and the various other complaints. The reality is scientists who’ve evaluated the accuracy of survey data have found that as long as you do true random sampling of households or individuals and you work hard to interview as many of those people as you can and you use unbiased questions, the results are incredibly accurate.

So I’ll just give you an example that in 2016, the year when we all were told before the election by The New York Times and by the fivethirtyeight.com that Hillary Clinton had more than an 80% chance of becoming president based on polls. In that year, If you look at only the polls that were done with random sampling during the week before the election, their average error in predicting the Trump and Clinton shares of the vote was less than one percentage point off, less than 1%. That’s much smaller than the theoretical margin of error of those polls.

On the other hand, the market was flooded in 2016 with non-random samples that were promulgated by two organizations, SurveyMonkey and Google consumer surveys. Those were done with what are called river samples. So these are, if you think of yourself as a fish swimming around in the internet, all of a sudden a net reaches in and pulls you out and asks you a question. In this case, if you’re reading a news story at a newspaper website, a little box pops up and says, you can continue reading the story for free after you answer this question, who are you going to vote for in the election on Tuesday?

Well, they said everybody reads the newspaper. The reality is this was not a random sample in any way. And those river sample surveys were startlingly inaccurate, average errors of six percentage points and more. And often errors as large as 13 or 14 percentage points. That’s not a surprise because there was no random sampling done in those surveys. But if you’re going to predict the battleground states, which are the only states you need to get right in order to forecast the outcome, you need much more precision than an average error of six percentage points.

So that is what I think importantly contributed to those incorrect predictions in 2016. So long story short there, we know how to do accurate polls. Are we doing simple random sample surveys right now the way we know we can? Almost nobody is. The market has flooded with more surveys that involve non-random samples, lots of them. And unfortunately, I’m sorry to say, some of the most visible and most praised pre-election surveys involve an entirely different methodology that’s also seriously flawed.

This involves random samples of people on lists of people registered to vote. So instead of calling a random sample of telephone numbers and giving all Americans an equal probability of being selected for a survey, this method involves first step is getting lists of people who are registered to vote in all the states, recognizing that mobilization efforts are going to cause more people to be registered between now and election day. Well, they can’t take that into account.

Secondly, when people are buying these lists from commercial companies, the polling groups that buy the lists are not told how long ago did the supplier get the list from the state. And so because people are constantly registering, those lists are likely to be out of date. And then after they get the lists, they only get names and addresses. Now, they’ve got to get phone numbers for those people in order to call them.

Well, it turns out can only get phone numbers for about half of the people on the list, and that half of the people with listed are available phone numbers is not a random sample of the whole list. Then you’ve got to somehow weight these data. And statistical weighting means adjusting for unequal probabilities of participation in different groups. So higher educated people agree to be interviewed more often than less educated people. In order to fix those discrepancies you have to know the true distributions of age and education and sex and so on in the population.

What’s your population? Well, it’s people registered to vote. How can you know the demographic characteristics of people registered to vote? You can’t. The government doesn’t know that. Nobody knows that. And so the companies selling these data make it up. They guess what your age is. They guess what your sex is. And when I’ve looked at what they think about me, I’ve been told I’m a 78-year-old female.

So the accuracy of those guesses is not great. The next steps are taken in all pre-election polls. You’ve got to decide among the people who are registered to vote, which of those people actually are going to vote or not. And then you’ve got to deal with the fact that when you do a survey and you say, well, if you do vote, who are you going to vote for, there’s a significant chunk of people, even up toward the end who will say, I won’t tell you because it’s confidential or I haven’t decided yet. And so the researchers have to handle that somehow. So there are a lot of steps in the process to produce accurate outcomes. What I can tell you is when we’ve looked at true random samples, it works beautifully.

IRA FLATOW: Well, what you’re telling me is that, then we should not be paying attention to most of these polls.

JON KROSNICK: That is absolutely correct. You should not.

IRA FLATOW: My last question to you is about the themes in this election. It seems to be there are two main themes in this election fear versus hope. As someone who studies political psychology, which one works more well?

JON KROSNICK: They both have effects. Fear causes people to be more thoughtful and attentive to information. Hope inspires positivity toward whatever candidate is making you feel hopeful. So if you’ll forgive me, let’s just say for the moment that Kamala Harris’s messages are inspiring hope. There’s reason to believe that taken by itself increases the probability that voters will vote for her. And we have lots of evidence from many, many statistical analyzes to support that idea.

Now, when Donald Trump says, I’m going to make America great again, that’s also potentially a hope inspiring message. But bear in mind also that a big part of his message is about fear. And it’s fear about what will happen if the Democrats continue to control the country. And what that does is doesn’t make people necessarily negative toward him, but it makes them thoughtful, it makes them attentive. It makes them look at the evidence.

