Category: Politics

In a hypothetical poll, done by one of the worst pollsters of them all, the Amazon Washington Post/ABC, which predicted I would lose to Crooked Hillary by 15 points (how did that work out?), Sleepy Joe, Pocahontas and virtually all others would beat me in the General Election….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 11, 2019

Notes:

• The final WaPo poll actually predicted that Trump would lose the popular vote by four points, with an MOE of +-2.5. Trump actually lost by 2.1 points, comfortably within the margin of error.
• ABC/WaPo, according to the stats nerds at 538, is the best polling organization. They earn the rare A+ rating.
• Every major polling organization shows Sleepy Joe with at least an eight-point lead at the moment.

If Trump were a rational man with normal levels of impulse control, he could have properly responded that polls taken more than a year before the election have a very low predictive value. Worded another way, September of 2019 “don’t mean jack shit.” All that matters is November of 2020.

And, of course, November of 2024, 2028 and especially 2032, when an 86-year-old Trump finally breaks FDR’s record of winning four presidential elections.

That FDR – what a loser!

This poll is relatively significant. The WaPo/ABC poll is the only one rated A+ by the statistics nerds at the 538 site.

The key findings are:

• Trump’s approval has dropped by six points in two months.
• The drop is correlated to fears of an economic slowdown.
• We can now see more specifically how Trump is losing the uneducated whites that represent the fundaments of his support. This poll breaks that group down by gender. It turns out that Trump’s support is actually increasing among uneducated white males (now 69%, up 5 points), but is dropping drastically among their female counterparts (now 42%, down 12 points)
• Trump’s rating is also plummeting among college educated white males. The drop was a precipitous 15 points in just two months, from 49% approval to 34%.

I guess the guy I should be making fun of now is Joe Sestak, who comes in with a perfect 0.0 in the polls, but I like the guy.

• Brainy – second in his class at Annapolis, PhD from Harvard
• Dedicated – worked his way up to three-star admiral.
• Experienced in government – two terms in the House.

He does have one liability. He’s basically been unemployed for eight years! (And that ain’t about to end with a stint in the White House.)

Back to the major theme …

The polls still seem to be hazy. A couple of them show a close three-way race, while the others still show Joe Biden running away from the pack. The weirdest anomaly is the battle between Warren and Sanders for the left wing. IDB shows Warren killing Sanders 24-12, while Emerson shows Bernie winning that battle 24-15. Nate Silver does rate IBD as one of his most reliable pollsters with an A- rating, but he rates Emerson just a hair below at B+, so I can’t make any sense of it.

She lacked both the polling and required number of donors needed to qualify for the third Democratic debate next month

And that lead is 26 points among independent voters.

Most shocking, Biden and Sanders now lead Trump among white voters! That is a very big deal. In the history of national exit polls, 1972 to the present, no Democratic candidate has ever won the white vote over the Republican! (Bill Clinton came very close, but those results were polluted by third party candidates.) In the past five elections, no Democrat has come within 10 points of winning the white vote.

• Obama lost the white vote by 20 points to Romney, 12 to McCain.
• Dubya won the white vote by 17 over Kerry, 12 over Gore.
• Trump beat Hillary by 20 points among white voters.

I should note that polls taken so far from the election have approximately zero predictive power. They indicate how the election might go if held today, within their margin of error of course, but public support for candidates is volatile.

Plus Biden may not get the nomination. The various polls seem to present us with conflicting views. Despite Biden’s fading numbers in other polls, this Quinnipiac poll shows Biden far in the lead, with 32% preference, compared to 19% for Pocahontas and 15% for Bernie. Warren has risen steadily from 4% in March to her current 19%. Kamala Harris started in the 7-8 range in March, and zoomed to 20 after the first debate. She was a serious contender there for a while, in a close second place on July 2, with essentially all of her new-found support coming from former Biden supporters, but then she plummeted right back to the 7-8 range after the second debate. Sic transit gloria mundi.

On the other hand, even without Biden in the race, Trump is looking weak. In all match-ups against the top five candidates, Trump is fixed at 38-40% of the vote. The support for the Democrat varies, but even Mayor Pete is nine points ahead.

Morning Consult has a unique system that attempts to track Presidential popularity by state. The most interesting feature is that you can move a slider to see how it changes from time to time.

I would not place total faith in the state numbers because the entire poll consists of only 5000 people, which is a solid national sampling, but indicates that the portrait of each state must be based on a small sample. A small sample can have some value if it is massaged carefully for age, gender, political leanings and so forth, but the numbers should still be viewed only as a broad indicator rather than an accurate measurement. Think of it as taking the temperature by standing outside rather than by consulting a scientific thermometer. You know for sure that it’s getting cooler, but you don’t know exactly how much.

To be fair, Morning Consult’s statisticians claim that their regressions are so accurate that no state has a MOE greater than 4% in the latest poll. I remain at least a bit skeptical.

The three candidates are bunched together, each receiving about the same amount of support (Sanders 20%, Warren 20% and Biden 19%) from registered Democrats and Democratic-leaning independent voters.

Since Monmouth’s June poll, Sanders and Warren have gained slightly (up 6 and 5 percentage points), while Biden has lost significant support (down 13 points).

I made a mistake supporting @realDonaldTrump. I don’t need to be absolved of that. But now I will do what it takes to help make things right. https://t.co/GJwA8Y8yBz

— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) August 20, 2019

I agree with the article that the purchase of Greenland would be a strategic coup for the USA, and I’m kinda surprised that the Danes and Greenlanders didn’t want to hear what Trump had to say.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Trump’s strategy. That deal could be a win-win-win for Greenland, Denmark and the USA. He just screwed up the deal on the human side, as usual, with his bungling, rants and insults.

In the position of the USA, the deal should be doable. Here’s what you offer: in addition to whatever amount is agreed by Denmark, the USA offers a quarter of a million dollars, tax-free to every single inhabitant of Greenland. That’s 14 billion dollars – chicken feed for the USA. Family of eight? You get two million dollars. You’re rich. No more spending your life on a boat in freezing temperatures, hoping for a good daily catch. You also get the status of US citizenship, which allows you to stay in Greenland or take your money to Des Moines or Orlando, if that suits you.

And if you don’t want to be an American, you can still take the money and move to Denmark, where a quarter of a million dollars will buy you a lot of pølser.

And not only that, but we really won’t disrupt your life very much if you choose to stay. Your prime minister just gets the new title of “governor,” and life goes on as before. We don’t care about your cod and salmon. We’re just interesting in building mines, naval stations, commercial ports, and research facilities. You can keep catching those cod, if you want, or you can sell your cod businesses to American entrepreneurs and head for South Beach. If you dread South Beach because you just can’t do without those freezing temperatures and fishing, you’ll find that a Minnesota winter is just as cold and wet and miserable as Greenland. And you may find Alaska very hospitable.

Let the Greenlanders vote on it. I’m pretty sure that offer will get a resounding “yes” from them. As for Denmark, they may talk big now, but if 95% of Greenlanders want the deal, Denmark will pretty much have to come to the table with an offer of some kind. At that point it’s just a matter of negotiation.