Reality Check

[angrychair]

The most recent MSNBC polling, came out this week, just before the 3rd indictment, has Biden tied with Trump 43%/43%.

Our country is irrevocably broken.

If, after everything we've been through with this megalomaniacal rapist that likely gave classified documents to foreign and other outside parties, a not insignificant number of voters still think "I would vote for him" I don't understand this country anymore. I really do not.

[BlueIdaho]

1. Polls...

Are only as good as the makeup of the sample group questioned and the questions they are asked.

[Silent3]

6. Please stop blaming the goddam polls for this!

The polls are not missing the damned 40% lead Biden should have over Trump!

No matter how you slice it, the polls reveal an unsettling level of ignorance, stupidity, and hate in the American electorate.

[BlueIdaho]

7. You don't know me well enough

To swear at me. I’m entitled to my opinion.

[Silent3]

10. Yes, you're entitled to it, and I'm entitled to berate that opinion

It's a hide your head in the sand opinion. If all you're thinking about is whether the poll reveals who will win or lose in 2024, and that's the only importance of such polls, you're missing a HUGE part of the picture here.

[BlueIdaho]

12. I stand with EarlG

Enough said.

[Silent3]

15. Who went on to argue about who's likely to win or not, which is NOT THE POINT

Why is who wins or loses the only thing YOU think matters about a poll?

Do you disagree that we're saddled by a lot of hateful, ignorant, stupid, and/or apathetic fellow Americans?

Do you think the polls are so bad they're hiding a 40% Biden lead?

Do you think how a large number of people feel right now is utterly irrelevant as long as a shift of a few percentage points saves us come November 2024?

[Think. Again.]

21. If your concern is...

....that a large percentage of Americans are so hateful, ignorant, stupid, and/or apathetic, I completely agree with you.

But I question if that percentage is truthfully reflected in those poll results, and I strongly doubt that any election would help that situation if that IS the case (unless that election resulted in vastly improved mental healthcare for all).

Yes indeed, FAR TOO MANY Americans are allowing themselves to be fooled so maliciously by the republican party, even if it's just a handful, that's still too many, and as fellow Americans we should be primarily concerned for their well-being and the victimization they are suffering under.

The republican party in it's current, severely harmful form should be abolished immediately, not only for the damage it is doing to our political structure and democracy, but also for the psychological harm it is causing so many of us Americans.

Perhaps your anger would be more effectively focused on republicans than on members of Democratic Underground.

[Recycle_Guru]

25. can you please stop attacking other DU posters?

[Silent3]

27. Pointing out how someone is utterly missing the point is not "attacking"

It's like a posted, "When comparing two vehicles, it's important to consider full life-cycle energy cost, including manufacturing and disposal, not just MPG", and people utterly ignore full life-cycle energy cost and start talking MPG.

[edhopper]

26. I agree Silent

even if the poll is off by 2 deviations of about 5% it still shows way too many people support this traitorous criminal. even 1 standard deviation is too high a level of support.

[Silent3]

28. Thank you for showing someone out there gets it!

I'd hoped my OP would have made it clear what I was getting at, but the knee-jerk responses to polls are even deeper than I thought.

[edhopper]

31. If half the voters had one shred

of intelligence, integrity or humanity, Trump would be polling lower than Nikki Haley.

Basket of deplorables indeed.

[Silent3]

2. While I still think Biden will win, it is damning that Biden's lead isn't a yawning chasm

My opinion of humans was never that great to begin with, but ever since Trump appeared on the political scene, I've had to downgrade even more.

Besides the scary number of people willing to vote for him are the equally guilty people who are so ignorant and stupid they don't bother to vote at all because they can't see any important difference between ending up with Trump or Biden as President.

[Think. Again.]

3. Polls are...

Polls are the 'Live Action' version of the book "How to Lie With Statistics"

"How to Lie with Statistics is a book written by Darrell Huff in 1954, presenting an introduction to statistics for the general reader. Not a statistician, Huff was a journalist who wrote many how-to articles as a freelancer. The book is a brief, breezy illustrated volume outlining the misuse of statistics and errors in the interpretation of statistics, and how errors create incorrect conclusions. In the 1960s and 1970s, it became a standard textbook introduction to the subject of statistics for many college students. It has become one of the best-selling statistics books in history, with over one and a half million copies sold in the English-language edition. It has also been widely translated. Themes of the book include "Correlation does not imply causation" and "Using random sampling".Wikipedia

[Silent3]

9. God fucking dammit. Another post moaning about the polls!

These polls, NO MATTER HOW BADLY RUN THEY ARE, are not hiding the enormous lead Biden SHOULD have over Trump if we weren't saddled with an incredibly hateful and/or ignorant and/or stupid electorate.

[Think. Again.]

17. A very WELL run poll....

...could very easily hide an enormous lead if that was the goal of the pollster.

However, even a very HONESTLY run poll could never reflect exactly how those polled might actually vote.

[MorbidButterflyTat]

19. What

do you want anyone to do about it?

None of us have any control over incredibly hateful, ignorant, stupid people.

Maybe take a walk outside and relax.

[Silent3]

22. All I want is for people to stop all of the stupid, reflexive, missing-the-point...

...attacks on the polls every time a poll, any poll, and especially a bad-news poll, is mentioned.

Post a poll, and you can be guaranteed the vast majority of responses will be the same drivel you hear every time:

Screw the polls!
The polls are rigged!
X predicted Y would beat Z, but Z won!
We've got plenty of time until the election!
What was the sample size?
People don't answer their phones anymore!

