The polls have shown Donald Trump with an edge for eight straight months, but there’s a sign his advantage might not be quite as stable as it looks: His lead is built on gains among voters who aren’t paying close attention to politics, who don’t follow traditional news and who don’t regularly vote.

Disengaged voters on the periphery of the electorate are driving the polling results — and the story line — about the election.

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  • DevCat@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    The poll results also depend upon answers from people who are willing to answer an unknown number. What percentage of Gen Z does that?

    I’m technically a boomer, and I don’t do that.

    • Hominine@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Interjecting to add my two pennies. Gen z isn’t as consequential here as millennials, (not that they answer unknown numbers.) Young people simply don’t vote.

      Edit: For the record I’m a xennial and don’t answer those calls either.

      • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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        7 months ago

        They don’t vote as much as older people, but they’re not an irrelevant population. 51% of eligible 18-24 year old voters voted in 2020. That’s 13.7M votes or 8% of the total. And they vote heavily Democratic. 51% for 18-24 vs a 71% turnout for 45-64 is disappointing, sure, but not remotely irrelevant. We have endless think pieces about Latino/Latinx voters deciding elections, and they were only 16.5M votes. No one would ever say “ignore them, they’re irrelevant”.

        Youth voting rose 8 percentage points between 2016 and 2020, and look how things changed. No demographic group is small enough to ignore, because elections are decided in the margins of a few critical states.

  • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Do people get these calls, give all these opinions, and then say “No, I didn’t vote,” and not have an ounce of thought? With this graph, I’'m glad they don’t tho keep that shit up.

  • JimSamtanko@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    His lead is built on gains among voters who aren’t paying close attention to politics, who don’t follow traditional news and who don’t regularly vote.

    So… trolls. His lead is built on gains from internet trolls.

  • KevonLooney@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    Biden wins just three-quarters of Democratic-leaning voters who didn’t vote in the last cycle, even as almost all high-turnout Democratic-leaners continue to support him.

    This trend illustrates the disconnect between Trump’s lead in the polls and Democratic victories in lower-turnout special elections. And it helps explain Trump’s gains among young and nonwhite voters, who tend to be among the least engaged.

    Ok, so Trump is cornering the loudest people who shout their opinions at pollsters but don’t vote: basically morons. Makes sense to me.

  • InternetUser2012@midwest.social
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    7 months ago

    Lets be real with phone calls and polling. The only ones answering phones, and then taking the time to answer questions is going to be the boomers (and the wanna be boomers). If tRump isn’t killing it in the phone polls, he’s in deep shit when it comes to real numbers.

    The propaganda campaign isn’t working as good this time around or it’s because of the 91 felonies he’s facing and the fact he struggles to complete a coherent sentence. Most of my family had their red hat dunce caps last time around and this time, all but one is voting for Biden because even though they hate him (when asked they can’t give a factual reason why) he’s the better choice for America. It’s refreshing to know not everyone on the right wants to vote in a vindictive dictator.

  • Optional@lemmy.worldOP
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    7 months ago

    Importantly, these low-turnout voters are often from Democratic constituencies. Many back Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate. But in our polling, Biden wins just three-quarters of Democratic-leaning voters who didn’t vote in the last cycle, even as almost all high-turnout Democratic-leaners continue to support him.

    This trend illustrates the disconnect between Trump’s lead in the polls and Democratic victories in lower-turnout special elections. And it helps explain Trump’s gains among young and nonwhite voters, who tend to be among the least engaged.

  • mister_monster@monero.town
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    7 months ago

    People who don’t regularly vote are the people that won him the election in 2016. I know these state media propaganda rags like to pretend that engagement with them is the deciding factor, but fact is, a lot of Trump supporters had their mind made up 4 years ago and don’t need to follow the noise to know what they’re going to do.

    • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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      7 months ago

      This graph is comparing against action 4 years ago. Anyone who had their mind made up then is a 2020 voter.

  • ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    The polls have shown Donald Trump with an edge for eight straight months

    Hm… did something unpopular start about eight months ago?

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    7 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Biden’s campaign released an ad aimed at Black voters that featured Trump’s past remarks defending white supremacists.

    Democrats are investigating Trump’s meeting with oil and gas executives in which he asked for $1 billion in campaign donations and pledged to reverse Biden’s climate policies.

    Ohio’s governor, a Republican, called a special legislative session to fix a procedural issue that could prevent Biden’s name from appearing on the November ballot there.

    Louisiana’s legislature passed a bill that would designate abortion pills as dangerous controlled substances and make possessing them without a prescription a crime punishable with jail time.

    “Drowning Street”; “Things can only get wetter”: The British press mocked Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for making a surprise election announcement in a downpour.

    Cassie Ventura said she was grateful for the support she received after CNN published surveillance video showing her being physically assaulted by Sean Combs, known as Diddy.


    The original article contains 1,818 words, the summary contains 148 words. Saved 92%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • DancingBear@midwest.social
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    7 months ago

    No one single poll is a tell all. But Biden is losing consistently over time in multiple polls in every battleground state by significant margins.

    It’s not looking good. It’s important to question methodologies and definitely okay to critique polls, but the trend is not looking good at all.

    I honestly don’t think the only candidate who can beat Trump is actually going to beat Trump.

    I live in a solid blue state. I’m not voting for Biden or Trump.

    But keeping your head in the sand saying lalalala none of the bad news polls are accurate is not really going to work.

  • Paragone@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    AND…

    Biden is cruising on presumed institutional entitlement/inertia.

    The economic-house-of-cards that Biden’s ( & many other ) administrations are propping-up as desparately as they can cannot fail to go down, eventually.

    No matter how many push the walls of a corrupt building, in a gathering-storm, pushing-on-the-walls won’t prevent its collapsing.

    IF that house-of-cards collapses in September ( -ish ), THEN Biden’s ejected, simply through backlash vote.

    Period.

    All of the “everything else is going to fight-off-change, but only this single factor may change, and that will decide the outcome” make-believe projections are bogus.


    Let the data, Universe’s speech, itself, speak.

    I guarantee you that it won’t happen the way simplistic-projections assert in advance.

    AND the political-actors affect things… AND the contextual-circumstances affect things… AND I’ve read that Putin’s working to make-certain that the way his war on Ukraina happens shoves the US toward Trump, and believe that to be a natural given.

    AND ClimatePunctuation is still accelerating, so maybe the “it’s all a hoax!!” ideology will have more “proof” that it’s the left who is creating all the extra hurricanes… ( given the way bias works, that’s likely, and I’m not by any measure pretending that the bias of the left is ignorable: it just fixates on different things, & ignores different things.

    See the Snopes item on how Biden’s daughter’s court-testimony does corroborate Joe Biden being pedophiliac, as he shared her showering, while she was a girl, thus that court-testimony corroborates all the photos of him holding other people’s little-girls right in front of his crotch, for the photo’d-together shots, that the left won’t admit are real. They’re sickening.

    Exactly as the people who died from multiple-organ-failure from taking Ivermectin, in order to protect them against Sars-Cov-2 which they were told didn’t even exist also is sickening.

    Integrity isn’t allowed, by political-motivation.

    Natural Selection’s going to be chopping-down this world’s population drastically this century.

    I don’t expect more than 2% of humankind to survive this century, even though the bible gives 1/3 survival for The Great Filter, both in the old testament & in the new ( OK, so Rev gives 1/3 survival for 2nd-seal & 3rd-seal, and ignores all the death in the other stages, but it’s still no-where near the 98% eradication I’m seeing as likely )


    Surprises are going to happen.

    And ignoring all factors except 1, in order to make predictions in political contests, is, unless that 1 is decisive, phony.

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