If your gut says Trump will win

[ColinC]

Don't trust it. Our guts are severely damaged after getting punched in it so many times by surprising and horrible election outcomes. Even Nate Silver says not to trust anybodys gut. Not even his.

[Gaytano70]

1. Nate's guts are only feeling one thing:

The loads of MAGA shit he's been ingesting since he started to believe all the overblown hype about his supposed talents (good at guessing?)

[ColinC]

2. Im not a Nate Silver hater and feel that the animosity towards him is a kill the messenger type response

He is simply telling us what the polls are saying. We all know the polls are not a gold standard. I don't trust the polls so therefore I don't put a lot of value in his analysis. But I find him honest in conveying he isn't more than a messenger than using a model to accurately convey what the vast majority of semi credible polls tell us.

[Deminpenn]

5. Silver isn't a pollster

He began his life in fantasy baseball. So if you think statistical models used in fantasy baseball are predictive of elections, you'll believe his message. Personally I think it's junk science so I don't take Silver or the 538 models seriously.

[ColinC]

7. Yeah he uses the same method with polls as baseball.

But I think his analysis is most accurate when the polls are accurate (like 2008), but not so much in 2010, 2020, 2022 or 2016 when they were somewhat or very wrong.

[Deminpenn]

8. So, GIGO

correct?

[ColinC]

9. I imagine there is some value in it.

But I have a hard time finding it.

[COL Mustard]

18. So if he's right 40% of the time

He's going to the Hall of Fame! I don't think so.

[ColinC]

19. I mean. Same as if he were right 100% of the time

He's using somebody else's metrics and just putting it in a neat package for us.

[COL Mustard]

22. Baseball players and weather forecasters

Can be wrong most of the time and still be successful.

[ColinC]

28. Yep

[niyad]

38. Goddess knows why our weather guessers, ooops, forecasters, are still employed.

My weather rock (for those old enough to remember!) is more accurate! To be fair, though, that big, tall rock sitting to our west does sometimes mess up the prognostications a bit.

[Nasruddin]

12. He has his plusses

Yes he has an ego as big as all outdoors and
yes he's dumps out a plentiful cornucopia of opinions random and obtuse at times
But he does try - he does try to be a data guy, and do something different than the pollsters.
Among other things, calibrating the pollsters, and teaching us about what the numbers mean

[pat_k]

32. We're in a better position than they are.

Believe it. It's True.

Good analysis from Simon Rosenberg in post down-thread:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100219610882#post30

[live love laugh]

3. Anybody whose gut is telling them this needs to get off their ass and GOTV.

[ColinC]

4. We all can do something. I convinced one of my undecided friends in MI to vote for Harris after him telling me for weeks

He might not vote for her.

[COL Mustard]

23. I think every vote will count

I know people will say this is the most consequential election in our lifetime, but this time it is.

[applegrove]

6. And if you feel the abject and deep pain that is fascist fomented fear

and you think of passively voting Trump to make the pain go away, by joining Trump's abuse train and protection racket, stop yourself. Belly breath and fight with your vote for Kamala. And live to fight another day in a Democracy where fear is rare once again and your government works to mitigate it, not spread it everywhere.

[ColinC]

10. There are a lot of people like that who can be swayed with strong personal connections.

I did that yesterday with someone in Michigan. I was so ecstatic when my friend promised me he will vote for Harris after saying he might not for weeks.

[applegrove]

11. Go Colin! Go Colin! Go Colin!

[ColinC]

16. Thanks Applegrove!!

[S/V Loner]

13. My gut tells me trump will lose the vote but...

my gut also tells me that they will use the courts to put him in. It's the only thing that explains their behavior.

[Elessar Zappa]

20. The courts won't help him.

Even the Supreme Court wouldn’t help him in 2020. That’s not going to change.

[COL Mustard]

24. I only hope it doesn't go into Congress

That would be a shitshow.

[surfered]

14. Thanks. I thought it was that burrito I ate.

[Warpy]

15. Part of my disease profile is IBS, so my gut says rude things to me all the time

but it's never been quite that rude.

