In Reply to: And then, the 21st century happened... posted by blindness on October 10, 2024 at 07:44:55
because it happened twice there too. And in consecutive elections. If people on this board had been around back then they would have been like, oh man, look, it's going to happen every election forever. Welcome to the 19th century.
Of course it never happened before that, and then, again, it didn't happen for 120 years after that.
Yes we've lived through it twice, and it's been traumatic, and if you lived through the San Francisco earthquake in 1908 you're not going to want to listen to anybody telling you about how it hasn't happened in 1000 years or whatever, but data is data, correlation is correlation, numbers, probability, statistical analysis, is not about personality. It's the exact opposite of personality. It's science. It's math.
And that's what we're talking about here. Not what I want to believe, I'm not even talking about this election, or even this poll (especially since according to the author, Reuters changed the link after they posted the poll and the 7% wasn't accurate). I am not at all sure what's going to happen. As I've said many times I see things that make me believe the polls are not capturing what's going on or what's going to happen. I'm talking about the statistical impossibility of national polls being meaningless (these are by the way the exact words used not just by confused but by many people, over and over again when talking about this) And of course pointing out the obvious, there is in fact a very strong correlation between popular vote wins and electoral college wins.
Does looking at state polls give you a clearer picture of what's going on? Yes. Does it become ever more important if the election is very close? Yes. Is it even more important because we live in an increasingly polarized society that manifests itself regionally. Yes (the first two times it happened was during reconstruction, so yeah, but then it didn't happen again for three generations). Will it, if the polls are accurate allow you to predict the winner to a greater certainty than an accurate national poll, yes, yes yes. All true. But none of that changes not just the truth of science, but the realities that underpins the numbers. And the reality is aside from deep red dumbfukistan, the critical mass of people from state to state are just not that different. So the EC and national vote match up 93% of the time.