And so the question is, does making people thoughtful help sell the Make America Great Again message or not? And from our point of view and our literature, I’m not sure it does.

IRA FLATOW: Well, this has certainly been thought provoking and eye opening. Dr. Krosnick, I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today.

JON KROSNICK: It’s my great honor, thank you, Ira, for having me. I really appreciate it.

IRA FLATOW: You’re welcome. Dr. John Krosnick, Professor of Political Science, Communication, and Psychology and Director of the Political Psychology Research Group at Stanford University.

What do you mean people who give a fuck voted for Kamala?

Thanks for posting that, R86.

I wish they wouldn't publish things like this. No point agitating the Maggats.

Pretty sure the MAGAts aren't reading "Science Friday," R89.

Well, the article was in USA Today, R90, so who knows what somebody leaves in the shitter at Denny's.

Sorry, R91, I thought you were referring to the article posted just before you at R82-86.

Though the MAGAts I know aren't reading USA Today, either.

Oh, you are ever so welcome, senior lesbian/ R88!

I did post it the day it was broadcast, but the transcript wasn't available until a couple days later.

And it's been on my mind since I first heard it because it's so timely, and am disappointed it hasn't gained a bit of traction in the MSM. I was hoping MSNBC or CNN, or even Democracy Now! would've booked the professor for an interview, but... crickets. Every host has breathlessly reported on the 1196.6 polls that've come out since then, but no reporting on the psych aspect of polling.

I voted this morning, first thing when the polls opened.

Great news, P-Drag/R94--any local reports of how turnout was this first day?

To all DLers on the fence about voting early, I can tell you a good 95% of anxiety I've had these last six months has disappeared, and it is such a good feeling, even though I'm in a red state.

I actually have a Ph.D. field in Quantitative Methods, Survey Research, and Political Polling, R93, so I could have told you most of what was in that ScienceFriday. But I assume nobody here thinks I know what I'm talking about because my life's experiences have been many and varied and it probably sounds like I'm making shit up (trust me -- I'm not that creative). But it was nice to hear someone echo what I (and all professional pollsters) already know.

There is no fucking way in hell, anymore, to get a sample where you could even stretch the truth enough to intimate it was "random," which is the premise of all statistical analysis: a random sample/normal distribution. So the days when you could trust [italic]any[/italic] poll are long gone.

For your own sanity and peace of mind, ignore them all.

[quote]But I assume nobody here thinks I know what I'm talking about because my life's experiences have been many and varied and it probably sounds like I'm making shit up (trust me -- I'm not that creative).

Damn, senior lesbian/R97, why on earth would anyone here accuse you of making shit u.... sorry, almost forgot where the fuck we are!

As a literature/history/library science geek who's allergic to math and its allies, I'm always in awe of numbers people.

I said in another thread that when I went to poll worker training at the BOE on Friday, the line to even get to the PARKING LOT was backed up for almost a block.

The popo was out directing traffic. It was fucking PACKED. This was the Hamilton County/cincinnati Ohio BOE.

It’s also on the bus line, so it’s easy to reach.

But R98, I'm really [italic]bad[/italic] at math! I had to take Algebra II twice in high school because I didn't understand it!

But statistics is different. Statistics is the science of the educated guess. Or as one of my bosses called it, a SWAG: a scientific wild-ass guess. Once you really start to understand it, and you must understand it with your gut as opposed to your brain, the computer does all the "hard math" for you. All you have to do is propose a hypothesis, collect the proper data, use the most "parsimonious" and relevant statistical/analytical test(s), and interpret the results.

Sounds pretty simple, but it can be infinitely complicated, especially collecting the data and interpreting the results of the statistical analyses. Thus my comment about the impossibility of collecting a "random sample" of likely voters, which falls under "collect the proper data."

I found statistical research to be excruciatingly difficult, but I had such a passion to answer social/political research questions, I had to master the methods. And ultimately, for someone like me who loves a challenge, I had a blast.

[bold]Now -- back to our regularly scheduled program.[/bold]

Early voted in Texas today. Suburban Fort Worth. It took 35 minutes from the time I got in line until I deposited my ballot and walked out the door. The line was consistently long but quick-moving the whole time. Unfortunately I live in a solidly Republican area, so who knows what the turnout means.

The Tarrant County Elections Dept website has a map of all early voting sites in the county that is updated hourly with the wait times. Most of the sites showed 30-45 minute waits for most of the day. I haven't seen any reports of the turnout numbers for today yet, so I don't know if it's more. less or typical.

What's with the Lee Sabatella of Brooklyn at R101 who sent Trump $1041.02? Does that irregular number have some kind of Nazi significance?

[quote] Anyone who voted for Trump as a joke in 2016 with the hopes that Hill would still win is fucking retarded

Or just a sex worker.