politics

Prediction: The poll will not attempt to select for likely voters. It will simply look at all poll respondents.

Prediction: If I look at the actual results of a handful of the most recent downballot elections (special elections and other weird situations where we can actually find out whether the Democrats or the Republicans won), I will find at least a 2-to-1 majority of good news for the Democrats over the other kind

I'm actually in favor of the idea of taking the November election extremely seriously because Biden has some problems and it's not at all assured that Trump won't win and that would be a fuckin catastrophe for many different reasons. But I think misinformation in service of that goal, or attempts to represent support for Trump as "the will of the people," isn't a good thing.

BRB, checking my predictions

Edit: WTF, it's even worse than my prediction. They're constructing an elaborate Frankenstein's monster of narratives out of individual data points from black voters of various age groupings, and their enthusiasm about politics in general, throwing in a quick little word about Gaza in there, without even pretending that they're trying to answer the question "what's the likely result in November, overall?". Sorta reminds me of this comic.

They don't even bother to attempt to say that the "downballot" thing from the headline has any connection to the poll, except in the very last paragraph where they throw in another weird little unproven narrative.

Edit: Okay, so to address the other half of my predictions -- Democrats won 80% of the recent special elections, including a seat in Virginia where the D guy won by 50 percentage points. I could spin up a whole narrative from that, go into all these details about Trump's criminal trials and kneecapping the RNC, and Biden's wins on the economy, and sort of pretend that the picture I'm painting corresponds to a prediction about downballot races in November, and it wouldn't mean a damn thing any more than this article does. It's just argument by anecdote.

(Actually, it arguably would be a lot more valid than this article... but still argument by anecdote. Certainly, there's reason to worry about November. This article isn't it.)

Yeah? Is it biased press spinning 1000 reasons why Biden is bad and losing to a felonious, pussy-grabbing, treason-weasel? Could that be it?

Missing some key context:

FTA:

"Overall, 62 percent of Black voters indicated that they were "absolutely certain to vote" in November, a decline from the 74 percent of Black voters who made the same statement in June 2020.

However, among the youngest cohort of Black voters — aged 18 to 39 — only 41 percent said they were "absolutely certain to vote." The number marked a steep decline from June 2020, when 61 percent of voters in this age group indicated that they were certain to vote.

Among young Black women, 39 percent of respondents said they were certain to vote this year, a sharp fall from the 69 percent who gave the same response in June 2020."

So, yeah, superficially it looks bad. The number of black voters saying they were almost certain to vote has dropped 12 points from 74% in 2020 to 62% today.

Among them, the number of young voters dropped 20 points from 61 to 41, and young women 30 points from 69 to 39.

Here's the piece missing... In 2020 how many of them ACTUALLY voted?

Table A-6 from here:

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/voting-and-registration/voting-historical-time-series.html

64.7% of Blacks registered to vote in 2020.
58.7% actually voted.

So 74% of blacks polled said they were certain to vote, but of the entire population? Yeah, nowhere near that number registered and even fewer actually voted.

In the black youth vote, in 2020, only 43% of black voters aged 18-29 turned up to vote, and 2020, thanks to covid, was the most accessible election in years.

https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/2020-youth-voter-turnout-raceethnicity-and-gender

So 61% said they were certain to vote, only 43% actually did. So it doesn't really matter now that 41% say they are certain to vote.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In 2020, Black Americans were instrumental in sending President Joe Biden to the White House, buoying his candidacy not only in the Democratic primaries but in the general election.

Biden won 92 percent of the Black vote overall that year, while also easily winning millennials and Gen Z voters, according to the Pew Research Center.

But Biden in 2024 is facing the biggest challenge of his political career, as his campaign works to rev up enthusiasm among his 2020 supporters as many of them remain disenchanted about the economy, the conflict in Gaza, and setbacks on everything from voting-rights legislation to student-debt relief.

The number marked a steep decline from June 2020, when 61 percent of voters in this age group indicated that they were certain to vote.

Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, while older Black voters lined up behind Biden — a familiar face who was seen as a political moderate and had built up goodwill as President Barack Obama's No.

Biden is working to boost enthusiasm among Democrats — but especially among young voters — as he touts his administration's success in passing infrastructure legislation and its record of job creation.

The original article contains 513 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 62%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I heard you could really easily galvanize the young Black vote by using AI to make some shoe photoes.