Post-mortem: predicting reelection on approval rating
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Came across this over at FiveThirtyEight (6 months ago). Compares approval ratings of past presidents in their first 4 years with our current president. Both W and Obama were below 50% at [that] point, but not as low as Trump, and managed to get a little upswing before November and got re-elected*. HW and Carter both had lower approval ratings than Trump at [that] point, and were one-termers. Clearly, DJT’s approval has been historically low compared with all except Ford on this graphic, but all indications point to the fact that he has a very loyal base that will not budge in their support, regardless of what he does or says.
I also wrote this in that old post:
One thing that will be interesting this time around is whether we’ll know the winner the night of the election or not. Odds are many, many more will be mailing in ballots this election, so it could be days (weeks?) before we know the full counts in some places.
And can you imagine what the debates are going to be like? Hooo, boy...LOL
Anyway, glad history repeated itself in this instance.
manual . RWD . LS3 . MagneRide . Brembos ... 4 doors + 5 seatbelts
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@davesaddiction The one thing that we have learned is these polls are useless. The entire polling industry needs to be revamped because their track record based on the last two elections is terrible.
"I give into my disease, of my needs"
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@krustywantout Yeah, it was waaay closer than expected from the polls.
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manual . RWD . LS3 . MagneRide . Brembos ... 4 doors + 5 seatbelts
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@davesaddiction I think the author is looking at averages and not looking carefully at the spot data. He casually says they got NC and Florida wrong like it's not a big deal but, that's a big deal! Plus, Pennsylvania was shown to be a landslide in favor of Biden but it wasn't that big of a margin. I also get that with covid, things are going to be off.
"I give into my disease, of my needs"
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I suspect models and polls do a bad job at factoring in the slavish devotion of a literal death cult, and the apparent fealty of a certain demographic when dealing with authoritarianism.
When 45 had that joke about shooting someone and not losing support, he was 100% correct.
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@krustywantout That's kind of what polling does though...attempts to predict the average. It makes sense that the more focused you get the more wrong it'll be.
FiveThirtyEight also had an article attempting to understand why Trumps polls in 2016 and 2020 were both very similarly wrong.
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@mastermario It's not the polling itself that's the problem, necessarily, although we've clearly seen just how off they can be and the weaknesses of putting too much trust in them--it's the reporting on the polling. There was definitely a sense this time, as in 2016, that Biden pretty much "had it in the bag" (which some did attempt to push back against more than they did in '16). The fact that it came down to so few votes in a few places shows just how wrong that mentality was. The election was very much a "toss-up" that Trump could've won, and that's not how most voters perceived it going in (I think more thought he had a 10-20% chance of winning).
