mozz

Moving goalposts is good clean fun, isn't it? I am finished though. I have chased them around for as long as I wanted to.

Yeah, polling is garbage in general but using it to see relative change is actually like the one thing that it's good for.

So, your assertion is that Biden is slipping lower and lower and lower in the polls the more he does. You picked the one state where he's slipped the most, to make that point. If I did the opposite, I could pick North Carolina, and say that gaining 1.7 points since before he did his press conference means he's killing it, and that press conference restored the confidence of the voters.

Probably a fairly accurate metric -- since you're going to ignore, for reasons which will be obvious to anyone who knows what the national polls show, the national polls -- could be to add up all the swing states and see how things have changed.

In the last week, Biden's gained an average of 0.56 points in all the swing states. If you saying him losing 0.4 points in PA since the press conference means he's losing ground, then I have demonstrated that zooming out to a non-cherry-picked-to-the-single-worst-state view shows the exact opposite happening.

Similarly, in the last month, Biden's lost an average of 0.8 percentage points in all the swing states averaged together. You could write an article about how even in the face of an objectively catastrophic debate performance, less than 1% of the voters abandoned him, pointing to the resilience of his support because most of the voters (unlike the media) are smart enough to realize that one bad debate doesn't all of a sudden mean that etc etc you get the idea. Oh, also, that means he's been gaining ground back since the debate, after dipping lower than 0.8 points initially, which kind of makes sense since the debate was such a horrifying fuck-up.

See? Primary sources are fun. That's all based on the Nate Silver chart of all swing states that you sent me.

No, I am warning them that I plan to show the poll numbers comparing Biden to whoever they select. Dismissing is different from debunking with evidence. But yes, I plan to debunk whatever they say, assuming it’s realistic enough to be found in a list of even some pretty outlandish Democratic possibilities.

You think there's some kind of conspiracy across multiple universities, research organizations and news organizations?

No. In fact the universities and research organizations have generally been publishing polls showing basically no change in Biden’s numbers. You would know that, if you’d citationed.

In media, yes, although it’s more a case of groupthink, laziness, and vulnerability to manipulation than it is any grand conspiracy.

Who do you think should replace Biden?

I am holding a graph of poll numbers comparing Biden with other Democratic nominees vs Trump, which I plan to send you once you have made your selection

~Fuck yeah~ (Edit: I had misread the last part of the comment I was replying to)

If he’s too old and someone else is better, then let’s do someone else. Figure out the plan, rock and roll with it, and get moving. Maybe Biden will or won’t be on board for that but that’s on him at that point.

But this idea that in response to a transparently partisan hit job, Biden is supposed to wander away from the campaign a few seconds before the motorcycle hits the jump-ramp and hope the most incompetent single faction in Washington puts together a last-minute clutch plan for victory - when they JUST DEMONSTRATED that they are gullible to bad ideas being force-fed to them by their enemies, and are in all likelihood going to bumble around trying to nominate Michelle Obama, or suddenly blame the whole mess on Biden for resigning, or whatever the fuck they do, for a while before finally just putting Kamala in place and watching her crash and burn because few of the problems Biden was facing were caused by anything about Biden - is absurd, and Biden is right to laugh it out of the room and continue campaigning.

Figure out an actual plan which you can pitch in all these anguished op-eds, or start trying to poach his delegates to usurp him, or fuckin do SOMETHING other than running around doing your best to lose the election

See this is why that whole “I am so strong that I will make you obey and might makes right” breaks down after a while. The MAGA people are learning this, too. (I mean… some of them, who are unusually open to learning.)

It is fractal. Just as you are lying, everyone else is lying, to you and to each other. Just as you are ignoring the greater good and gimmicking the rules to benefit you and ultimately only you, so is everyone else. It doesn’t really matter how high you rise; you’ll always be stood on top of a weird, violent, unstable, dangerous tower of bullshit.

If you’re honest about working for the greater good, it’s not like all of a sudden that means everything simple or easy or good. But, you can build a big tower with the other people who are doing the same, and no one’s going to be trying to sell off pieces of the tower to finance their guest house. You don’t have to worry that literally everyone still alive is trying to kill you and take over. And so on, you get the idea.

his polls get worse

Citation needed

Like a primary source, not just a news story claiming that this is happening or you doubling down about how it’s definitely happening

Like a big graveyard

And then the Israelis will move in, presumably, and the Palestinians will become a scattered-handful ethnicity with no country at all, like the Kurds. Or like the Jews used to be.

What on earth are you talking about?

Setting aside the dishonesty of excluding medicare, medicaid, social security, and the big assistance programs that got passed recently from the "social / economic programs" line on a chart of government spending, yes of course congress / the president pass budgetary acts that set non-discretionary spending. That's how that spending got there in the first place. Where did you think medicare and medicaid and the student loan forgiveness programs and everything got into the non-discretionary budget in the first place, if not from congress and the president passing budgetary acts?

(This annoyed me so much that I went back and added a downvote to the pile for you)

Because making this distinction (apparently for no reason at all except that it provides a misleading way to present data that have nothing to do with the reality) is a bunch of bullshit.

If you had said “here is how this data is false and what is the real information” I think you would be getting upvotes

This may not be the intent on your part, but it kinda comes across like “oh this data isn’t a TOTAL bunch of bullshit, and here is a random arbitrary distinction underlying it which wasn’t mentioned which totally makes it make sense to present these numbers this way,” and my guess is you’re getting downvotes because if that were what you were saying, that would be simply doubling down on the dishonesty of the original chart, and people are downvoting it for dishonesty

Ha. It was too complex for me to want to get into it, and I feel like I already said what I said about it... but honestly, it's sort of a fair question / point that I just dropped the conversation. Here's what happened:

So the NYMag article is full of some fascinating statistics, including the fact that voter engagement overall is going steadily up over the last few elections, and that Democratic likeliness to vote is way higher that Republican. It also includes a qualitative narrative about (slightly oversimplified) why that's bad news for Democrats or something. To me, the numbers it was citing didn't match the narrative.

But anyway I didn't want to play the game of going to some vague citations and digging through them for specific numbers to argue against, so that I have to do the work of both sides of the argument, and just kinda lost interest. If you or @AWistfulNihilist@lemmy.world want to cite some statistics that might back up the media narrative that Democrats aren't "energized" in the sense of planning to vote in the election, whatever articles you want to draw them from, I'm good with that. If you or they want to send me some articles and pretend that you win if I don't feel like digging through them for those statistics (or alternatively if those articles just repeat the exact narrative that I'm acknowledging the existence of but not the factual backing for), I'm good with that too.