...with hardly a person showing they're smart to shake off the conspiratorial nonsense and their clear lack of understanding of how polls, pollsters, and statistics work, or demonstrate that they are absorbing what a perilous condition the polls indicate simply by frequently being way too close for comfort.

[MorbidButterflyTat]

34. I understand

I do.

These past days, weeks, months have been really hard. Feeling overwhelmed and frightened, it's hard to be hopeful.

We can't control anyone but ourselves. But DU is a safe place for people who share the same values and want the same things for ourselves and our kids, and our country. These things will always be more meaningful than any poll.

I wish you a relaxing evening, and hope you find some peace.

[MorbidButterflyTat]

18. Thanks

for that rational explanation.

I refuse to light my hair on fire over some anonymous poll.

[Silent3]

23. My thread has nothing at all to do with asking anyone to light their hair on fire...

...about anything, other than the generally perilous state of democracy in this country.

If we were stepping back from the brink there would be a much healthier lead for Democrats reflected in the polls.

If all you think of when you see a poll is, "Will the Democrat win in this next election or not?", you're totally missing the point.

[Brainfodder]

4. Decades of brainwashing takes time to recover from?

Supposedly only 10% are paying a lot of attention to politics in the first place, so you have a sector of just loyal life long Rs mixed in.

I feel ya, getting hard to believe there are this many fools!

Also, lots of angry poor folks who think of Washington, DC as haven of evil elites and somehow they think this asshole is for them, thanks to the likes of Rush and other such sources of BS and his non-stop touring around and talking shit even when President!?!

[agingdem]

5. about that 2022 midterm "red wave"???

screw the polls!!..

[inthewind21]

13. About

EVERY POLL since 2000.

[EarlG]

8. There are still 15 months to go until the election

FWIW, here's what was going on with Barack Obama around the same time in his first term:

August 17, 2011

New Low of 26% Approve of Obama on the Economy

A new low of 26% of Americans approve of President Barack Obama's handling of the economy, down 11 percentage points since Gallup last measured it in mid-May and well below his previous low of 35% in November 2010.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/149042/new-low-approve-obama-economy.aspx

September 6, 2011

Obama hits all-time lows, according to NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll

When Barack Obama unveils his jobs and economic plan to a joint session of Congress on Thursday, he'll do so at the lowest point of his presidency, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. After the bruising debt-ceiling fight — as well as Standard & Poor's subsequent downgrade of the nation's credit rating — Obama's job approval rating has sunk to a low of 44 percent, a 3-point drop since July.

December 15, 2011

Harvard poll predicts Obama loss

A new national poll of America’s 18- to 29-year-olds by the Institute of Politics (IOP) at the Harvard Kennedy School finds more millennials predict President Barack Obama will lose his bid for re-election (36 percent) than win (30 percent).

Obviously Obama went on to comfortably beat Mitt Romney in the 2012 election.

[Silent3]

14. Replace "irrevocably" with "very badly" in the OP's "Our country is irrevocably broken"...

...and the OP still isn't wrong.

God, I don't know why the instantaneous response of so many people is to criticize the polls and their predictive power of who will win the election.

These polls reveal a huge level of hate, ignorance, stupidity, and apathy in the American public, regardless of whether Biden wins in 2024 or not. That should trouble people regardless of who wins.

[EarlG]

16. Just pointing out that a single national poll taken this far out from an election

has absolutely no value whatsoever when it comes to predicting the outcome of the election.

But I agree that it's disturbing that so many Republicans are comfortable with a candidate who attempted a coup against the United States (among other crimes).

[Stuart G]

20. I agree with you that polls taken this far out from an election have no meaning & no value at all.

..Ideas change rapidly in this country due to current events. The 2024 National Election is 15 months away.

In politics that is a very long time. .........ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN AND OFTEN DOES!!!

[Silent3]

24. If by "no value at all" you mean "doesn't help predict the next election"

There are OTHER VALUES than that.

[onetexan]

30. THIS!!☝️

[brush]

11. I'm with you. trump is at the same time the most consequencial and worse thing...

to happen to this nation since the Civil War...and that's saying a whole lot.

He's a chaos agent who has, and continues to with his montrous presence , monopolize the space where ever he goes in a negative way. And he refuses to let go as he's running for president to stay out of jail.

If he fails, and I hope he does, at age 78, jail would mean rest of his life.

What a monstrous disrupter he's been and continues to be to the nation.

The 30 percent of the nation who continue to support him I guess has always been here with their grievance complaints.

[RANDYWILDMAN]

29. TFG voters live in a bubble/cult

they have a corporate propaganda conglomerate that aids and abetts them as well it's called Fox and they have done serious damage to our country

[edhopper]

32. And they make up

near half of the electorate.

[albacore]

33. 538 says roughly the same. Just sayin'.... nt

[elocs]

35. Reality Check: our country has been broken for a long time & is unlikely to get better.

Democrats and the Left too often tend to be complacent and self-righteous, are like herding sheep. We all need to get out and vote for Biden in '24 if we want to keep our democratic republic. Yes, even in very Blue California because we don't just want to beat Trump we want to give him what Ali called a Floyd Patterson humiliation beating.
This is it.

Another reality check, but a nice fantasy: Trump will likely never go to anything like we envision as a "prison cell", will never have a cell mate, and his living conditions will likely be better than what most of us have. He may even just get house arrest where all he might have to enjoy is listening to our howls about it. But with years of appeals ahead of any guilty verdicts, Trump might just die in his sleep before he ever loses his freedom.

But this country will never be the same again, not having tens of millions of Trump cult members scattered across and throughout the nation with no Mason/Dixon line of demarcation where anyone's next door neighbor could be a slave-owner. A bell has been wrung that cannot be unrung.