Let’s not forget that a massive segment of the voting electorate still supports Israel, which is the needle to thread.
If you care so much about this, what you can do is go on social media as well as speak to your friends and family about what Israel is doing to influence the polls directly. Reduce the national poll numbers and you’ll see a reflection in policy. The slow shift in policy towards Israel has obviously been proportional to the degrading national and international support.
Recent polling shows that isn’t true. Early in 2024 the most people wanted to condition military aid to food aid. Polls taken by late March and early April showed a swing to where people now believe it’s a dirty war on both sides that we should not be supporting, except to force them to accept food aid. Most democrats and independents are recorded with this position.
The question none of this polling dares to ask and probably should is, “will this issue prevent you from voting for a candidate in the general election?”
What polling are you referring to, because the March polling from PEW who I’d trust the most in this situation still has 36% supporting Gaza action and another 9% having no opinion.
The question none of this polling dares to ask and probably should is, “will this issue prevent you from voting for a candidate in the general election?”
I think that’s a fair question, but at the end of the day, the vast majority of people also do not place the Israeli-Palestinian war remotely at the top of their top list of concerns. So framing another way is: What % of the electorate in key states actually considers Biden’s actions as unacceptable, versus the % of the electorate who still continues to support Israel and would consider it unacceptable if he withdrew further support? Moreover in terms of damage-control what would happen to Biden if he withdrew all aid to Israel and they just so happened to incur another terrorist attack? Whether we like it or not, this election is inevitable and Biden is certainly the better option not only for the people of Gaza but also the people of Ukraine and the wider planet for that matter. Certainly wouldn’t be that difficult for a right-wing nationalist government to stage a false-flag akin to Russia’s apartment bombings. So I think the proportional wind-down as polls continue to turn against Israel is the smart move. If I was in the Oval Office (and of course, none of us here are), that’s what I would be advising. Meanwhile the second I win election, I’d be cutting Israel off entirely.
That’s why the question needs to be asked. The traditional ranking against other issues fails when an issue might be a deal breaker. It’s why Abortion is such a huge thing in campaigns, even though it never ranks highly in that polling question either. Even after Roe V Wade healthcare access is sitting at fifth in Gallup’s latest rankings.
Interestingly Pew’s report from earlier shows less engagement than Gallup’s but it’s also more in depth on Muslim and Jewish attitudes towards the fighting which is interesting but less useful for the campaign overall.
So either they managed to poll meaningfully different groups or things are shifting and the paying attention number jumped for some reason in March. Also of note in the Gallup poll is that Democrats and independents no longer approve of Israel’s war. At 70 and 60 percent for each. Suggesting the time to start divesting is now.
Well they could try to not be so daft about these challenges and act in acccordance with living in the 21st century. (I know, very difficult for Biden and his team, but it is possible.)
Phone-based MFA, spend a tiny fraction of campaign dollars to advertise on social media platforms so respondents can opt-in for the poll, applied stats to randomly select for the target demographic you’re after. This should satisfactorily solve for the above and improve poll quality.
So first off, you seem to be confusing direct campaign activities with polls. Campaigns do sometimes run internal polls, but you should never trust the numbers they put out. Generally, they do want them to be accurate because they want to make strategic decisions around them. However, they aren’t obliged to release those numbers to the public, and if they do, it’s often for a specific reason; they may want to spin a narrative that they’re in a powerful position, or perhaps paint themselves as the underdog. Either way, you don’t want to rely on those numbers.
FiveThirtyEight has not historically included campaign polls in their Presidential model. They sometimes do for Congressional campaigns, because those don’t get polled as heavily and there would be a lack of data if they weren’t included (which also means they have to use other factors to correct the results to get a good model).
Most polls aren’t like that, though. They’re run by private companies.
Second, any little road bump you do to polling means fewer participants. Need to verify MFA through a text message? Whole lot of people are going to see that and promptly stop and go back to what they were doing.
Third, advertising for opt-in? No way you’re getting a randomized sample out of that.
Turns out, polling companies are not run by idiots. This is not an easy problem.
You’re totally right about the distinction between campaign and official polling, fair point.
Still, I do think there are means available for pollsters to get more accurate results from younger voters if they so choose. MFA can solve the identity problem well enough, but there are better solutions if we want them. For example, I’d love to have an anonymous, secure, unique voter id which could be used by individuals to verify voting results independently after an election concludes. If we had it, we could use that instead.
We absolutely should not have such an ID. People buying votes would ask you to show them your verified vote on your phone before you get paid. There’s a long history behind anything that could let you show your vote to another person after the fact, even voluntarily, and we’ve banned them for a reason. It’s one of those problems that we’ve solved so well that people forget why those rules are there.
Morning Consult does online polling, and they seem to do OK. If you look through the FiveThirtyEight polls, you’ll notice they sometimes have an unusually large sample size, like 10k registered voters when most others have between 1k-3k. That’s because they gather a whole lot of people in their polls, but the result isn’t particularly random. They then have to apply weights to get something like a random sample.
Where do they get those weights and how do we know they’re valid? That’s a very good question. They match up with other polls, but those other polls have problems that we’re trying to get away from.
He should try a “improving my polling numbers” weekend blitz.
He can start by dropping all federal government support to Israel and by promoting BDS
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Let’s not forget that a massive segment of the voting electorate still supports Israel, which is the needle to thread.