[AdamGG]

17. Polls are less accurate because

People don't use land lines without caller ID any more. Before the 2000's, it was pretty easy to randomly call residents out of the phone book and they would usually answer. Now, pollsters need to try to track down representative samples of who they think will turn out to vote and compared to the days when people just picked up their land line phones, it can introduce bias on which people are willing to participate.

[milestogo]

21. If your gut says Trump will win, go to urgent care immediately.

When you are well enough to vote early, do that. Do not talk to anyone till after the election.

There are other recommendations here. This is just one option.

[LostOne4Ever]

25. So long as I breath I will do what I have to do to see Harris win

Even if the odds were 100,000,000,000 to 1 against me I would bet on that one as it is still not zero.

I have voted and done all I can and will do more!

[Tweedy]

26. Definitely do not trust Nate Silver

He has a gambling problem and is currently working for Peter Thiel.

Peter Thiel who despises all of us hobbits; and yet, he had the unmitigated gall to call his company “palantir”. Somewhere lovely, J.R.R. Tolkien is not amused. 😒

[Mme. Defarge]

27. Try a little

bicarbonate of soda.

[Metaphorical]

29. Nate Silver

fell into the same trap that many previous pollsters fell into - assuming that you had the magic 8 ball. His technique of aggregating averages worked for about three cycles, until enough people realized that you can game the aggregates by flooding the zone with unreliable and partisan polls, at which point it becomes a lot harder to use them as a way of gauging patterns and trends. Another thing that makes things complex is the Electoral College. Statistics overall works best when you have large aggregate populations, but the EC by its very nature means that a comparatively small number of states have a very outsized influence on the overall election. Finally, this has been a very atypical year. Most computer models work best when there is a lot of previous examples to draw from, and there are very few past historical that can be used to model what has happened this year.

This is not necessarily to defend Nate Silver, but overall I think he's no worse than most of the pollsters out there.

[pat_k]

30. We're in a better position than they are. Believe it. It's True.

. . .
...
The race isn't slipping away from her as some have argued...

And this week, we had confirmation that all the polling we're getting that's independent polling is looking just like the polling we got last week. What has changed is that there has been a flood of what I call red wave 2024 polls coming into the averages. And that flood, which is now more than 80 polls by 31 different organizations...

[listen for more good data]

We have a habit of going too quickly to worry... Come at the world with a little more hopium -- hope with a plan... Live in a place of joy and the glass half full, or whatever your analogy is, do not spend these next 13 days in a place of worry and glass half empty. It's a choice.

17:29 Usually, at the end of October there is a debate and it sort of wakes everybody up.... Donald Trump... got his ass kicked so bad in the last debate, he couldn't do this final debate...

so it's up to the campaigns.

19:35 I want to give Kamala's team incredible credit... they built a strategy around closing strong with incredible frenetic energy to show this intensity that we're bringing here...

20:08 Our capacity to close is much stronger than theirs, meaning it's far more likely that we're going to move the election toward us.

21:21 I texted with Olivia Troy today, who's one of the President's of Republicans for Harris... she said she had people coming up to her at events in the last couple days -- Republicans saying, you know, I was kind of on the fence, but this behavior in the last week. I can't do it. I just can't do it... And if the pollster I was on the panel with yesterday is correct, she's seeking slow incremental movement toward Harris.

22:00
The likely scenario in the election was always going to be that at the end of the day a big chunk of republicans just couldn't vote for this guy because he is unacceptable; he is the most dangerous man in American political history. He is someone who not only wants to strip the rights and freedoms away from the women of America. . . but literally, Donald Trump is promising that he's going to rip apart and end the global economy that has made us prosperous; he's going to end the Western Alliance that's kept us safe; he'd going to end American democracy that's kept us free. These are the things that he's telling us he's going to do.

23:45
We've gotta win this thing for our families, our democracy, our freedoms and our future. . . . We've gotta close here with joy, and confidence, and strength, and power, and not from fear and worry. Fear and worry are what they want. What we want is we close this thing with joy and love of country and love of one another. These are far more powerful emotions than fear and worry.

