It is going to be really interesting to see if/how this affects public opinion over the next couple of months.
Right now, we're in a place with clear partisan divides for preventative measures, but nevertheless still pretty broad public support across the board.
One scenario I've worried about: With Trump's messaging so inconsistent, many Trump voters focused on the more pro-restriction things he said, which aligned with their own beliefs. (See this from July.)
With a Dem president advocating for preventative measures, is there any possibility of some backlash effect? Probably depends to some extent on who the loudest GOP voices are, and what message they're putting forward.
Of course, also possible there's a rise in support for such measure, or not much change at all -- and non-political factors, like the rate of cases over the winter, will matter too. We'll see.
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I don't have a ton to add to the polling discussion at the moment -- want to get a lot more information before I start theorizing in detail about what happened, or what that means for polling in the future.
Here's an initial writeup, to which I'll add a few personal thoughts:
I think there are two main issues here: the communication and the data. Polling is an inexact snapshot, and this level of error was always a possibility.
Exit polls!
-Yes, they're happening this year
-A lot of the work was done prior to Election Day
-Final results not foolproof, but provide useful data about the electorate
-Don't try to use early results to guess who's going to win
-Especially this year
One of the big advantages of finalized exit polls is that they're weighted to the actual results of the election, rather than our best guess of what the electorate will look like.
As we all know by now, this year it'll while to get the actual results of the election.
Polling errors are indeed real! They could favor either Trump or Biden! If they do favor Trump, it's still probably not because of social desirability bias!
I do not understand why this is the one concept to which the Discourse has latched onto like a remora.
Pollsters should stand by their results, and journalists should help readers understand the broader context of the data they're providing. These are good examples of simultaneously doing both.
New HuffPost/YouGov poll: Here's what voters say their top issues are for this year's election -- and how it compares to what they think the two campaigns care about.
I get into this more in the story, but: there are a lot of reasons to use caution when analyzing top-issue polls. One thing I DO think they can be useful for is gauging which campaign messages are resonating or not.
We've been asking this question biennially since 2014. A few things that stand out to me this year:
-Immigration is WAY down in salience from 2018
-Trump's messaging on crime is just not resonating, even with his supporters
(I really dislike chatty first-person-plural ledes that make casual, sweeping assumptions about one's readership)
Also interesting: "It might seem like paying close attention to this year’s Presidential election would lead to higher levels of stress, but paying close attention to the race is actually correlated with lower levels of perceived stress."