If you care so much about this, what you can do is go on social media as well as speak to your friends and family about what Israel is doing to influence the polls directly. Reduce the national poll numbers and you’ll see a reflection in policy. The slow shift in policy towards Israel has obviously been proportional to the degrading national and international support.
Recent polling shows that isn’t true. Early in 2024 the most people wanted to condition military aid to food aid. Polls taken by late March and early April showed a swing to where people now believe it’s a dirty war on both sides that we should not be supporting, except to force them to accept food aid. Most democrats and independents are recorded with this position.
The question none of this polling dares to ask and probably should is, “will this issue prevent you from voting for a candidate in the general election?”
What polling are you referring to, because the March polling from PEW who I’d trust the most in this situation still has 36% supporting Gaza action and another 9% having no opinion.
I think that’s a fair question, but at the end of the day, the vast majority of people also do not place the Israeli-Palestinian war remotely at the top of their top list of concerns. So framing another way is: What % of the electorate in key states actually considers Biden’s actions as unacceptable, versus the % of the electorate who still continues to support Israel and would consider it unacceptable if he withdrew further support? Moreover in terms of damage-control what would happen to Biden if he withdrew all aid to Israel and they just so happened to incur another terrorist attack? Whether we like it or not, this election is inevitable and Biden is certainly the better option not only for the people of Gaza but also the people of Ukraine and the wider planet for that matter. Certainly wouldn’t be that difficult for a right-wing nationalist government to stage a false-flag akin to Russia’s apartment bombings. So I think the proportional wind-down as polls continue to turn against Israel is the smart move. If I was in the Oval Office (and of course, none of us here are), that’s what I would be advising. Meanwhile the second I win election, I’d be cutting Israel off entirely.
That’s why the question needs to be asked. The traditional ranking against other issues fails when an issue might be a deal breaker. It’s why Abortion is such a huge thing in campaigns, even though it never ranks highly in that polling question either. Even after Roe V Wade healthcare access is sitting at fifth in Gallup’s latest rankings.
My numbers are from Gallup.
Interestingly Pew’s report from earlier shows less engagement than Gallup’s but it’s also more in depth on Muslim and Jewish attitudes towards the fighting which is interesting but less useful for the campaign overall.
So either they managed to poll meaningfully different groups or things are shifting and the paying attention number jumped for some reason in March. Also of note in the Gallup poll is that Democrats and independents no longer approve of Israel’s war. At 70 and 60 percent for each. Suggesting the time to start divesting is now.
How do you get Millenials and Gen Z’ers to answer their phones for more accurate polls?
Send me a fuckin email for Christs sake
Or leave a voicemail so I can call you back when I’ve got ten minutes to take the poll
Or text messages
How do you prevent duplicate voting when anyone can share a link? How do you avoid spam filters, or stay within compliance of anti-spam laws?
Well they could try to not be so daft about these challenges and act in acccordance with living in the 21st century. (I know, very difficult for Biden and his team, but it is possible.)
Phone-based MFA, spend a tiny fraction of campaign dollars to advertise on social media platforms so respondents can opt-in for the poll, applied stats to randomly select for the target demographic you’re after. This should satisfactorily solve for the above and improve poll quality.
So first off, you seem to be confusing direct campaign activities with polls. Campaigns do sometimes run internal polls, but you should never trust the numbers they put out. Generally, they do want them to be accurate because they want to make strategic decisions around them. However, they aren’t obliged to release those numbers to the public, and if they do, it’s often for a specific reason; they may want to spin a narrative that they’re in a powerful position, or perhaps paint themselves as the underdog. Either way, you don’t want to rely on those numbers.
FiveThirtyEight has not historically included campaign polls in their Presidential model. They sometimes do for Congressional campaigns, because those don’t get polled as heavily and there would be a lack of data if they weren’t included (which also means they have to use other factors to correct the results to get a good model).
Most polls aren’t like that, though. They’re run by private companies.
Second, any little road bump you do to polling means fewer participants. Need to verify MFA through a text message? Whole lot of people are going to see that and promptly stop and go back to what they were doing.
Third, advertising for opt-in? No way you’re getting a randomized sample out of that.
Turns out, polling companies are not run by idiots. This is not an easy problem.
You’re totally right about the distinction between campaign and official polling, fair point.
Still, I do think there are means available for pollsters to get more accurate results from younger voters if they so choose. MFA can solve the identity problem well enough, but there are better solutions if we want them. For example, I’d love to have an anonymous, secure, unique voter id which could be used by individuals to verify voting results independently after an election concludes. If we had it, we could use that instead.
We absolutely should not have such an ID. People buying votes would ask you to show them your verified vote on your phone before you get paid. There’s a long history behind anything that could let you show your vote to another person after the fact, even voluntarily, and we’ve banned them for a reason. It’s one of those problems that we’ve solved so well that people forget why those rules are there.
Morning Consult does online polling, and they seem to do OK. If you look through the FiveThirtyEight polls, you’ll notice they sometimes have an unusually large sample size, like 10k registered voters when most others have between 1k-3k. That’s because they gather a whole lot of people in their polls, but the result isn’t particularly random. They then have to apply weights to get something like a random sample.
Where do they get those weights and how do we know they’re valid? That’s a very good question. They match up with other polls, but those other polls have problems that we’re trying to get away from.