24:20
Let me say one last thing. . . I want to remind everybody about one of the central reasons that we're all here together at hopium, which is that -- and Joe Biden talked about this in his State of the Union speech this year. He talked about FDR's speech in 1941; FDRs State of the Union address. He talked about how that address was the beginning of the call of America to rally against fascism and rising authoritarianism in what became the rallying cry tht began to move America into World War II. That speech though was also the speech where FDR laid out his vision of the four freedoms and how he wanted a world that was not base on dominion and control, one country having control over another or one person having control over another. A world based not on dominion, but freedom. And he laid out the Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of the Press. He laid out these four freedoms for all of us . . . And these four freedoms became the foundation of the modern world. The four freedoms became the basis of the Atlantic Charter that got the United States and the United Kingdom together in 1941, that became the basis of the alliance that won World War II. The four freedoms became the basis of the United Nations Charter in 1945, which laid out an international law, a global system where one nation could not have control of another; dominion over another. And it was the beginning of the unraveling of all holdings by European powers, their colonial system. FDR forced the unraveling of all that to be consisten with the United Nations view that no nation should have dominion over another. This is part of the the war in Ukraine is about. Russia is trying to go back to a period prior to the United Nations where countries coul have dominion over one another. And then in 1948, negotiated in part by Eleanor Roosevelt, there was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which ws the first time in international law individual people had human rights... And that world of freedom -- of these four freedoms, that world of Pax Americana over the last 80 years has created a golden age in human history. There's never been a better time to be alive in all of human history that there's been in over these past 80 years. We've seen life expectancy go from 45 years to over 70 years now in the world, we've seen extreme poverty, despite huge explosion of population, plummeting in raw numbers. We've seen more people living under democracy that any time in human history. We've seen more people being literate an being able to read and write. Three times as many people today can do so as a percentage of the population than in the 1940's. Meaning they have more capacity to do and contribute and live out their dreams than any time before. This has been a golden age in human history.

What's important for us is we get this final fuel to go do the work that we need to do for our country and our democracy and for our kids. We have to remind ourselves that that world - this golden age in human history -- was something that WE did. The Democratic Party of the United States did that. We created a golden age in human history. And it's my view that there has never been an organized force that's done more good for more people than the Democratic Party that we're all part of.

One of the reasons I'm so confident that we're going to prevail here in the next 13 days is that when our party was called in the 1940s, we all answered. We rose to the occasion, and we defeated authoritarianism and fascism then. And what Joe Biden began in his State of the Union speech, he was making a new call asking our party to once again answer a all to defeat fascism here and all around the world; to make sure that freedom continued to prevail over dominion.

The reason I end all of this so confident and so optimistic is because all of you have been answer this call. Millions and millions of Americans have been going to work, donating money, writing postcards -- 80 million postcards are in the process of hitting all across the country -- canvasing every day, texting, phone banking, info warring, working your networks with good information. You guys have gone to work, you've answered the call. Millions of you have done this. And the millions of you who have answered this call is more powerful than the dancing dipshits on the other side, right? Let them have Elon Musk and a bunch of these oligarchs. We've got all of you. We're more powerful than they are. And we are doing the work for our democracy...

Do more, worry less...

[RidinWithHarris]

31. The only thing my gut tells me is that Harris has a better chance than polling would make it seem, but not the...

...extremely high probability of a win that we should be looking at. Any significantly non-zero chance of Trump winning is more than enough to cause me great anxiety until the election is over.

[Ontheboundry]

33. I hope everyone is right

But polling has always been against trump, and he generally performs better than the polls suggest

This is why when I see the polls,.I remember 2016/2020. F the polls , just vote ffs

[ColinC]

36. All true.

[Xavier Breath]

35. My gut just polished off a pint of Denali Extreme Moose Tracks.

So I wouldn't trust its judgement at all.

[SoFlaBro]

37. If your gut is sensing an Orange Bastard, maybe it is time for a big b.m.

[Dem4life1970]

39. Two words: Alan Lichtman. That is all.

[Dem4life1970]

40. The new ABC/Ipsos poll acc. to Matt Dowd might calm people's nerves (Lichtman is good enough for me though)