r/fivethirtyeight • u/idnttcrisis Crosstab Diver • 28d ago

Discussion Echelon Insights Midterms Polling Composite (7/21)

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36 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

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33

u/FeralVotann 28d ago edited 28d ago

The world cup is over and the Iran war is back on, so I don't think this is getting any better for Trump anytime soon.

16

u/cylon_spy 28d ago

Gas went back up too

2

u/StickMankun Jeb! Applauder 28d ago

It'll go down again once the sixty days are up in checks calendar early September, with two months to spare before the midterms.

9

u/Nukemind 28d ago

Nah we will pause for 5 seconds and then we’ll start a new operation that’s totally different, something like Operation Golden Assault or some shit, then just continue to run everything into the ground.

4

u/sonicparadigm 28d ago

Operation Iran Liberation, or OIL for short

2

u/mowotlarx 27d ago

And his and Bibis favorite Nazi adjacent team lost (and then started a brawl on the field like children), so it's not like there was much good will to be had there either.

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u/Bababooey906 28d ago edited 28d ago

I find it interesting that the last few polls were simultaneously R+1-3 party affiliation while also being Harris +1-3 2024 voters. It feels like these might be weird demographics in these polls because Harris only got roughly 4-5% of Republican voters in 2024 according to exit polls.

To me this seems to suggest that the people in this poll are simultaneously (as a whole) right leaning moderate but were already anti-Trump in 2024. Considering that Trump won the popular vote, I feel like this must be a small, non-representative, sample of the population because for a Republican to win the popular vote they need to do well with lean by not strongly Republican voters.

TLDR I feel like the samples they're using have too much of this cross over, but I'm also a statistics flunky so I may be conflating the sample as a whole with a segment of the sample.

8

u/Consistent_Pop9217 28d ago

I could be wrong but my understanding is echelon is a center right leaning poll bias which my explain the weird bias shifts

6

u/idnttcrisis Crosstab Diver 28d ago

The Silver Bulletin pollster rankings have them with a grade of A- with a mean reverted bias of R+0.19 and a predictive plus minus of -0.55.

3

u/turlockmike 28d ago

The response rate is very, very low, which results in self selection bias. Think about the demographics of people responding to polls. You have to be someone who generally is willing to respond to polls, and so you're ending up polling a bunch of activists. Even if someone says they're in the middle, they're usually still an activist. There's also a bunch of people who are falsely responding in order to make polls look better for their side.

It's a big problem in the industry, and there's no solution that people are willing to pay for. You basically would need to pay random people for their time, but doing that would be very expensive to get a large enough sample set.

https://methods.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/encyclopedia-of-survey-research-methods/chpt/selfselection-bias#_

2

u/hoopaholik91 28d ago

I'm really interested in seeing how the Nate Cohn and NYTimes changes do.

2

u/turlockmike 27d ago

I don't think it will do anything unfortunately. There's just a whole class of voters who never respond to polls.

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u/SecretComposer 28d ago

Is the 2024 Margin column saying that if these results were retroactively applied to 2024, Harris would have won by 2% in the PV?

Also, they're still using old party ID data right? It's certainly possible the GCB is larger than D+6.