Osodecentx said:
whiterock said:
Osodecentx said:
Regarding polling - it seems pollsters missed it again.
Did they over correct for Democrats?
Do you have an opinion?
to get it right, pollsters have to poll the universe of people who actually show up to vote.
that is hard to do in the age of mail-in voting.
Until the GOP understands that mail-in voting turns elections into exercises in organizing VOTES rather than voters, we will struggle to win elections. Dem Secretaries of State are tossing ballots out on the waters; Dem campaigns are organizing armies to go harvest them up. That is a helluva lot easier than trying to get live human beings turn out to vote.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/10/26/lawmakers-want-to-know-why-pennsylvania-sent-out-240000-unverified-ballots/
That's why there was such a contentious legal battle about mail in battle in the lead-up to the election.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/legal-fight-explodes-pennsylvania-mail-ballots-rcna56112
Thanks
My question could ncerned the accuracy of polling. Why are pollsters getting it wrong? You've said they under sampled Republicans in the past (shy Republicans). I wonder if they over corrected this time
The shy Republican voter remains a problem with respect to polling responses. The Dem campaign rhetoric about Republicans being a threat to democracy may have expanded that problem into shy voters....plain old voter suppression.
seems to me that the biggest part of problem this go around was that the Democrats DID turnout their base. They did get their voters motivated over the "threat to democracy" issue and the abortion issue. I base that on the data posted here about GOP picking up 10-25% points in almost every demographic except for "unmarried women" which Dems won by 37%. And that's not a macro factor, either.
GOP actually won the nationwide congressional vote by about 3-4points (votes still coming in). So what Dems accomplished was not unlike the Karl Rove magic with Bush....winning states by focusing on high turnout in key areas. Dems managed to turnout their base in swing districts enough to win races by a point or two. The Spanberger race in VA-7 is a great example. We should have won it. But lost by 3+ points. Did Youngkin go walk streets for her? Did she have enough money? (Walker in GA got outspent over 3-1, for example.)
The concepts I'm talking about here are critical to understand. So many Republicans talk about "swing voters" as if there is a third of the electorate with no real political leanings who sit down and rationally evaluate the landscape every two years. That's wildly misleading. Most voters lean one way or the other, and are swayed only on an issue or three (the set of which varies from election cycle to election cycle). There are in reality a very small number of voters who are true "independents" in the classical sense of the term. What a campaign has to do is use messaging on the right issues to push those voters not just into one side or the other, but to actually go out and vote. That's where "democracy" and "abortion" messaging came in. It pushed enough numbers of a certain type of voter to show up and vote.
YOU HAVE TO TURN OUT YOUR BASE....YOUR VOTERS. You have to identify who your voters are, talk to them (airwaves, mail, email, door knocking, etc....) and then they have to GO VOTE. Dems did that. Republicans didn't.
This is the context in which one has to evaluate MAGA. yes, the true independent voter hates him. But they're a small single digit percentage of the electorate. What Trump brings out is gazillions of voters who Republicans have traditionally sucked at mobilizing to get off the couch and go vote. The logic of having Trump stay home in a mid-term (because he's too toxic) is a valid concern. Will he also motivate the Dem base to come boiling out to oppose him? But they came boiling out anyway to save abortion and democracy. All we accomplished by keeping Trump on the sidelines was to keep the Maga base at home.
Turnout turnout turnout. You have to get YOUR voters to vote. We did not do that very well on Tuesday night. Trump should be criticized most of all for staying off the campaign trail
