The Blowout No One Sees Coming

Never heard of this company before. LinkedIn shows five employees, most of whom joined in 2024 and a company founded ding in 2023. Seems pretty unlikely that this group has identified a blowout that all the bigger and far more experienced players refuse to point to - could be wrong, of course, and maybe they've got a brand new model that is best in class, but seems unlikely.

No one expects a blowout. If you had expected a blowout, you wouldn’t have changed your infant into nice clean clothes and taken them to the zoo.<p>Who are these people who predict an electoral landslide for the dems? It feels like they’re trying to set themselves up to be the fivethirtyeight of 2026 and 2028 if they happen to be proven right.

I just always assume polling is propaganda. There are clearly other countries involved in manipulating this election.

I like the dashboarding more than the analysis lol. I think FL is just a red state now and positing it as anything else smells a little fishy to me. Also, I think there&#x27;s a thing now where all sorts of analysts know they can get a name out of making one big correct prediction that everyone else got wrong. That&#x27;s lead to a lot of predictions being made with the intention of being contrarian.

That&#x27;s not true, the most respected analyst says a blowout is reasonably likely. Nate Silver says that there&#x27;s a 40% chance of a blowout even though the odds are 50&#x2F;50.<p>There are 7 swing states, and Nate Silver says that the odds of all 7 states going to the same candidate is 40%. 25% chance Trump takes all 7, and a 15% chance Harris takes all 7.<p>Essentially, a broad 2% polling error in either direction means a blowout. What are the chances of a 2% polling erorr? Pretty darn high.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.natesilver.net&#x2F;p&#x2F;the-state-of-play-in-the-7-states" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.natesilver.net&#x2F;p&#x2F;the-state-of-play-in-the-7-stat...</a>

If polling is as wrong as they think here, I wonder how much effect it’d have in places outside of politics.<p>Basically any company that tries to do market research or any organization measuring public opinion is wrong in systematic ways.<p>there will be some very exciting opportunities for whomever can come up with a polling methods that works with modern communication.

I mean...in Nate Silvers&#x27; model, the two most likely outcomes are one or the other candidate sweeping all 7 swing states.<p>I don&#x27;t know that anyone who is actually paying attention to the data will be surprised by any outcome that isn&#x27;t more extreme than that.

Everyone wants easier to predict US elections.<p>Are there free elections anywhere that are easy to predict?<p>In a world where $1.00 in Instagram ads yields $1.02 in donations, does it matter?

For those handwaving that &quot;it&#x27;s a dead heat&quot;, I&#x27;m genuinely curious: how do people explain that national polls are 48% to 48% but everyone expects Trump to lose the popular vote? It&#x27;s estimated he may lose it by as much as 10 million votes.

Yada yada pre-registering their high-variance bet so they get credibility if it happens to come true.<p>It’s pretty much a dead heat with maybe slight advantage for Trump.

I&#x27;ve made this bet with some of my friends for this election cycle: the polls are wrong, I just don&#x27;t know in which direction yet.<p>I&#x27;ll save this topic at least. In just a few short weeks we will see which theories were correct. But its important to see these predictions _BEFORE_ the election results are announced.<p>There will be a lot of people after the election pretending to be correct and on the &quot;I Told You So&quot; despite their poll numbers being bullshit. So now is the time to collect arguments and theories.

It&#x27;s obvious for several reasons that political polling is at best nonsense and worst outright fraudulent. Reason 1: people don&#x27;t change their voting intentions much. So how can polls swing one way and the other so much? Answer must be that they are measuring noise. Reason 2: headline numbers aggregate several polling results, but apparently don&#x27;t discard known fraudulent data from partisan polsters. So the results can be trivially changed by simply spending money. Reason 3: nobody sane responds to a polster. So they are measuring data from provably insane people. Reason 4: polsters often exclude samples that should be included, for example by requiring respondents to have voted in two previous elections. So the samples is skewed. And on and on. Add to this the incentives in the news industry to make things click worthy and you have the result we observe. Nobody wants to say the emperor has no clothes. There&#x27;s also a bias in some media to report a close race for fear of being accused of influencing the outcome.

a lot of debate here but one thing is not a debate: both parties want to portray the other one as a devil, in truth the actually both are going to be OK. We had Trump for 4 years, we basically had Harris for 4 years. We are not China or Venezuela. Everyone relax and figure out how to focus on similarities rather than difference. One Love!