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Question/discussion
This has been my go to place for quick overview of all political polling for years! The condensed summary view and graphs were great. Now we get this!?! I have to scroll three pages on mobile just to see anything. This is so sad... Anyone have an alternative aggregator they recommend?
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Yep, this is awful. Data like this needs to be displayed on a single row for readability. I look at RCP on a daily basis but if they don’t dump this format I guess I’m done. I was going to suggest fivethirtyeight since I’ve used them in the past too, but I see their format changed at some point as well. It’s a bit more readable than this, but still a mess and they don’t even display the +/- spread.
Try RealclearPOLLING.com. It will give you the old realclearpolitics.com format.
Actually if you're on realclear politics and you hit the menu for 'Trump vs Biden'
that goes to real clear polling, it's basically the same site just different looks and different links
though i'm not at all certain why it's politics and polling that's separate, maybe the basics are there like 'here is the newest'
I'm not too fond of the new look that just wastes space, i think it's done to be more legible from a distance, but it's disturbing on a widescreen mac that's for sure
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/trump-vs-biden
i need to zoom out twice to get it to look normal, but i don't think i upset the formatting
Pulling aggregators are in a bit of a rut right now. It used to be that RCP and 538 were right equivalent, with maybe a slight partisan angle right/left respectively but not to a terribly bad degree.
But lately RCP's formula has diverged from 538's more strongly, to its detriment, and it seemed to be going the way of other more popular polling sources. Then 538 was decimated a few months ago when there were massive layoffs, including Nate Silver...who still owns the modeling and projecting tools that made 538 so good.
The good news here is that Silver is now a free agent and not beholden by any corporate media. He's doing his own substack called Silver Bulletin and still churning out high quality content. I wouldn't be surprised if he still did the great forecasting and modeling this election season again but does it a little closer to the election.
Wasn’t he the same cat that projected Hillary to win with something like a 99% chance?
Nope, not at all. Silver was famously one of the few who said that while Clinton was most likely to win, there were several possible futures where she loses, and a win the popular vote but lose the EC was specifically one of those possibilities.
Ha! I just went and looked it up. I stand corrected. He gave her a 71.4% chance of winning the electoral college. That’s way, way less than the other polling companies. I acquiesce…
Silver also has very intentionally focused on the conversation that predicting the electoral future is best thought of in probabilistic terms. Clinton was the rather overwhelming favorite, but it just so happened that this was the time Clinton rolled snake eyes at the craps table. 30% outcomes do have to happen sometimes in order for the models to make any sense. This was a time the 30% chance won.
I've never been that fond of Nate's book or his bombast, but i find that most of the pundits of polling never really get into how some states are just veering off from the actual vote counts, and they don't adjust for that. One needs a table of how off the results were in the top 15 states that veered from the average and use that as a 'bullshit filter' from weak polling samples that need to be way more than 350 or 800 votes but 3000 to 25,000 votes for those problematic places.
.......
I found that RealClear just doing the simple averaging came out just as good as Silver with the rating of pollsters and double regression analysis
I still think real clear wins out, but i think you need to look at everything which means Larry Sabato and Rotherberg, and the other 10-15-20 things like 270 to win and stuff.
Nate's biggest problem is he never really gets useful till like the last 18 hours of the election and then one last poll will veer the results to being a little less offensive and closer to reality.
I still have faith in the average of a lot of recent polls being less of a surprise
I feel really bad for all the people who just had scrapers break..... At least there aren't any elections too close out.
Yeah, I hate it. Somebody is going to find a way to scrape the data into a better chart, though. I hope.